Identifying and Recruiting Your Collaborators
First up, it’s important to find the right collaborators for your target audience. Why? Because if you don’t you will end up attracting the wrong target audience for your brand! Here are three key consideration to keep at the front of your mid when you are looking for your collaborators:
- They have audiences that align with your target market
- They share the same or similar passions and values that your brand does
- They are willing to establish a mutually beneficial collaboration
So how do you go about finding potential collaborators?
First of all you want to decide your goals. Do you want to attract and audience that is on the same platform that you spend your time on? Do you want to get these people over to your website and on your email list?
If I am wanting to build my audience on a specific platform, then I will collaborate with influencers and others on that same platform. If I am wanting to build my email list and get more people familiar with me over at my blog, then I will collaborate on any platform that has my target audience.
So how do you find these potential influencers and collaborators? Here are some tools that can help:
Each of these tools can me quite an investment, but if you are serious but when used correctly, can have serious ROI. With these tools you can, track conversations that are highly relevant to your brand and discover who initiated them, and you can contact these personalities from there with a collaboration request.
Before you reach out, it’s important to follow them on Social Media. Show some love by engaging in conversations, and really getting to know what their brand is about. Like and share their posts so that you are “on their radar” before you reach out with any type of request. In spending time to follow the conversations you will develop an understanding as to whether or now their passions and motivations align with those of your brand. If it’s not clear, you can always reach out any ask these very questions to find out more.
Once you’ve determined that the person or brand is a good fit, it’s time to reach out. Send a message via email, reach out in a private message on Social Media, or pick up the phone and do it the old fashioned way. Introduce yourself, briefly tell them what your business is about, and be direct about why you are reaching out to them. Remember, this is in effect a sales pitch. They key to winning a sale is to answer the questions WIFM – what’s in it for me. I is this questions that will be in most (if not all) peoples mind when you reach out with a request to collaborate. So make sure you address how you are going to help them – more so than how they will help you. Here are some ideas to put you on the right track:
- How can you expand their audience or network?Do you have contacts that will be beneficial to them (this is a good one to consider if you are just starting out and only have a small audience)? Is your audience highly congruent with theirs – are they the same types of people?
Don’t have an audience? Don’t worry… there are other ideas that could make a collaboration attractive.
- What kind of perks can you offer? Are you planning upcoming events they would find valuable? Do you have training courses or other assets that would benefit them in their niche? Can you provide a service in exchange for the collaboration opportunity?
How to Partner with Collaborators
Before you launch into outreach, make sure you have a clearly defined plan that outlines the role your collaborators will play in your video content strategy. Coming up with a great topic that you have keyword researched and asking them to promote it is simply not enough. What can they bring to the table that you can’t? What do your audience need that you can’t give, or your collaborator can do better than you?
Once you’ve found your topic, it’s time to plan the collaboration. Here are some key activities you will need to implement to make the most of your collaboration:
- Gain insights: Communicate with the collaborating partner to determine what topics are getting engagement and on which platforms (this will help you and your partner plan where you should promote the collaboration piece, regardless of what platform you are collaborating on)
- Share and share alike: Come to an agreement before hand exactly what will be shared to each of your platforms, and when. Create a content calendar so you both know exactly what needs to be published to social media before, at launch time, and after your collaboration video goes live.
If you are already actively doing collaborations, what are some other preparations you put in place to make sure you maximize the partnership? Leave your comments below.
