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Are you an entrepreneur who’s falling into this incorrect mindset that could be costing your business hundreds of customers? What’s that you ask? You want to know what mistake I’m talking about?
Well, here it is:Â failing to recognize the value in interacting with other businesses.
When you’re just starting you with your company, it can be easy to fall prey to the ugly mindset of seeing every one of the other businesses in your general industry as competitors waiting to take your customers away from you.
But if you start trying to build business partnerships, viewing some of those companies as organizations that you can make mutually beneficial strategic alliances with, then you can really start to explode in growth by harnessing the power of sharing your audiences.
1. Run Giveaways
One of the best ways to build a business partnership over social media is to run a giveaway with the other company. Get your products/services together into a bundle, and run a contest on your social media profiles to give the bundle away to a lucky follower.
This way, you’ll build brand awareness for both of your companies and educate each other’s audiences about your product.
2. Cross-Promotional Coupon Codes
Similar to a giveaway, you can both issue cross-promotional coupon codes on your social media. For instance, if the companies ACME and TSI are trying to build a partnership, then TSI could have an ACME20 discount code on their products, while ACME has a complementary TSI20 discount code on its products.
3. Friendly Banter
There’s nothing that can engage your audience quite like friendly banter between companies. This is exactly what Wendy’s does on Twitter. By poking some harmless fun at each other, you can both grow your audiences.
4. Complimentary Services
The first step to this strategic partnership is identifying a company that provides a complimentary service or product to your service. Then, come up with a plan wherein your customers get one of their products or services free with each purchase and vice versa. To see how Gusto and Solid Digital built a partnership, read more here.
5. Shout Outs
Last but not least, you can utilize this method to build business partnerships even if you don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up some of the more complicated alliances we’ve discussed above. Simply give each other shout outs to your followers so that you can educate each other’s audience about the existence of the other brand.
Leverage Social Media to Build Business Partnerships
There you have it — now that you have five concrete strategies to leverage social media to build business partnerships, all that remains is for you to start reaching out to companies in your industry to see if they’d be interested in joining hands with you in a strategic alliance.
For more business advice, be sure to take some time to check out the rest of the articles available to read on the website!
