Mastering Strategic Partnerships: Rapidly Boost Your Audience With A Long-Term Approach
If you do strategic partnerships well you can rapidly build an audience which will help you achieve your goals.
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The Power Of Partnerships When Done Well
The most active music artist today is….
A common joke in the music industry is the most active artist alive today is ‘feat’. As in ‘featuring’ (the work of other artists). Artists are increasingly collaborating with other artists to benefit from each other’s audiences.
For example, Ed Sheeran - one of Spotify’s top artists collaborated with BTS - the most popular Korean boyband. This introduced the artists to each other’s audiences and built their following (despite never meeting).
Why we’re seeing sports crossovers
You can see this happening in sports too. A recent trend has been the rise of crossovers between different sports disciplines. In 2017, Connor McGregor, a UFC mixed martial champion, fought a boxing match against Floyd Mayweather, a semi-retired undefeated boxer.
While many felt it demeaned the sport of boxing, it was strategically brilliant
The fight (and the hype around the fight), enabled Connor McGregor to massively expand his audience amongst an entirely new generation of fight fans. It also enabled UFC to target an even bigger share of boxing’s market.
But strategic partnerships come with a catch. You often have to give more than you get.
Mayweather was the bigger name and retired. To bring Mayweather out of retirement, McGregor agreed to a contract in which Mayweather earned triple what McGregor did for the fight. Mayweather earned an estimated $300m for the fight (McGregor took home a paltry $120m by comparison).
Short-term, this seems like a bad deal for McGregor. But having a bigger audience as a result of the fight (a fight he lost) opened up new opportunities. Even today McGregor is able to command UFC’s biggest prize purses (despite not being in the top 10 fighters). That’s because the UFC knows when McGregor fights he brings a huge audience with him. That’s the power of an audience.
Likewise, he gained more in sponsorship deals and even launched his own brand of whisky - which he later sold for $600m.
The Real Power of Strategic Partnerships
Too often strategic partnerships are thought of in narrow terms.
Pretty much every vendor in my space has at some point offered me a referral deal. That’s such a narrow-sighted way of viewing a strategic partnership. So are vague ideas of referring each other to clients.
The real power of strategic partnerships is introducing you to their audience rather than going straight for new business. The bigger you grow your audience, the more doors will open up for you.
A bigger audience means more referrals, more speaking invites, more opportunities to collaborate with others.
Building A Strategic Partnership
Begin with a list of people who reach a similar audience to you
The basic principle is you find someone with access to an audience you want to reach.
Ideally, an audience that is a little bigger or the same size is ideal (don’t partner with people whose audience is significantly smaller than yours without charging a fee).
Then you come up with a compelling offer to make it worth their while. You might have to give more than you get immediately. But it’s worth it because it helps your audience.
An acquaintance once followed my advice and began pitching ideas to bigger names in his industry. It failed miserably. The problem was he couldn’t bring anything to the table. He didn’t have a big enough audience to make the endeavour worthwhile to the big hitters in this industry and wasn’t willing to pay.
Like everything else in this book, you have to do things in stages. If you haven’t built a big following yet, it’s unlikely the major names in your industry want to collaborate with you.
You have to start with people much closer to your level. If we’re going to be crude, you might begin with the F-listers and work your way up to the A-listers.
Begin With Small Alliances
In the early stages, build small alliances. The people with smaller audiences are usually most amenable to engaging in joint webinars, award shows, live breakdowns, and even debates.
Make sure whatever collaboration you’re doing that you’re able to capture email addresses. Building your mailing list for the future is key. Avoid activities which give you a mention but not the ability for people to easily click a link or scan a QR code to access your work. You can give up a lot of your time to appear on a podcast, for example, and not benefit much from it.
This doesn’t mean podcasts aren’t great - the Tim Ferriss effect (being featured on a key podcast) can put you on the bestseller list. However, there are very, very, few podcasts at this kind of level. Targeting them is a little like targeting Oprah for your book. However, if you grow your audience enough, you might be able to appear on a major podcast at some point - but that day is probably far away for now.
Work Your Way Up The Domino Ladder
Imagine this as a series of dominoes if you like.
First, you must grow in audience size from 0 to 10, 10 to 100, 100 to 1000, 1,000 to 10,000 etc…
As a general rule, try to find people who can reach a level just above you. If you’re in the 100 to 1k category, then look for people who have a 1k to 10k audience. If you’re 10k to 100,000k, look for people in the 100k+ arena.
As you advance through each stage, your tactics should change. You gather your first 100 people by direct engagement and outreach. 100 to 1000 is especially tricky, but small alliances with people like you should get you there.
Once you’ve hit an audience of 1k+, it’s time to figure out who in your industry has clout they can promote to others. Look specifically for
Hosts of online communities who can send an email to this audience.
Authors of newsletters in your industry.
Platform vendors and blog authors looking for something to promote.
Event organisers.
Experienced professionals with a small following.
Speakers at events in your industry.
Build a detailed list of the right people you might be able to build alliances with.
You can use a tool like Sparktoro if you like to quickly understand sources of influence in almost any sector.
Crafting A Compelling Offer
Be prepared to give more than you receive
Once you have your list of strategic partners, it’s time to craft the offer. Like Connor McGregor, you should be willing to give more than you get to achieve your goals.
Really take the time to consider what would make the offer a no-brainer for the recipient. What do they most desire?
Here are some tips…
The first is to make it easy by taking on all the legwork yourself. You can host an event, bring an audience they want to reach, and create an environment where all they need to do is promote and show up.
The critical thing is they promote the activity to their audience too!
The second is by crafting an offer which gives them great rewards for the least amount of work. The three big levers here are
Exclusivity/scarcity. The opportunity to be featured in an exclusive environment is usually compelling.
Direct income. You can pay or agree on a revenue share which makes it a no-brainer for the partner.
Easily build their audience. You can make it simple to grow their audience within the industry.
A few years ago an organisation wanted me to promote their event.
They decided to host a workshop the day before the event. They took care of the venue, food, and accommodation. They even offered me 50% of the workshop revenue. All I needed to do was teach and promote it. They (correctly figured) people who were coming to the workshop would also stay for the conference. I made $15k from the workshop, they made $40k. This might seem unfair, but $15k for one day’s work isn’t a bad deal.
Be Creative In Your Offer
A while back, someone approached me with an invitation to speak at an event of top industry professionals. This was a compelling offer. It was scarce and got me in front of a small audience they wanted me to reach. They also offered me the opportunity to invite one other top tier industry professional.
Consider how clever that is. They created an exclusive, elitist, event. Persuaded me to come. And then let me invite another top-tier professional. This both increased their audience and made the event more compelling for others to attend. It also earned me the gratitude of whomever else I invited.
There are plenty of creative approaches you can take. Another is to host a competition or challenge. One Instagram influencer I know bought a luxury toaster and teamed up to host a competition with two other influencers in her niche. She gathered over 3000 new email addresses for a total of $150.
I don’t recommend hosting competitions to win a toaster, but you can be incredibly creative in your approach. You can set a challenge and partner up with others in your space to solve it.
Small Fees Can Speed Things Up
As you’re getting started, you will discover that sometimes even a small fee can make it worthwhile for people at the lower rungs of the ladder. The average cost of acquiring an email subscriber for a B2B brand can range from $3 to $50.
If you can attract 100 new subscribers for $300 to $500, that’s a good deal. There are plenty of people who would happily take that payment and partner with you on an activity.
Be wise about the metrics here. Just because someone has a 100k subscriber list (or following), doesn’t mean they will get all subscribers to your list after an activity. The average click-through rate for email ranges from around 2% to 5%. This means only 2k to 5k people from an audience of 100k are likely to click through to your mailing list. And even then, there will be a drop-off between of around 50%.
So a shared activity with someone with a 100k mailing list might boost your list by 1k to 2.5k people. This is still a great boost - but if money is involved you should probably aim for a figure in the $3k to $8k range rather than the $50k+ range.
Remember here the more subscribers you have, the easier it is to target bigger names in the future and grow your practice. Being too frugal can hold you back. For a few thousand dollars, you can typically be featured in all of the low to mid-tier influencer activities in your industry and acquire an audience of thousands of people.
Quality Is Critical To Success
One important lesson to success here is quality. When you do get opportunities to partner with others the quality of the activity has to be high for the audiences to want to cross over to each other.
If you’re not getting the results from this activity, it’s probably because the quality of what you’re creating in that shared activity isn’t high enough. If you’re not going to blow your new audience away there is no reason for them to follow you or join your mailing list.
You have to genuinely treat this as rare, amazing, opportunities to build your brand and really make sure you’re delivering tremendous value people can’t get from anywhere else.