Online success is much more than creating a great website for your business and waiting for customers to find you. Ongoing marketing and partnership building efforts need to be a priority. Luckily, working actively with partners can help increase your exposure and give you plenty of marketing opportunities to capitalize on your efforts without having to put forth as much effort on paid marketing.
Partnering with companies that are complementary, but not in direct competition can lead to a great return on the time and effort your business puts into creating these relationships. Linking to each other’s content, sharing social media events and co-hosting webinars and other online activities will give all businesses involved the opportunity to have greater exposure within their related vertical markets.
Make a list of the companies that you think are the most complementary to your business and contact them to see what you can do together. For example, a pet grooming business is a perfect match for a business that sells supplements or healthy pet food. Together they can cross promote in a variety of ways to increase exposure and sales for all concerned.
Another popular way many businesses have found to gain partnerships with other companies in order to increase exposure and popularity in the search engines is to engage in volunteerism. For example, if your business is the pet grooming business, volunteering to groom pets from the local shelter will give you the opportunity to gain exposure through press releases because media interest is high in any sort of volunteerism activities. Not to mention, the shelter will also help market the fact that anyone adopting a pet will get one free grooming session at your business. No matter what sort of business you have, there is some form of volunteerism activities you can get involved in that will create a return on the investment you make.
When you seek partnerships with complementary and non competitive businesses, and non-profit organizations, you will find many of them are more than willing to partner with you for long term or short term projects that will boost exposure and marketing efforts for all concerned. Make sure to reciprocate any exposure the other business gives you by posting links to their business or giving them some other sort of online attention as well. Using partnerships in this way will help you cut down on online marketing expenses and give you a boost in activity that you would not have been able to have with traditional advertising methods.
