How collaboration leads to success

HARSEST - Collaboration for brands

How collaboration leads to success

The Internet has changed our lives forever…and the lives of our brands too. People perceive things, make purchase decisions not in a traditional way anymore, but in a modern way – brand new way – consulting the Internet on so many things and so many levels.

According to Forbes,

  • 90% of consumers check online reviews before visiting a business.
  • These online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions.
  • 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation of a friend or a family member.
  • 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.

Inspiring numbers, right?

Just think about them this way:

Almost everyone who is engaged with your brand has googled you before knocking your office’s door. What google search can tell about you? If your google business information is not clear or is lost somewhere in between many others similar brands, you can be sure, your potential customers knocked someone else’s door.

HARSEST - buying decision

Online reviews are not only limited to Google reviews these days (but this channel is one of the leading), people leave reviews on Instagram. Make sure your CS team is doing its best to make a good impression, otherwise someone’s story may influence someone’s decision to trust your brand.

Trusting reviews is a big deal because by our nature we would rather prefer to test something on someone else first. That is why people follow bloggers and vloggers – those people jump in first and come back with a fresh review that can be easily accessed and trusted. This is why collaborations got popular in the first place – and as a brand, you can use it for your own good.

Collaborations are not lies, as it might be seen sometimes, but even paid ones are not. They are a good way to let people know about your brand. And that doesn’t only go to small and unknown brands, that goes to big famous old brands too – it helps them to hang on on top.

So are all the collaborations same kind of good?

NO.

Contacting a random person in hopes that it will somehow work out is never a good idea. It is all about the strategy.

All effective marketing campaigns including collaborations start with a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Firstly, you need to identify what you want to achieve:

  1. to reach more people or reach a very specific group of people
  2. or maybe you want to improve your brand reputation in general
  3. or even reward your current loyal customers in some way.

HARSEST - Collaboration plan

Your objective will lead to the type of collaboration you can rely on:

  • Brand + brand
  • Influencers
  • Celebrities

Brand+Brand collaboration

Collaborating brands might sound scary but it opens up new horizons. By doing collaboration you can reach people that you wouldn’t have reached before. You don’t need to collaborate with your main competitors, but try to find someone who can compliment you as much as your brand can compliment them. Good example: shoe brands collaborating with apparel brands. Or apparel brand collaborating with accessory designers. By doing so you can create something new and unique, something that your market hasn’t seen before.

Influencers

We have covered this part before in previous blogs, but it worth mention again – the right influencer can promote your brand like no one else. These collaborations don’t need to cost much but can be considered highly profitable in long-term – influencer’s fanbase is growing constantly. New people are coming to social media to check the posts – would be great if your brand’s product is mentioned in one of them. This type of collaboration is not limited to Instagram only. There are a lot of bloggers and vloggers (yes, youtube is still popular with its reviews and tutorials)

Celebrities

If there is a budget, you might want to consider to go for this one – after all, celebrities have way more influence and way more chances to collaborate the right way. Fragrances and various limited apparel collections are the bright and undeniable examples.

HARSEST - Supreme t-shirts collaboration with celebrities

After finding what is right for your brand, you need to find what is right for your customer (existing or potential one). This is what will make your collaboration not only good but effective.

Content matters too. While there are a lot of ideas out there, taking someone else’s idea for your own needs might not be a good idea. Try to build something from a scratch and something unique for your brand only. This way people will remember you for you and not refer to your business as “something like that brand” or “those with commercial similar to…”.

These are major steps for a successful collaboration campaign. There is also one more step which comes after – conclusions. Even good campaigns might not necessarily lead to big results. You need to make your collaborations flexible enough to reach the desired goal. If you see that brand collaboration doesn’t work, try to involve influencer there to distribute to brand+brand creation to the right people. If influencer’s post doesn’t work try to change the description or use extra perks – discounts.

 

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