People running a startup, a small business or an agency may often feel like there’s never enough time to get all the work done that they need to do. That’s because, with limited resources, there’s only so much that one can achieve within a day.
With that being said, collaboration marketing is an alternative way for brands both large and small to achieve their business goals by looking for smart ways to drive growth. That means, working with each other—and the key to this is looking for business synergy by creating win-win scenarios.
Here are some creative collaboration examples of ways that brands can drive internal and external growth.
Examples of internal collaboration
Internal collaboration usually takes the form of things like internal workshops, events and work retreats that are geared to facilitate internal creativity, allowing a team/company to work creatively together.
Here’s a fresh look at how one startup created an internal collaboration routine within their company for idea generation, which ultimately led to the creation of an idea that solved a major business problem.
Idea generation
On 4 pm every day in Seoul, the team at CodeCloud would internally meet together for a growth marketing brainstorming session. During one meeting, in particular, the CEO of CodeCloud happened to notice that the startup was experiencing app usage drop-offs with:
- Daily average users (DAU) increasing—meaning that the startup was acquiring a lot of new users. Not a problem because the website was generating a decent amount of organic users.
- Monthly average users (MAU) decreasing—meaning that people would stop using the web application within a given period of time. A major problem because people were signing up, using it for a little bit, then they’d stop using it.
The CEO, then asked his team, “How could we fix this?” One of the team members then responded with, “Well, learning to code is kind of like going to the gym. Initially, people are enthusiastic, but after two weeks time, they get lazy.”
One thing turned into another, and the team took this to this to a whole new level by quickly coding up a 2D geeky spaceship, with the following message, “Sorry, you’re not good enough to code—you’re out!”
Then, the spaceship exploded … BOOM!!!
The underlying strategy here was based on parent/partner psychology. If your boyfriend, girlfriend, mom or dad tells you not to do something—or, they say that you’re not good enough to do something, then what usually happens? You want to do it. That’s because people naturally don’t like being told that they can’t do something, which in effect, makes them want to do it.
As an example, imagine that your partner says, “Hey, I don’t want you to drink this Friday night.” So, what’s probably going to happen? Despite what they’ve said, you’ll probably go out—or alternatively, have a nightcap at home.
The impact of this was astounding and saw hundreds of inactive users email the startup with messages like, “Hey, I’m sorry, I’ll do better. Let me back in.” In such a short timespan, the team at CodeCloud were able to turn “inactive users” back to “active”—by killing the email list. This happened in 2014, a few years before Hubspot killed their inactive email list.
Examples of external collaboration
External collaboration occurs when two brands collectively agree to work together on a project to help each other grow.
Instead of looking at what other brands have already done, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at things that brands are already doing and offer up “hypothetical use-cases” on things that they could do with other brands in industries that are typically known for being hard to market.
Finance
BetaShares is a recognized leader in the Australian exchange-traded fund industry, giving Australian investors the best opportunities for investment growth and diversification. They have been acknowledged for achieving a record number of “firsts” for the market and therefore, a natural aspect of their strategy could be looking to educate investors and advisers about the potential of investing in ETFs—both broadly and specifically.
By taking a quick look at the BetaShares website, I happened to notice that they have an Understanding ETF Basics Course, structured as a collection of ebooks and additional resources, this course could easily become a growing marketing opportunity to collaborate with a wide range of businesses. Here are some hypothetical examples of creative things that BetaShares could do:
- Collaborate and partner with the Australian personal finance magazine Money Magazine by giving Money Magazine’s audience access to BetaShares ETF course, and in return, BetaShares could add a Money Magazine news widget to the BetaShares website.
- Create a sample version of their ETF Course to be offered via the Parent Wallet interface of Spriggy —an app that has been designed to teach Australian kids financial literacy and the value of money. This would help both brands gain access to a new audience.
Insurance
Once a year, the Australian insurance company Choosi runs a survey that researches upcoming market trends. For example, the 2018 Choosi Workplace Report identified that “Women notably spend over $1 billion more than men every year on their work apparel.” Just with this statistic alone, this could open a lot of doors for possible brand cross-collaboration.
Let’s imagine that Choosi was again to create a similar survey report in 2019. What kinds of brands could they potentially team up with? What could they do? Well, they could use their data research and team up with another company to expose their brand to a new/wider audience. Here are some hypothetical examples of some out of the box things that Choosi could do:
- Run a 2019 survey with Showpo — and in an extra field to their survey about Showpo (which would be highly valuable to the company), and in return, Showpo could expose the Choosi Workplace Report to their followers by emailing subscribers to take part in the survey. In this scenario, a potential big win on both accounts.
- Team up with Survey Monkey — Survey Monkey could inform their Australian audience about the survey, and Choosi could run the survey by using Survey Monkey and add an “in partnership with Survey Monkey” to the report.
Internet
Did you know that Netflix has an Australian ISP speed index. However, what you may not have noticed is that Netflix excluded Aussie Broadband, a company which the ACCC previously said had the fastest NBN speeds in Australia.
On the assumption that Aussie Broadband would like to be added to the Netflix Australian ISP speed index. Here is a hypothetical example of how Aussie Broadband could use collaboration as a growth strategy in the form of a campaign: Collaborate with a brand that has access to a lot of bloggers, for example, Blog Chicks (with 4,000+ bloggers) and run a joint blogging award campaign together. This campaign could be used to grow both brands, likely resulting in media exposure, an increase in brand power, and could even gain the attention of Netflix.
Final remarks
Whether it be internal or external collaboration, these can be both used to accelerate growth, expand your reach, facilitate the development of a new partnership, or even grow your revenue by reaching a new market segment. In sum, collaborating internally within your team, or with other brands, helps you to exchange value and grow.
Luke Fitzpatrick covers fintech trends on Forbes, a guest lecturer at Sydney University, enjoys writing about tech and coding.
