📣 New Ecwid tools to grow your ecommerce business in 2024. Learn more →
Everything you need to sell online

Set up an online store in minutes to sell on a website, social media, or marketplaces.

Grow Your Audience Collaborating with Other Brands

5 min read

In this episode of the Ecwid Ecommerce Show, podcast hosts Jesse Ness and Richard Otey dive into collaborating with other business owners. Collaborations are a great way to expand your audience without spending too much money—but you’ll need to invest some time in it, for sure.

Tune in to find out how to look for possible collaborations, how to connect with other businesses, and what you can do if you don’t have a significant audience yet.

Why Collaborate with Other Businesses?

Collaborations are a great way to expand one’s reach to potential customers. Collaborating with other businesses doesn’t necessarily require spending money. It can be as simple as a cross-promotion on email lists or giving each other a shoutout on social media channels.

However, you do need to invest time researching and reaching out to potential brands.

How to Choose Brands for Collaboration

Before even contacting a potential brand, you should identify compatible collaborators and plan out what you want from the collaboration.

Here are four main attributes of a partnership to keep in mind:

  • Partners should be similarly sized companies. (Usually, a bigger company isn’t likely to collaborate with a smaller company.)
  • They should sell products related to yours but not be your direct competitors.
  • Their products or services should appeal to a similar demographic as yours.
  • Their items or services are around the same price level as yours.

For example, if you sell hammers, you want to look for a business that sells tool belts, but not necessarily another hammer seller.

How to Reach Out to Other Brands

When reaching out, you can use various tactics, from emailing, reaching out on social media, or calling.

When you contact other business owners in your market, list the benefits of your potential collaboration, such as leveraging each other’s audiences that share the same interests.

Ask if they are interested in a cross-promotion opportunity where you promote each other’s products. Offer to promote their products in your newsletter or make a post on your social media pages. Be sure to specify your email list and social media audience size.

Consider creating an image together that showcases how your and their products work well together. You can both use the picture to market your products!

Sweepstakes Collaborations with Other Businesses

Apart from email and social media campaigns, you can offer to run a sweepstake or a giveaway with a potential partner.

Collaborating with other businesses via sweepstakes is effective in so many ways. Through a giveaway, you can get more followers, more people to sign up for your email list, and reach a wider audience of potential customers.

A third party usually organizes these collaborations, matching up companies based on demographics, product types, and audience size. Generally, each of the participating businesses will offer up a gift certificate and promote a sweepstake through email and social media.

A good thing about sweepstakes is that they usually require a participant to enter their email address or phone number. You can get contacts of potential customers through the sweepstake, as opposed to just being featured in your partner’s email or social media post.

What If You Don’t Have a Big Audience Yet?

If you’re just starting out with your business and don’t have a big audience, you might think you can’t offer much for collaborations. In this case, you can try to partner with influencers to get more exposure for your business.

Listen to our podcast about influencer marketing based on influencer seeding instead of the pay-for-post model. Influencer seeding has proven to be more effective and can help you build a following from the ground up.

Sell online

With Ecwid Ecommerce, you can easily sell anywhere, to anyone — across the internet and around the world.

Stay up to date!

Subscribe to our podcast for weekly motivation and actionable advice to build your dream business.

Ecommerce that has your back

So simple to use – even my most technophobic clients can manage. Easy to install, quick to set up. Light years ahead of other shop plugins.
I’m so impressed I’ve recommended it to my website clients and am now using it for my own store along with four others for which I webmaster. Beautiful coding, excellent top-notch support, great documentation, fantastic how-to videos. Thank you so much Ecwid, you rock!
I’ve used Ecwid and I love the platform itself. Everything is so simplified it’s insane. I love how you have different options to choose shipping carriers, to be able to put in so many different variants. It’s a pretty open e-commerce gateway.
Easy to use, affordable (and a free option if starting off). Looks professional, many templates to select from. The App is my favorite feature as I can manage my store right from my phone. Highly recommended 👌👍
I like that Ecwid was easy to start and to use. Even for a person like me, without any technical background. Very well written help articles. And the support team is the best for my opinion.
For everything it has to offer, ECWID is incredibly easy to set up. Highly recommend! I did a lot of research and tried about 3 other competitors. Just try ECWID and you'll be online in no time.

Want to be a guest?

We want to share interesting stories with the community, fill out this form and tell us why you would be a great guest.

Your ecommerce dreams start here

We use cookies or similar technologies to maintain security, enable user choice and improve our sites. We also set cookies for marketing purposes and to provide personalised content and advertising. You can reject all non-essential cookies by clicking “Reject all.”