been thinking of contacting other business similar to mine as a way to marketing for everyone. Have you done this? what were your results. or is just a bad idea.
I think it’s a great idea to partner with other companies for dual-marketing opportunities. Social media “shoutouts” are great because your name gets to reach a larger audience in hopes of building more internet awareness. Although sometimes your “partner in marketing” is competing for the same jobs, you have to be confident enough to know that you are the better company.
Using your resources is critical to marketing your business. You can choose to partner with non-competitive companies of the same type, but in my oppinion there is always competition between companies with the same product or service.
Possibly a more effective approach could be to partner with companies, different in product or service, but with the same target market. Finding companies who can distribute a form of advertizing in the form of a promotional or free gift is a great way to get your company name out to your target market (and even a sample of craftsmanship if your creative) using the hard-earned client base of a reputable and successful company.
Very willing. Great idea.
We just talked about doing this for our company via a newsletter. If you read any marketing website, the new age of marketing is about content. Consumers are constantly hit with advertising from every angle. They’re numb to it and can quickly turn it off.
Content marketing (think blog/news feed,“Buyer’s Guide to Window Buying” download, etc.) builds trust between your brand and the consumer. And we all know that before someone will buy from you, they have to like and trust you. By providing relevant content on your website, consumers will spend more time there, reinforcing you as an expert and making them open to your recommendations.
The idea we talked about for our company is a newsletter or small publication. We get tons of leads from a little magazine sent out to 46,000 local households (all in upper class neighborhoods) that is just a collection of articles from “industry experts” (who also happen to advertise in the publication). There is no central theme to the magazine, but it’s mostly companies that are targeting homeowners. But what differentiates this is that it is NOT just a magazine of ads. There’s content there, and people LOVE reading the articles.
Our thought is to get one “expert” from each “sector” of the remodeling industry. We’d be the sunroom experts, then we’d get a siding expert, plumbing expert, window expert, electrical expert, water expert (softeners and filters), chimney experts… you get the idea. We’d sell a few ads (most likely from the experts companies) or at least get them to help pay for the newsletter’s printing and shipping.
Why bother you may ask? Because it’s almost free advertising if you can get some other companies to pitch in (minus your time to organize it). And it’s better advertising than postcards, magazine/newspaper ads, TV commercials, radio or about anything else that is going after what we call “Prospects at Large” (people who might have a need but haven’t actively started pursuing a solution).
If you are struggling with generating leads, I’d give it a try. You can get in front of all of the other business’s customer lists as well, which in and of itself is very valuable. Their customers are more likely to read it if it’s coming from a company they already trusted with their money.