What is Content Collaboration?

You join forces with another brand and create awesome content. Then, you share it with both of your audiences, and it provides a shot in the arm of freshness as well as opening your brand up to a whole new set of people, without costing a fortune.

Some of the most iconic brand collaborations have come from the most seemingly unlikely partnerships. Gucci and Disney, sharpie and Nike, Dolce & Gabbana and Smeg, Peanuts and Marc Jacobs, KFC and Cheetos…you get the idea.

So, here’s 5 way to make your collaboration a success

1. Choose brands with similar attitude to yours

Apple sells innovation not iPhones, and Airbnb sells homes away from home not lodging. Ultimately, you’re selling your vision to your clients; so if the partnering brand shares your vision and passion, chances of smooth sail collaboration increase.

So when identifying brands to collaborate with, do a check to make sure your values don’t clash. Ben and Jerry’s believe in ‘saving our world’ so you’d never see them collaborating with big oil. If your visions clash, you might find content marketing tricky, leave your audience confused, and be associated with values you’d rather not be.

Don’t let that stop you from coming together with direct competitors for a good cause. When Burger King and McDonalds came together in 2019 to raise money for cancer in children it did big favors for both brands. The proceeds from Big Mac sales for one day were donated to the cause and Burger King stopped selling their Whopper, to encourage Big Mac sales. Burger King was seen as charitable and unselfish, and made people crave their Whopper all the more after being denied them for a day.

2. Collaborate with a brand that is a complimentary service or product

Spotify and Uber came together supporting people with a premium Spotify account to listen to their own music in cars booked by Uber. “It’s the first time we’ve personalized the experience inside the car,” Uber CEO, announced. “And for music lovers, that’s nirvana.”

The collaboration should make sense and work well together to create something special and unique. When narrowing down your collab-list think about what innovation you could create together and how that might appeal to your audience.

3. Make use of available technology

We tend to refrain from changing practices afraid of a learning curve but we forget that most times new ways are innovated because it is faster and easier.

Technology has made it easier than ever before for teams to collaborate remotely. The problem is, most businesses rely on old fashioned ways like emails, calls, and messages forgetting to innovate methods of communication to actually allow technology to help us be more efficient.

There’s so many more efficient options than emails and downloads to review creative content. Of course, there are tons of popular project management & communication services like Trello, Basecamp, Slack and Jira. I’m here to tell you there are web apps tailored specifically for people that create, collaborate, and manage content. As much as we love slack and dropbox, it probably isn’t a good fit for the creative content today. Free websites like wipshot allows you to streamline review, proofing, and feedback for videos and images with the team, collaborators, and clients. Talk about no more dispersed emails, texts, phone calls, and meetings.

So many collaboration tools are available to use for free, wipshot among them, and they’re only going to get better.

4. Choose a brand who’s target audience overlaps with your target audience.

Don’t confuse this with your products needing to be similar. When Vans collaborated with Harry Potter it was a match made in heaven…or a match made in Hogwartz. So make sure you focus on that target market intersection because you don’t want to end up trying to sell meat to vegans!

5. Establish a regular schedule of communication

Right at the start of the partnership, you should approve a mutual schedule for when you want to receive task updates. It could be daily, a few times a week, or weekly. The important thing is that it’s set regularly, and shared amongst all team members, so they know when to expect communications and are always kept up to date.

Without a regular communication schedule, important milestones may not be promptly communicated, which could lead to ruinous results and delays. Communication is so important to any collaborative project and planning that in advance is key, even more so for remote teams in different time zones.

In conclusion, collaborations can open up a whole new world of content marketing when it’s done right.

If you adhere to the above advice, you can inject new life into both your brands, successfully drive engagement and drive up your sales.

Written by Tara of yourwebstory and wipshot.com