In our podcast episode, Building Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations, Julia and Laura discussed the importance of collaboration in any business, including how to strategically use partnerships to leverage business growth through better connections and efficiencies. In this article, we will explore when to set up these partnerships, uses of vendors and white label services, and other forms of collaboration to grow your business while missing common pitfalls.
Why You Might Collaborate with the Competition
Our COO Julia Becker Collins once wrote an article for the Worcester Business Journal called Build bridges: Why the competition isn’t your enemy. In it, she detailed Vision’s long history of working with others in the marketing sphere, even when our core services overlapped. While you should read the article for more details, the circumstances you might work with others in your field can include:
- The Wrong Size for Your Services: Whether you sell to individuals or businesses, not every customer will be a good fit for you. Consider building a mutual referral network if you’re too big or too small a fit for their needs.
- Thought Leadership: Your competitors are also experts, and all experts should share knowledge. Whether privately or publicly, best practices, solutions, and thinking through challenging issues help both sides.
- Competition as Vendors: Sometimes, building up functionality for specific services doesn’t make sense. However, if your competition has, they can slot their services into the gaps you have (or vice versa). This can be a great time to look at white labeling services for each other.
Building and Marketing Your White Label Services
So, to expand on that last point: depending on what you and your competition sell and the gaps in your own services, white labeling—products made by one party but branded as another’s—can make a lot of sense as a business tool for growth. Why expend the limited resources of your business on training staff and buying equipment when you can have someone else do it for you but in line with your own brand, best practices, etc. The inverse is also true: the “____ as a Service” field always has room for successful niches you can exploit by white-labeling your own company.
Vendors vs. Partnerships: The Outsourcing Trap
As an agency that works to seamlessly integrate ourselves as the marketing department our clients didn’t know they needed, there is one trap to avoid. As we talk about in our blog, A Marketing Vendor Versus a Marketing Partner, if you don’t work closely together, the breakdown in communication, goals, and changing markets can make them fail. If you’re outsourcing your marketing, but it’s the set-it-and-forget-it of static marketing plans without review, it’s doomed to fail.
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox.
It always pays to find the right partnerships for your business—no one stands alone, even in the business world. Do you have a big gap in your business where your marketing should be? It’s time to contact Vision. We’ve helped countless clients not just outsource their marketing but build a partnership where consultation, reporting, and expertise meet to supercharge a business’s growth, especially when they had no marketing department to start with.
