7 Steps to Quick Audience Growth Using Collaborations
This is a must listen if you…
- would like to create meaningful relationships with people
- would like to rapidly increase your audience growth without spending a lot of time on social media
- don’t always have a million new content creation ideas
This episode will outline the seven steps for collaboration success. And if you want to explore further and find the exact audience growth strategy that will work for you, go to laurenmariecourses.com/grow for the LIVE workshop.
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Episode Transcript
You’re listening to marketing cows episode 126. Hello friends. Welcome back to the podcast. It is a good day here in my house because I’ve got my computer back. Oh, you know, when you just like, your computer just turns off and it doesn’t want to turn back on. And you’re like, no, my laptop conked out a few months ago.
And I was like, that’s okay. Cause I’ve got an iMac pro, which is like this giant computers, like way overkill, but I was doing a lot of design work and editing and stuff. So I was like, I’ll get the top of the line computer. And I was like, I have my backup. You know, I have my computer on my,
my laptop and the, with the laptop when I was like, well, at least I have my computer, so it’s fine. And then the computer just turned off like completely just shut down and wouldn’t turn back on. And I was like, I feel like I’m in Seinfeld where George is yelling at the squirrels. And he’s like, we had a dual role.
He was like, you’re not allowed to break at the same time. That was the deal we had. You’d get the memo. Apparently the computer didn’t get the memo, but it’s back now. And I am happy. They had to replace the logic board and the power supply and whatever that is is basically the whole inside of the computer. I think.
Can you tell him very technical, but it’s the second time they’ve had to do that on this computer. And luckily it was within the two year warranty. So no charge for my brand new inside of my computer. Thank goodness. And it’s working fine so far. Knock on wood. I don’t have any wood. Anyway, we’re talking today about the seven steps to quick audience growth using collaborations.
And this is actually the second strategy in the holistic audience growth formula, which is the whole idea of this is guys, to give you ideas of how to grow your audience, that aren’t going to suck your soul dry and cause you to hate your life and have to do things that don’t feel authentic to you because there’s so many different ways to grow your audience.
And out of having a lot of conversations with people, I discovered that it’s like, people think there’s only one way and they, and they hate that way. And so they’re not doing it or they are doing it, but they’re hating it. And it’s like, that’s not the way to grow your business. You need to find a way to grow your business.
That feels good to you. That feels authentic to you. That feels like you, and that you can do it. And it becomes part of your normal, how you run your business, your normal day to day activities. You kind of integrated into other things you’re doing. And the way when you do that, it’s not a, this other thing that you have to do.
And it’s like grudge work that you do on the side, but it actually is, is fun. And it becomes, it gives more to you than this end result because if all you’re doing is growing your audience, because it’s like, it’s on your to-do list of like things that you need to do to have a successful business. And you’re like tick,
you know, I, I posted on social media today, check, you know, and you’re just doing it. And it’s like, you’re this grudge work. It’s not gonna, it’s not sustainable. And you need to be really in your business for the long-term and have a level of enjoyment in everything that you’re doing or in, you know, the majority of what you’re doing.
Of course we don’t love everything we do all the time. But with audience growth, there’s so many different ways to do it. So I wanted to go through six different strategies. This is number two, and it’s about collaborations and the collaboration module. If you will, today, we’re going to have seven steps. So this is all about strategic outreach and one-on-one connection.
So this is one of the methods. If you hear this and you’re like, oh, that’s not for me. Then you’ve got five other choices. So one was yesterday and the, the other four will be coming up. So not to worry, you will find one that works for you. But today this is really for you. If you are more limited on time or creative ideas.
So if you heard number one, that the creator was, was strategy one. That’s really, for people who are just coming out their ears and nostrils of like ideas everywhere, you know, and you just, and you kind of need an outlet for that. This one’s good for you. If you don’t have a ton of extra time to put into this,
or you don’t have a ton of creative ideas, but you do like to create meaningful relationships. So you don’t have to necessarily be an extrovert or social butterfly, but those one-on-one connections are really where you thrive and finding those, those few but deep relationships that you can really cultivate and grow. So that’s who this strategy is really for it’s for you. If you want to collaborate with other sort of complimentary brands and people that are going to be a great compliment to what you have to offer.
So step one in this process is to find someone who is a great compliment to your offer. And even if you don’t have your course or your membership or your coaching program up and running yet, you know what you’re going to be offering at broad stroke. So, you know what subject matter, you’re going to be helping people with, you know, who your audience is,
and maybe you’re getting to know them, but you kind of have an idea. So you should be able to think of someone else who serves the same audience that you do, but in a different way. So they have the same audience, but they have a different way of serving them or a different service or product that they offer them. Then you do.
So this is someone who possibly, you might normally refer clients to because they do something different than you, but it’s complimentary to what you have to offer. And this was sort of right up my alley when I had my wellness business, because what I, my vision for that was really to bring all the best practitioners that I knew under one roof. And it was called the element center and we had all different complimentary therapies and just yummy stuff.
So we had yoga, we had massage and we had nutrition and we had a psychotherapist and we had like a Reiki person and we just had all different types of modalities. And so collaboration was happening all the time. So it was like, we’d have people come in and they would spend the day and they’d go from one room to the next and just all the amazing things that we had to offer.
So, you know, if you’re, if you’re in a service-based industry, like who you’re already referring people to, for instance, if you are a massage therapist, maybe you’re gonna refer people or you’re gonna collaborate with an herbalist or a nutritionist. Or if you let’s say, you’re not in wellness, maybe you’re like a branding specialist. So you might be collaborating with web designers or social media agencies.
It’s like, they’re serving the same people as you, but they’re doing it in a different way, right? Let’s say if you’re a coach, like maybe you’re your leadership coach for women, corporate women. So maybe you find someone who helps women with personal finance. So it’s like they, they will be serving the same people, same audience, but they have a different offer.
They have a different way of serving them. And so what you want to look for is obviously I’m S I’m kind of saying this in different ways, you get what, who you’re looking for, because the key there is to get in front of their audience and their audience would be a good fit for you and your offer, but they’re not doing the same thing as you do.
So it’s like, if you are a child, counselor, or a child therapist, you don’t find another child, counselor or therapist, you find someone different who also works with kids, maybe it’s, you know, music therapy or maybe it’s art therapy in your therapy is, is totally different, but you would be serving the same kind of needs in the,
in the kids. So, and as far as audience size, you want to find someone who has at least an equal size audience that you do or larger, but not necessarily the biggest person in your industry. Now you can approach those super big brands and names, but, you know, they oftentimes have kind of a full roster or they may already have someone that they’re collaborated with.
So there’s really a need for collaboration in that mid range, where they have an audience, they have a, some sort of offer, or they’re serving people in some capacity, but they’re not this massive, you know, household name or something like that. So those mid range brands and companies will have more space to collaborate for you. And they’ll likely be looking for opportunities like this,
because like you, they need content. They need referrals. They need other experts too. And they probably are being asked. I know in my groups, I’m being asked all the time for certain things based on the needs of my particular audience. And those will be different than yours, but you will know who your people are, are wanting to have support that you don’t,
it’s like where, where your skill or your zone of genius ends. And someone else is someone else’s begins that you could kind of pass them over to there. So these sort of middle range, not giant names will likely be looking for opportunities to sort of cross-pollinate with other audiences. So it’s going to be a win for them as well. And even if you’re just starting out,
you have people that you’re connected to. So don’t, so don’t discount it and think like, well, I’m just starting out. I don’t have anything to offer. I don’t have an audience to offer well, that’s okay. You have your knowledge to offer. And you do have some people that you’re collaborating with. And as your audience grows, that’s gonna only just be greater and greater for them.
And they may not necessarily need to get in front of your audience. Although as yours grows, having that, both that sort of cross referral back and forth can be really nice. So that’s step number one, find someone who is a great compliment to your offering. And actually it would be like, find a type of person. So what type of person are you looking for?
Is it an herbalist? Is it a graphic designer? Is it a personal finance expert? Like what type of person are you looking for? And step number two is make a list of 10 potential names. So people that would fit that description. So they’re in that, not like giant, giant name, but they’re, you know, they appear to have an audience on social media.
It looks like, you know, they’ve got a website, but they might not have a massive following. So, and they fit that, that bill of having the same audience as you, but having a different offer than what you do. So 10 potential collaborations, you’re going to write all 10 of those down. And if you don’t know, just start Googling,
go on Facebook and type in the type of, of person that you’re looking for. Check out free Facebook groups. If you are already in some, you can ask for a recommendation, Hey, does anyone know someone like this and, and follow the thread there, or just go on Google and have a look around and make it that list of 10 potential people.
So step three is for each person on that list, you’re going to think about, so you’re going to take each name one by one and think about who you’re already connected to. That might be connected to them. So if you guys ever played that six degrees of Kevin bacon game, it’s like the idea is that like everyone’s connected to Kevin bacon with six or less connections.
I don’t know why Kevin Bacon’s the person, but anyway, so you’re going to find that likely if you don’t know that person directly, you probably know someone who knows them, or maybe there’s two degrees. It’s like, you know, someone who knows someone who knows them. Right. But you know, industries are, are so small anyway, like as soon as you kind of connect,
it’s like you, you you’ll easily find someone who knows those people, especially if they’re not, you know, big, giant brand names. So think about, of those 10, do you know any of them directly, or do you have a personal connection with someone who does know them? And I would start there so find like Astrix make a little star next to the ones that you feel like you could connect to them directly and get an introduction.
Like if you do know someone who knows them, you’re going to go to that person and say, Hey, I’d love to meet so-and-so would you be willing to introduce me? Because a personal introduction is going to go to the top of their stack of emails, right? As opposed to just a cold approach from, you know, from, from their social media or just finding their contact on their website.
So you’re going to start there and reach out to the people that you know, who know them and ask them to introduce you. Now, if you have those and if not, that’s okay, you’re still gonna contact the ones that you don’t have a way of getting introduced, but you want to start with the ones that you might have a personal connection to.
So step four is to familiarize yourself with each of these 10 people’s brands, their offers their content. You want to get informed about them, get curious, get interested in them before you reach out to them. And this is a big pet peeve of mine. And I know a lot of other people that get approached for collaborations, but you can tell that the person who’s who’s reaching out has actually no idea who you are or what you’re doing.
And it’s like either just a cut and paste, you know, so-and-so would love to be on your podcast. And I’m like, really? And you can tell they just cut and paste that to like 20 people a day and hit Sanders. Like that’s not an, I never even respond to those because I’m just like, Ugh, but you want to actually get to know what they’re doing,
what they’re creating and, and listen to some of their podcasts, watch their IgG lives or YouTube videos, or read their blogs, like get familiar with their content. So you can actually be informed about that when you reach out to them and not to mention, you might actually find some information that would be useful for yourself and your audience. And that’s an extra bonus.
So familiarize yourself with each of them, that’s step number four. So those 10 people, you’re going to go through a, do a little research. You might need to set aside an afternoon and just spend, you know, 30 minutes on each and, or maybe less 15 minutes on each. And then really just kind of do broad strokes and, and find at least one piece of content that you can watch from beginning to end or listen to from beginning to end.
So you have a sense of their voice, their values, what they sound like, you know, all of that. And then step number five is you’re going to find a contact for them. So you can go on their website and look for an email. You can go on their social media and just direct message them. Or again, if you know someone who knows them,
ask for an introduction again, don’t copy and paste something to all of these. These are only 10 people. You can, you can come up with 10 unique messages, okay. Be a person, you know, act and talk like you would normally talk to a human being, reach out in a, in a, in a normal way, like you would to a friend.
Okay. And refer to that piece of content that you watched or listened to or read when you reach out to them, refer to that and comment on what you liked about their approach or a question you might’ve gotten, or your, what was your take on that issue? Or how did you respond to what they said? Like really get curious and, and informed and ask them about it and just comment about it.
And, you know, maybe say things for this thing that you talked about. It’s so important that our audience gets to hear about this, or whatever would be actually true for you, don’t make up something. Okay. So you’re going to be authentic in this when you reach out to them. But step number five is that you find a contact and you reach out and you introduce yourself to them.
And it doesn’t have to be a long, make it short. You know, they don’t have time to read long thing, just something short and sweet. And step number six is if you get a response and the person seems open to a conversation, offer to add value for them, and more importantly, their audience. So if they do have a group,
a membership, a community, a platform, an audience, what the deal is, they’re going to be protective of those people because that’s their, that’s their community, right? So anything that they do, anyone that they put in front of their audience needs to be a good fit for their audience, be aligned in, in the values that they have and that their community has,
and is someone that’s going to provide value for them. So what you want to do is offer something that you think that would be a value to their audience. So you could offer to do a free talk, a free workshop for their group or their membership. You could offer to do an Instagram live collaboration. Like you do a live together with them,
or maybe an IgE takeover. That’s where they would have you, you know, create content that goes out on their Instagram. Maybe just for one day, or you could do something like sponsor their podcast and you may pay for that, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a lot. So you could offer to sponsor their podcasts for a month or a certain number of downloads,
even if they don’t have, if they’re not big enough to have ads, or even if they are big enough to have ads, they would probably be open to a conversation of offer of some sort of sponsorship. So step six is once you’ve opened, the lines of communication is create an offer for them that is free, or you are paying them in the case of a sponsorship.
And that can, you don’t have to know what that would be right away. You could have some ideas based on what you’ve done before or what you would be really comfortable and confident in speaking on. And you approach them with that. So you say, Hey, I was thinking that your audience might really like to know more about blah, blah, blah.
And that’s something that I talk about a lot. And w do you think they would be interested? I’d be happy to come and do a free talk for you. So step seven is that if this is a go, you’re going to prepare two things. So one is the actual talk or the, if you’re doing an IgG live, maybe you come up with some bullet points,
highlights that you want to cover in that live. Or if you’re doing a sponsorship, you’re going to need to come up with that script. And so, whatever it is that you’re going to create, you need to create that. So that’s number one. And number two is you’re going to come up with their free gift. So that gift is something that,
with this person’s permission, you offer at the end of your talk or the end of your thing. So you’re going to say, Hey, is it okay at the end of our workshop that I’m doing for your group? If I offer, if I give them this free download or whatever the freebie is, and in exchange for giving them that they will give you their email.
So basically you’re getting, you’re gonna announce a link. So you’ll say, Hey, you know, if this was fun for you, I have this free guide. You can go ahead and download, just go to, and you give them the, the URL, the website, where your freebie lives, and when they go there, they would be entering a form on your website to download that freebie and boom,
you’ve just widened your reach times. The number of people that this person is connected to. So this is like a strategic sort of way of exponentializes your audience growth, because it doesn’t require any posting on social media. It doesn’t require you to go out there and become an influencer and, you know, follow yourself around with a camera all day or anything like that.
So it doesn’t take as much time. There is some research as we went through these seven steps, there is work, but it might be more suited to you if you don’t really like social media. And if you aren’t such as social butterfly, and if you don’t just have oodles and noodles of creative ideas all the time, this is a sort of a more strategic way of exponentializes your audience grow audience growth quickly,
and think about that. So every one of these person, people, and what you’re going to do after you go through these seven steps is you’re going to rinse and repeat for each of these contexts that you’ve identified until you’ve done this at least 10 times. And you might want to go further with one or two of them based on the rapport that’s there.
Maybe you create future offers together or partnerships. Again, if you develop a friendship like this can go really go a long way. And who knows, you know, who knows where this can go, but it’s a way of creating partnerships that I think it’s pretty simple and it maybe obvious. But when we talk about this in my group, there were a number of people that were like,
oh, I never even thought of doing that. And it is a totally different approach than strategy number one, which we did last time. So let me just recap for you the highlights. So this is the strategy number two of the holistic audience growth formula. And that is the collaborator. And this is for you, if you would like to create meaningful relationships,
one-on-one with people. And you’d like to exponentializes your audience growth quickly without having to spend a lot of time on social media or coming up with a bunch of different ideas. So, step one is to find a type of person that’s a great compliment to your offer with the same audience that you have. Step two is make a list of 10 potential collaborators.
Step three is for each person on that list, think about who might already be connected to them that you, that could introduce you to them. So a for each one, you’re going to see if there is a, a mutual friend that you might have step four is to familiarize yourself with those 10 brands, those 10 people’s content and offers to get informed.
When you reach out step five is contact them, find a contact, email, phone, number, a social media handle, and reach out and make some sort of introduction. Like you would do a normal person as a human being, not a copy paste or a sales pitch or anything like that. Just reach out and say, hi, step six is if you get a response and they’re open to a conversation,
offer some kind of value for their audience for free. And the final step is to prepare two things. One is that piece of content that you’re doing for their audience. And the second thing is a free gift that you’ll give at the end that gets them onto your email. Of course, once they’re on your email, that is another step, but we’re not talking about that here.
But once they’re on your email, you have now grown your audience, which is the whole point of this episode, which is the seven steps to quick audience growth using collaborations. So this is way too quickly exponentializes your audience growth. And if you do this every time you do this, you will be taking a leap in your audience growth. And sometimes those leaps can really pay off and become partnerships that you might be able to nurture in all sorts of different ways for years and years to come.
Hopefully that gave you some ideas. If you want to dive in and do this whole workshop together, I’m offering a live intensive on June 21st. You can go to laurenmariecourses.com/grow, and you can sign up there. It is the holistic audience growth formula. So this is a way to supercharge the growth of your online business. Using a holistic system.
Holistic means your whole person. So this is going to include you and your lifestyle and your personality, and not just be something that you were told as a good idea, but you actually hate doing so come join me. I look forward to it. I’d love to meet you. We’re going to do it on zoom. So I get to see you and we can talk.
And until then, I wish you a happy whatever day it is. When you listen to this, we’re going to be back again for strategy. Number three, next time. Bye for now.
