Effective Co-Marketing Techniques for Small Business

For small businesses to thrive, they cannot afford to ignore marketing. Getting busy and doing business in today’s reality practically means running a small business. Most people are presently involved in running small businesses and they are striving hard daily to grow these businesses. That is why they do all they can to reach more customers, serve more people and make more money as a result. Most of these small business owners promote their businesses better by working together and involving their customers in their marketing efforts. It takes co-marketing techniques to do so properly, and the results are usually very good.

Following are some tested ways you can partner with other businesses and consumers to co-market your small business.

Affiliate Marketing

Through affiliate marketing, you can turn other businesses into resellers for your own business. Affiliate marketing allows websites, influencers, blogs, and other third-party domains to sell your products for a percentage of the sales. The percentage payment is called commission which must be earned before being paid. Bloggers and content marketers can use their own websites to recommend third party products/services to their own followers/ audience using unique affiliate links supplied by the product/service merchants. If anyone clicks any of these links and makes a purchase, the blogger/content marketer gets a portion of the sale as commission. By this arrangement, your customer gets a great product/service, you make a sale, and the blogger/content marketer gets a commission. That is how affiliate marketing works and it is usually a win-win situation for all the parties involved.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing

This is about the oldest and most effective marketing technique. Smart marketers can always encourage their customers to talk about their business thereby helping to market it. Business owners can create great a product that naturally compels buyers to tell all their family, friends and acquaintances about it. If you have a great product in the market which people cannot help talking about, these people help to market the product extensively through word-of-mouth info.

Brand Partnerships

These days, Brands do work together to share customers by cooperation and collaboration. This arrangement mutually benefits all the brands involved. A perfect example is the business relationship between beverage-serving bars and food-serving food trucks. Such separate businesses can work together to sell more without encroaching on each other’s business territory. If you can find a company that sells some complementary products/services to yours, you can partner with them to better market your products/services and sell more.

Referral Marketing

Through referral marketing, you can empower your customers to market your products/services in exchange for discounts, rewards, or cash back guarantees. Many businesses are running very successful referral marketing program worth emulating. Some businesses always promise to and do reward subscribers with points which they can redeem later, gift cards and more when they get their friends, family and other persons to subscribe. Such reward system usually helps in no small measure to push products in the market.