Developing a strategic marketing plan is important to raise awareness for your business. If consumers don’t know about your fabulous product, it is very difficult for them to buy it! The art of successful marketing is largely about letting the public know how to find you.

For online business, there are a variety of creative ways to do this: direct email, banner ads, pop-up ads all of which are successful and strategic tools. A rather new idea in Internet marketing is called collaboration marketing, an understanding of which will help develop a complete marketing strategy.

What is collaboration marketing?

In essence, collaboration marketing focuses on directly attracting customers to your site, rather than intercepting them with traditional advertising methods. In traditional advertising, customers are somewhat randomly drawn to your business. For instance, if they happen to see an enticing advertisement, and happen to click on it, they may find their way to your website and business. This is proven and effective marketing tool, but to find an edge in business, it is important to cultivate new and creative ways to raise awareness for your business.

How does collaboration marketing work?

Collaboration marketing attracts customers by becoming more and more helpful to them, in a sense a sort of personalized service. This type of marketing targets customers both in terms of evaluating potential new products and services that may be of interest to them, and working with them to get more value from products and services they have already purchased.

This may sound like a lot of work, but these goals can be obtained through straightforward processes that will target a large group of customers at one time. Personalized service need not be personal service. Collaboration marketing challenges the idea of a one to one personalized service with the refreshing view of many to one to one types of marketing.

Push vs. Pull

Collaboration marketing works by mobilizing a broad range of relevant third party marketers to add value to the customer relationship. These marketers make resources and relationships available to the customer that will enhance the products the customer has already purchased, thus creating a need and loyalty to the company of previous purchases. This is a pull approach where the marketer becomes useful to the customer so the customer then seeks out the marketer, rather than other types of marketing that seek to push a customer towards their product by invading email and blasting out ads.

Certainly, traditional modes of marketing are effective. Many types of marketing have been successfully implemented for decades. But the art of successful marketing and strategic marketing is about finding an edge and developing a strategy that will get you noticed and attract customers to the products and services that you offer. Collaboration Marketing should not be the only type of marketing you implement for a successful strategy, but is another piece to add to your repertoire to give you the business edge that will get you noticed and helps make your business a success.