Posted by If you’ve never considered integrating your business with another service or product that your customers are already using, you might want to take notice of this trend.
Companies and entrepreneurs are teaming up with non-competing entities to reach the same customers, massively increase traffic and sales and keep their customers around for much longer.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Know who your customers are.
If you don’t know who your customers are then there’s no way you’re going to be able to find them and make money. No matter what your product or service might be, the fact is that NOT EVERYONE is your customer.
I don’t know why marketers have such a hard time with this. You build websites, thus everyone who needs a website is your customer, right? Wrong. You make pizza, thus everyone who eats is your customer, right? Wrong. You do social media marketing, thus every company is your customer, right? Nope.
When you target everyone, then you target NO ONE. You build websites for restaurants. You sell organic pizza to health conscious people. You do social media marketing for chiropractors.
You’ve got to be targeted in who you’re marketing to. Once you know who they are, then you can figure out what channels your customers are using, and then find then where they already are.
Step 2: Use other people’s platforms through integrations.
Someone else already has your customers. You’re looking for someone who is not a competitor of yours but has the same customers you want to target. For example, if you offer a software service for small businesses, look at what other services these small businesses are already using.
Partner with these other channels to leverage their user base to grow your own customer base through integrations. You’re attaching your product or service to their product or service in a way that makes both products better.
Let’s say you’re an expert on social media marketing and you’ve put together an awesome course on how to use social media to drive traffic to an offer. Someone else has a course on how to build products and offers and create sales funnels. By partnering, the customer gets a full business model that teaches not just how to create hot selling products, but also how to drive traffic to those products through social media marketing.
Ask your customers to help you identify what solutions you can potentially integrate with by finding out what products or services they consistently use. Integrating with another business because you think it’s a great fit isn’t necessarily going to work. But if your customers tell you it’s the right fit because they’re using this other product over there in conjunction with yours, then you know you have a winner.
Your partnership needs to be a win-win, and your partner pages have got to rock. Partner pages let people know that you’re integrating with this other product or service. Then you can drive traffic through ads to these pages that show you have partnered with this other company. For example, if your software as a service company were to partner with Dropbox, you can create Facebook ads for Dropbox users that show how easy it is to get your solution in conjunction with their current Dropbox account.
Step 3: Get your new partners to promote for you
Whether you’re partnering up with a small information marketer or a giant software as a service company, ask them to promote you to their user base. Don’t be shy about asking, because they will actually want to promote you because the more integrations their users do, the more their customers will stick around and keep paying.
Let’s say you’ve got a membership site for online marketers. You can partner with non-competing membership sites and software as a service sites. Then when someone joins your membership, they can also get your partner’s PLR membership at a steep discount, and that Leadpages type of software at a discount and so forth. Or maybe you offer them everything at one price.
And pretty soon your member is also taking advantage of all these other sites and service that they access through your membership site. If they were to cancel your membership, they would lose all of these other sites, too, unless they signed up with each one again at full price.
I think you can see the possibilities in this – to say fortunes are made this way is a vast understatement.