EMBiz: Play Well in the Sandbox With Others

Laurel Mintz, CEO & Founder

Play Well in The Sandbox with Others 

Hey, Laurel Mintz here with Elevate My Brand. Today I want to share with you a little bit of detail around one of the saying that I say a lot which is, “We play nice in the sandbox with others.” But what does that actually mean? At Elevate My Brand we have a core value of collaboration, but it’s a very intentional collaborative process. I want to share with you how we approach it and how you can use collaboration as a successful growth tool for your brand. 

Building a Formal Partnership 

As a process driven marketing agency, we saw that there was an opportunity to leverage the relationships that other ancillary non competitive brands and businesses had within our market. But one of the things we hear all the time is, “I built this great partnership but then it kind of fell flat.” Nothing actually got executed and that is because nothing was actually formalized. So, what we do with our strategic partners is actually formally execute a strategic partnership agreement. You know that I’m a lawyer, so I’m always thinking with that hat on and when we saw in the past that these partnerships weren’t being executed on, I thought “How can we make people take this more seriously?” So that agreement that is signed by all parties really helps with that issue. On that agreement, we actually ask the strategic partner to tell us what platforms they have, what they’re willing to do, and what they’re committing to do truly within the relationship that we’re building. 

We also want to make sure that we’re able to track all of that content. As you know we have the Task Action Report, which is basically a google doc on crack, that allows us to see over time what is working and what isn’t working with those collaborative partnerships. 

Now, this should be something that you think about when launching a brand. It can really be done at any phase, though. For example, when we do our onboarding emails for our new clients, we have a little statement in there that says, “If you’d like to be a collaboration partner, let us know” and we do often feature them on our newsletter. 

Again, this is really about thinking through who might be a great partner and then formalizing that relationship so that everyone on that table is getting what they really need to elevate their brand.