Strategic Partnerships To Grow Your Business in the Digital Economy
Overview:
Personalized, virtual experience are in demand.
The technology isn’t new. What is new is the millions of people using the technology for the first time.
There are innovative ways businesses can partner with each other to reach more people.
Strategic partnerships can increase reach and generate new revenue.
The post-COVID virtual/digital economy is opening new doors for businesses and individuals willing to adapt and embrace change. Rather than fighting to build business on our own, we can use strategic partnerships with other businesses to help each other, our employees, contractors and communities.
I’m a business speaker and magician. My live event business stopped in March 2020, and I spent several weeks helping clients transform my in-person appearances into virtual events.
But then I started doing something else. I embraced digital leadership. And I started creating new events. I wasn’t just replacing; I was creating events that had never been planned before and I was doing it in partnership with local, regional and national businesses, franchises and organizations.
Below are case studies from the last three months of transforming my event business and ideas to inspire business owners and entrepreneurs.
Local Partnerships:
I’ve partnered with Puff ’n Stuff—a top-rated local catering company serving the Orlando & Tampa communities. We’ve created “A Virtual Night Of Magic,” where they’re delivering their amazing catered meals to people’s homes along with the password to join me for an exclusive, private virtual magic dinner show just for those households.
The catering company gets to offer their client base a unique, exciting family event. Likewise, I’m excited to share this with my central Florida clients and fans who have been hiring me for two decades. They’re at home right now, wanting a break from cooking and missing out on live entertainment.
We’ve formed a strategic partnership to offer our clients a dinner and show option that fits their needs perfectly at the moment. It’s a new product offering — a hybrid virtual & in-person experience created exclusively for this new digital economy. The aim is to reach the growing group of local residents looking for personal engagement in the virtual world.
As the World Economic Forum wrote in 2018, anticipating this business trend: “The migration to digital and mobile has created new opportunities for businesses to get closer to their customers. Yet it has also created demand for more personalized and more customizable products and services.”
Local partnerships can also be national (I’ve partnered with locally owned franchises of national brands) and local partnerships can be regional. I presented my virtual show experience for customers of a furniture outlet that partnered with a furniture manufacturer. The businesses doubled their audience and used the experience as a part of their advertising and marketing outreach. It was a creative, positive way to thank their customer list suddenly at home, and starting to engage with the new (to them) digital economy.
Regional Partnerships
Across the country, I’ve partnered with law firms, mortgage brokers and business planners, consultants and advisors to treat their clients to a personal, exclusive virtual magic show experience. These business organizations cater to a client base that is typically widespread across their state, country and even the world. They would never even think of doing any kind of customer appreciation event where everyone would be physically present together. Logistics and budgets wouldn’t allow it.
And in some cases, these non-competing businesses would never think to partner with businesses similar to theirs to do something like this. The in-person economy wouldn’t have made this such an easy option. But there is now demand for personalized, virtual experiences. Through my live, virtual magic show experiences, businesses & organizations can bring their audiences together from the comfort of their home at a time when they need connection and engagement the most.
This partnership idea — which is industry agnostic and can be applied by any business embracing the digital economy — helps everyone involved. The organization’s clients receive a personalized event experience. The organization gets the positive association and the credit for gifting such an experience. And I, as the artist, along with my standard fee, get to grow my audience base to people who otherwise would not have seen me. Everyone wins.
National Partnerships
National brands have always had the size and budget to bring in the best speakers and entertainers to delight their employees. Corporate meetings have been the foundation of my business, and they continue to be in the virtual world. I’ve presented virtual magic shows and business presentations for franchisees, clients and employees of hundreds of private organizations.
Most of these events are internal so I do not post about them or share any information. With these events, the partnership that’s developing is a national or international brand partnering with an artist who has a national or international reach.
National partnerships can also include theaters, festivals, fairs or television shows partnering with artists. This has been done for a long time, I know. Maybe because my business was so focused on in-person events, I ignored the digital market for a long time. So while the idea isn’t new and this technology has been around, what’s different is that because of the quarantine, more people are using and embracing the technology. The methods have always been there, but the effects that businesses can create are new, because the audience has finally arrived.
Your business isn’t magic. What can you do?
Think about who else caters to the same audience that you do. And then ask: would this customer benefit if our businesses partnered together?
If you’re a local fitness expert, would your customers benefit if you partnered with a local gym, a local farm, a local health-store? What could you do to help each other’s clients? A personal coach with a digital following can partner with an exercise equipment company to provide live or recorded workouts featuring their equipment. A partnership like this benefits both parties: the brand benefits by providing quality content, instruction and variety to their customer base. And the personality benefits from the audience growth and client growth that comes with a bigger reach.
If you’re an artist who loves teaching people how to draw, maybe you can partner with a pencil or paper manufacturer. With every purchase of a product or collection of products, customers receive a drawing lesson from you. The artist builds their audience and creates a funnel for private lessons.
National brands have done this kind of thing for years. They’ve partnered with influencers and leveraged celebrity. But what’s also different now is that the playing field has been leveled. You can see it everyday on TV, where national shows usually filmed in large studios with big crews and mega budgets are now broadcasting from their own home living room or basement, just like you and me. Everyone is just one person in front of a lens.
I believe this wave of people embracing the digital economy creates a level playing field for small and medium-size businesses that want to do what national brands have been successful at doing for decades. I believe this is one of the reasons why artists should look at this time as a potential renaissance for their art.
So here is my challenge to business owners, entrepreneurs, artists and craftspeople: find each other.
Local, regional and national business owners should be partnering with other local, regional and national organizations, personalities and artists to help each other grow their business. Together they can spread more joy, create greater connection and help foster each other’s communities.
All at a time when we need each other the most.
Interested in a strategic partnership with me to impact your audience? Get in touch today so we can innovate together and serve our communities!
