Collaboration Is The Name of The Game

We’ve been talking in recent tips about working as part of the community, building relationships and working together rather than being territorial, protective and suspicious of competition.

Working with other businesses, as well as dance businesses, really does work.

Here’s some tips on how you can do this:

• Throw a charity event – perhaps theme it, and invite other businesses to take part – i.e. we’ve been asked to run an “ice” themed event for someone who is going to walk to the North Pole – so we are going to teach dance routines to Ice Ice Baby, and various Frozen tracks. We are asking a local disco company that have a “snow” machine to come along, a company that run Princess Parties and ask them to dress as characters from Frozen, and also a facepainter.

We will feature all logos of the companies on the flyer, we will all market it and we will all be able to showcase our businesses, get great pr and raise money for a fantastic cause.

The benefits of working together are joint marketing, reaching a larger audience, great PR, building relationships and getting customers to take part in what you offer, therefore potential of more business – PLUS your fellow businesses are more likely to recommend you when asked for services such as yours

• Have you thought about businesses that may tie in with yours? i.e. dancewear companies, football training companies, companies that focus on getting kids healthy etc.  For example, with the football companies, many of them are focussed on boys (although thankfully this is changing), however we were approached by a football camp to joint market – us to promote the football camps to siblings of our usual campers, and they would promote Popdance to the siblings of their footballers.  Again, joint marketing saves on print costs, hitting double the social media and database, and also makes great PR.

• And how about offering free samples of things that other businesses want to share with your customers – for instance, we were approached by Healey’s offering us a set of Healeys (roller skates within a shoe), for all of the children on our camps, in exchange for us promoting them on our website and flyers.  On this occasion, we did decline as we were not sure we wanted our Popdancers on skates at that particular camp, but you can see how businesses who want to get their product in front of your audience does work.

• Offers – you may also want to exchange offers with other businesses, i.e. Trampoline Park – offering all their customers a free dance class taster session, and they offer your customers a free go at trampolining.

• And we mentioned even working with other dance teachers and schools – we are always more than happy to promote other dancers – in fact, dance teachers that we’ve promoted, or retweeted etc. have usually ended up working with Popdance too!

So, definitely worth thinking about how you can collaborate with other businesses in your area. Perhaps start with ones that you already have a relationship with and then build on from there.

We would love to hear how you get on – get in touch at [email protected]

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If you would like to find out more about working with Popdance, please email [email protected]

Meanwhile, have a fantastic week!