For online business, there are a variety of creative ways to do this: direct email, banner ads and pop-up ads all of which are very successful tools. However, a rather new concept to online business is the collaboration marketing strategy, of which, an understanding will help you develop a complete marketing campaign.

What is Collaboration Marketing?

In essence, this marketing strategy focuses directly on 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 click on it, they may find their way to your website. This is a proven and effective marketing tool, but to truly find an edge in a sea of online businesses, it's important to cultivate new and creative ways to raise awareness for your business.

How Does Collaboration Marketing Work?

Collaboration marketing attracts new business by becoming helpful to the customer, in a sense a sort of personalized service. This type of marketing targets customers 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 may have already purchased.

This might sound like a lot of work, but these goals can be obtained through a straightforward process that will target a large group of customers at one time. Personalized service need not be personal service. Collaboration marketing challenges the idea of the "one on one" personalized service with the refreshing view of multiple "one on one" consumer services occurring simultaneously.

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 buyer then seeks out the marketer, rather than traditional types of marketing that seek to push a customer towards their product by invading emails and blasting out ads.

Certainly, traditional modes of marketing are effective. Many types have been successfully implemented for decades. But the art of any successful marketing campaign 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 marketing strategy you implement, but rather, another piece of your repertoire to give you an edge to get your business noticed and help make your company a success.

Copyright (c) 2008 Christian Fea