Your Joint Venture is a Strategic Alliance

What is a strategic alliance? It is an alliance between two or more entrepreneurs or business owners who work together in a strategic fashion for mutual benefit. It is a double “win” arrangement that is based on a solid joint relationship.

If you are considering a joint venture or strategic alliance, begin your process with a few questions: Who is your ideal customer? What is your target market and demographic?  Who is your competition? Who else provides similar services or products in your industry? These questions can help you discover potential strategies that can be achieved through an alliance with another business owner.

What are some sample strategies that could work with your joint venture alliance?

• Use seminars, workshops, and other public forums to promote you and your partner to the marketplace.

• Offer creative combinations of your products or services as a package deal.

• Create a newsletter, or contribute to each other’s newsletters by writing articles.

• Endorse your strategic alliance partner’s business to your clients and customers through your mailing list.  Have your partner do the same.

• Include a special offer coupon to your joint venture partner’s email and snail mail packets.

• Incorporate each other’s products or services with recommendations.  For instance, a real estate agent might recommend a mortgage broker to her clients looking to buy a home.

• Provide links on your website to you joint partner’s website.  Have them do the same.

• Write and publish a helpful “how to” ebook or publication and send it free to joint clients and customers.

• Create an affiliate program where you and your partner receive a fee for each new customer that was referred to the other.

• Look on a national level for strategic alliances, as well as locally.  You could reach a great many more customers with a national strategic alliance.

Your strategic alliance does not have to be limited to just you and another partner. Consider a group of alliances where all can benefit. An example could be a real estate agent, a mortgage broker, and a title insurance officer who combine efforts to meet the needs of individuals and families buying homes.

Be sure to always know your potential partner and their products or services. It doesn’t make sense to automatically recommend another business’s product to a customer if you have not reviewed or used the product yourself. If the product turns out to be faulty or low quality, your reputation could suffer. Make a full effort to get to know your strategic partner and the products and services they offer.

When it comes to forming a strategic alliance, keep in mind that you are forming a partnership. Your negotiations in forming the details of the partnership should include win/win strategies that benefit both parties. But also remember that your joint partnership should benefit customers from both parties as well.

There is no better time than the present to take a look at your current business needs and discover ways you can profit and benefit through one or more strategic alliances. Don’t wait for another business owner to approach you. Get out and start forming alliances today.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report.

Search Engine Optimization for Strategic Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website, and this is a key technique for a strategic marketing platform.

Search engine optimization drives traffic to a website by matching targeted keywords with searches performed by a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the list of search results, or the higher it ranks, the more people will visit that site. If someone performs a search for “cosmetics” and your website comes up in the first position on the first page, more people will go to your site than the site in the first position on the second page, or even to the site that is the fifth position on the first page. Search engine optimization can also target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, industry-specific, and vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s placement and relevance, search engine optimization considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. Search engine optimization may involve a site’s coding, presentation and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.

Another class of techniques know as black hat search engine optimization or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm the search engine user’s experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

SEO History

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

SEO for Your Strategic Marketing Strategy

Having your website high in the rankings of a search engine is a strategic marketing way to increase your exposure. The higher you rank on a search engine, the more likely people are to visit your site.

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages are found automatically and do not need to be submitted separately. Some search engines, notably Yahoo, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. These programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.

These are a few ideas on how to start thinking about applying search engine optimization to your business-marketing plan. The first step to gaining new customers is by driving them to your site. Search engine optimization can be an important part of your successful strategic marketing plan by increasing the easy search-ability of your company’s website and making your business more noticeable.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

Consider Collaborating With Other Business Owners for Increased Profits

Let’s say you have a successful Internet business with a successful e-marketing platform, and you feel you have good relationships with existing customers and fair success at gaining new business but then you hear about Collaboration Marketing and you wonder why all the hype? Why should you consider changing anything or expanding in a new direction?

Collaboration Marketing may not be a must for your business, but it’s certainly something worth exploring. You may not need to collaborate with other companies to grow your business, and you may be satisfied with the size and scope of your business. But even if you are not looking to grow, change, or expand, a collaboration strategy may help you maintain the smooth running of your current operations, which could mean less day to day work for you.

There are two distinct types of Collaboration Marketing that are important to understand. One deals with the actual advertising and marketing of your products, the other relates to the market in which you sell and distribute your products. Before making a decision about whether a collaboration strategy is right for your business, it is important to understand and explore both aspects of this type of marketing.

Advertising Collaborations focus on shared industry resources and word of mouth partnerships. If you have a small business specializing in making wedding cakes, you will benefit by making contact with other wedding industry professionals such as photographers, caterers and consultants. If a photographer has a client who has not yet decided on a bakery for their special cake, the advertising collaboration creates a point of contact and referral to recommend your wedding cake business to the client.

By the same token, if you have clients who have not yet selected a photographer for their wedding, you can recommend your collaboration partner, who is a wedding photographer. The success of your Advertising Collaboration will depend on your ability to form and develop successful business relationships.

Market Share Collaboration deals directly with the market in which your products are bought and sold and may be a large undertaking, but it’s an important process to understand in any marketplace. This type of collaboration has to do with banding together with other small businesses in your area, and forming a small cooperative to maximize cost savings for products you all use or need to do business.

For example, the Central Minnesota Buckwheat Growers formed a 16 member cooperative in order to market their buckwheat directly to larger buyers, and they received a substantially higher price for their product than they could have received individually.

You are probably not growing or selling buckwheat over the Internet, but this model holds true and translates across the board for any business. If you are a small business, you may benefit from partnerships with other small businesses in your same industry just like the Buckwheat Growers did when they formed a collective.

Collaboration Marketing is a model I believe you will find merits exploration. If done properly, it will provide a helpful way of expanding and solidifying your business for years to come.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

Strategic Marketing: Customers and Competition

To begin an effective strategic marketing strategy, it’s imperative to know your customer, as well as your competition. Knowing what your target audience is, and who your target customer is, will be the first step towards developing a successful marketing strategy. Once you have identified your audience, you can begin to tailor your strategy to include your collaborative marketing efforts.

Who is your customer?

Start by making a series of imaginary profiles of your potential clients and customers, asking specific questions such as:

• What is the age range of my potential clients?
• What is their income range?
• What are their lifestyles and hobbies?

Depending on the product you are marketing, your phantom client profile will vary. The motivation here is to think of the customer as an individual, rather than as an amorphous group of unknown clients. Once you identify a potential client profile, it will be a more natural process to tailor a marketing scheme.

An effective marketing plan begins with thinking specifically in terms of whom your market is, and who you are trying to entice to use your products and services. An advertisement, email or website display will vary greatly depending on whether you are targeting college age, financially conservative students, middle income families, or single, young professionals. However, a cohesive, well thought out series of advertisements is more likely to appeal to a diverse variety of clients rather than an assortment of ads tailored to reach a specific audiences. Your product or service may very well be suitable for a variety of clients, but is less likely to sell to a varied consumer base with too many individual marketing strategies.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Knowledge of your competitors’ marketing scheme and how they market their products is almost as important as being able to identify your prospective clients. There’s a lot to be learned from studying a competitor, especially if they are a well-established business with a solid marketing strategy.

Build upon what has proven successful

If you know of a business in your industry that has catchy marketing ads, it’s a good idea to understand what they’ve done to be successful. This is important for two reasons: you don’t want to exactly replicate another marketing strategy, and you want your advertisements to stand apart from what is already being produced. This will help you to develop and tailor your marketing scheme to your target audience, in a way that is different from your competition and get you noticed!

Awareness of how similar businesses in your industry approach marketing will help you develop the edge you need to target your own clients. Intimate knowledge of which these prospective clients are will set you in the right direction for developing a successful marketing strategy that is unique and specific to your business. Knowing your target market, and how others target the market in your industry, will put your business on a successful path for growth and recognition. Based upon this knowledge, you can even choose a synergistic competitor and create a collaboration marketing campaign.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

Using the Media as a Strategic Alliance

Millions of people read the newspaper every day. Many others read magazine articles. Most of these two groups combined believe and trust the better part of what they read.

What is published on those pages becomes regarded as truth, or at least it holds an inkling of truth. The stories are often the topics of morning radio talk shows, people chatting at work or among friends. In short, the stories that make it to print have an impact on consumers.

Therein exists a very effective form of collaboration marketing. With the media, you are building the trust of consumers, who will in turn be more likely to buy your product or service. The trick is to get the newsmakers to write about you and your business, which starts with news releases. In accomplishing this goal, you will form a strategic alliance with the media. The key to success with this strategy is to have well written releases. The media receives countless press releases each day and if it’s not in the proper form, or you’ve a made a mistake, your release goes in the trash.

Hiring a communications firm to write them for you is a great idea. They will have a large media list with specific contact information for publications in your area and around the country. Getting your release to the right person is important. These contacts can be found on your own in most cases, although it make take a lot of work. Chances are you will have to make your way through many gatekeepers before you find the right person. There are online services where if you subscribe, you will have access to their media lists. However, some of these sites can be hundreds of dollars to obtain.

If you are going to give it a go yourself, here are a few key things to remember in writing a news release. Never call members of the press members of the press. It is thought of as a negative term these days. So, at the top of your page it should read ‘News Release’, not Press Release. If the content of your release is time sensitive, then the words – for immediate release’ should be in the second line. This will tell the media that the info in the release has an upcoming expiration date. If it can be used for a while, then it should read ‘for release at will.’ This will give your release a longer shelf life and it has a better chance of seeing its way to print. Be sure to include your contact information. Keep paragraphs very short, one or two sentences. Keep the entire news release to one page when possible.

Consistency is going to play an important role in this strategy. Forming a strategic alliance with the media will be key to your collaboration-marketing plan. Some will choose to send media releases once a month for an elongated period of time. Some plans span 3 months, while others choose a more secure year or more. Of course, not all releases will turn into articles because big news happens and you’ll get sent to the bottom of the pile. But chances are if you consistently send your releases, you’ll see your name in print.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

To discover more Joint Venture Marketing Strategies join his free Joint Venture Marketing Wealth Report

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