You Ask, I Answer: Identifying Complementary Brands for Collaboration?

In today's episode, Taylor asks, we are a small air freshening brand with a subscription service. Who should we collaborate with? I'm struggling to come up with a complimentary brand or even a type of brand. So this question is really important because very often what people do is they look at their business and how their business does business and looks for similar kinds of businesses. Hey, you're a subscription business, so and you're a subscription business, we're a subscription business, so let's see if there's some opportunity to collaborate with uh there.

And that's not uh the worst way to do it because there is going to be some overlap. Logically, if someone is comfortable buying things through subscription, uh, they may be comfortable buying something else through subscription. But one of the challenges of that is that you don't know whether that brand or that product or service is going to be useful to you to understand um you know is this uh is their customer base similar enough to yours. So there's a couple of different ways to handle this. Number one, and probably the the most straightforward is to survey your audience, your customers that you currently have and say, hey, what other products and services do you use, either on subscription or not, to get an understanding of what are the major brands that are in this person's life.

Is this person that is a customer? Are they also a Netflix subscriber or an Amazon Prime subscriber, or are they uh a DoorDash subscriber or a a Grubhub subscriber? Get an understanding of the brands in that landscape first. And then what you'll probably want to do is you'll want to look at what do audiences of those brands have in common. So let's take a look at uh where you would get this information.

Now uh the easiest place to get it from is actually from Facebook Audience Insights. So let's bring this up here. Here we have everyone on Facebook, and this is you know uh this is set to the United States, but you can obviously change it to whatever you need it to be. Um if we look at interests, if you know somebody is interested in Netflix, for example, or even a specific show on Netflix, you could toss that in here. Uh is there sp a uh let's look at uh Doordash, see if that's in here.

Yep. And now you've got a couple of those uh targeting criteria in here, that's 70 million people. Go to page likes. And what this is gonna pull up, of course, are all of the other brands and interests that this audience is is interested in. And if it you this is would be the place then to start looking, particularly if you have a locality that you serve that's specific, uh, or uh maybe a particular type of affinity that uh are brands that are within your reach that you may be able to do business with.

Some a bunch of these are are obviously very big ones. Um, but you can see here there are you know a travel agency, it's a particular type of sports bar, uh there are some TV shows, uh, there are some websites that may or may not be uh very large, but this is how you would sort of calibrate in on based on your understanding of your customer base. Uh this would be the way to identify those complimentary interests and then use this data to do your outreach. Now, if your page is large enough and and has enough uh followers, and we're talking in the thousands here, uh if not tens of thousands, you can do this directly without having to use these calibrating brands. Uh so example, let me go ahead and pull up uh my page in here.

You can see my page, even though it's got a thousand followers, does not have enough data to do this. I can calibrate on the basic demographics and get some ideas of location, maybe if it's there. Uh, but in this case, I don't have enough information for my page. So that's why I would suggest going the survey route first to find the big brands that these come these customers have in common and then use that to calibrate. Essentially, you're you're creating almost kind of a look-alike audience in in some ways of uh what else do these people have in common.

The other thing that you can look at is in Google Analytics. In fact, let's go ahead and bring that up here. Within Google Analytics, you can get what are called in-market interests, and these are the interests that people have within your uh audience. So let's go ahead and look at interests. And what is it that these folks are also interested in acquiring?

Let's go ahead and close this. Uh, we can see employment, career consulting services. This is my website, and this is the last uh seven days. Let's expand this out a bit here. Maybe go for October.

60 or 90 days is a good window to look at. Employment, business and productivity software, advertising and marketing service, travel, hotel, and accommodations. You can see that there's a list of these different types of companies that someone is in market for or has an affinity for, the types of things that they like to be looking at. So technophiles, uh, business travelers, value shoppers. This then gives you additional types or categories of companies.

And this is from your website data, which will give you uh those people who come to your website. You could obviously restrict this down uh with segments if you you want to track only people who converted, but that is obviously contingent upon uh making sure that you've got goals that uh are trackable in Google Analytics. So a couple of different approaches depending on whether you want to go the the Facebook audience route to see those interests or uh and those very specific named interests or the general categories with Google Analytics. Either way, you can get at that information or at least start down the road of that information to identify what are the things that your audience also cares about, and then build uh audiences from that build or uh collaboration partners from that. That's a good question.

So remember to always think from the customer's angle first. If you if you're starting from the business side, it's hit or miss. If you start from the way the customer is thinking, it is more likely to land every time. Uh as always, please leave your follow-up questions below in the comment box. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

We'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.