38. Mastering Partnership Marketing with Laura Lopuch

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All right, I'm going to start this off by telling you a little story.

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When I started Tiny marketing, I was, I was working for The Man, obviously like all of us are, and I had started it as a side gig. It was something I was doing on the side. I was freelance writing, I was doing marketing consulting. It was a nice mix of market. Stuff that I was doing on the. Side while I was working as a marketing director. But I knew that eventually I wanted to own my own business. So I started thinking about how I can build out my personal brand and how I can start getting known for my thing, that one thing. And I started testing out what my thing could be on LinkedIn.

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I tried out different niches within marketing to talk about on LinkedIn and it turned out that my experience as a one person marketing department and stretching my resources and my time with my systems was the thing that really resonated with people. So that's how I was able to find my niche, my differentiator. But once I figured that out, I needed to get people to actually hear it.

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I needed to build my audience. And how I did that was through partnerships. So while I was still working for The Man, the way I was able to build my personal brand was through strategic partnerships. So I started reaching out to publications, to product companies, to other service providers, and I began getting interviews on podcasts to talk about my differentiator tiny marketing. And I started reaching out to publications and writing guest posts. And I would say my 1st $15,000 that I made as a freelancer was people just seeing my byline in publications and going to that link. And honestly, those blogs from five plus years ago that I wrote are still bringing me traffic and bringing me leads. Partnership marketing has such a profound impact on my business and it will on yours too. It continues to be a cornerstone of my marketing. But now I do it with podcasting, with live streaming, with partner webinars, and it makes all the difference in the world. It is a way of borrowing other people's audiences and basically hacking the system to be able to build your audience quickly. So over the next month, we're going to be talking about partner marketing.

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In the next two episodes, I'm going to be interviewing Laura Lopetch and we're going to be talking about one, an introduction to partnership marketing, what it is, how you can get started and different opportunities that you can use to be able to create partnership marketing. In episode two of this series, we're going to be talking about partner marketing pitching.

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So she's an expert at cold emailing and she's going to be giving you the lowdown on how exactly you can pitch your partnerships. And then we're going to cap off this series with a webinar.

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The webinar is called collaborate to Succeed exploring the Secrets of Successful partnership Marketing. And we're going to teach you how to pitch partnerships to grow your audience.

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00 A.m.. So be sure to sign up. The sign up will be in the show notes and let's get started. So let's get started and bring Laura on.

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Hello and welcome to Tiny Marketing. I'm Sarah Noel Block and I teach small marketing departments that are tired of feeling overwhelmed and underresourced how to build and manage effective and efficient marketing strategies that work for them. Get ready. It's time to dig in and get a big impact with your tiny team.

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Why don't you introduce yourself to the audience?

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Sure. Hi, I'm Laura Lopez. I'm a Cold email and pitch expert and I help small one person businesses write winning Cold emails, basically an email to a stranger to create a connection and a relationship that then leads to sales and clients. And I don't do PR pitching, but I do partnership pitching, which is something that me and Sarah are going to talk about a lot more today. So I'm excited you're here. Yes. We're spending like an entire month talking about partnership marketing, which my people have been like, please talk about it. Anytime I post anything about it, they're like, tell me more. By the way, anybody who is listening right now, you can also hear Laura on episode 23. It is actually my most listened to episode. It is the seven types of cold emails you should send with Laura. Yes. It's a great episode.

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Yeah. I learned so much from you.

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So let's talk about what partnership marketing is for anyone who might be unfamiliar with it. You give your definition and then I'll hop in with mine.

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I'm curious to hear yours. All right, so my definition is basically where two people kind of join forces and they are doing some sort of collaboration together. Sometimes you hear this kind of marketing referred to as a collaboration. It's either or partnership collaboration.

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I think that those two words are synonyms, so you can kind of use them interchangeably. But basically it's like, I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back. So what that can look like is I'll come on and do a webinar for your audience and talk about some sort of content that maybe your audience is interested in, but you don't actually talk about it. And come to think of it, a great example is that episode, I think you said it was 23. I came on your podcast, right? And we were talking about partnership. We were talking about Cold emails. And it's something that your people are very interested in because they're looking for ways on how they can maximize their investment on their time and get more bang for their time invested in a particular activity. And Cold emails can do that. You don't talk about Cold emails, but I do. So it was like this really cool win win situation where I get to talk to your people about a subject that I'm really interested in, and it benefits your people in a huge, huge way. So that's really the essence of a partnership, where it's like this cool relationship where it's mutually beneficial.

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Yeah. And a lot of times I end up becoming friends with these people that I'm partnering with, the people that end up on my podcast or we do webinars together.

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We always keep in touch. And when it comes up that someone needs a certain service that someone I know does, I'm like, I have the perfect person.

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And it's very circular relationship, but piggybacking on what you said. In our pre call, we talked a little bit about how I do inbound marketing. So it's all about building trust and authority within your niche.

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But that alone isn't the whole deal when it comes to sales. We were talking about this Venn diagram where content marketing and inbound works really great, but it works even better when you combine it with partnerships, which is more of an external type of marketing.

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And Cold outreach, that little center of that Venn diagram is the perfect place to be selling because you're hitting them in all different directions, borrowing other people's audiences, building your authority through your own content, and then the outreach aspect of it. It's like the Holy Trinity.

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I think you've got the name for the Venn diagram now, Dang. I did it. Yeah, exactly. And I like how you bring up the point of where you get to make friends in the process. And I've seen that play out for me in making partnerships. It's really a lot of fun, and sometimes it's a little bit lonely doing a one person business.

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Yeah, the laptop doesn't really give a lot of affection back, so it's really fun to get to meet people and get to engage with people and then maybe get to do repeat collaborations.

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Like, this is our second one, you and me, and it's so much fun to join back up and making friends along the way. It's awesome. Yeah, there's a catch up, and I've referred people to you so many times. Anytime anyone asks about Cold, email like Laura. Here's her information.

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Thank you. Follow her, subscribe to her newsletter. You'll learn so much. It's really a no brainer. So let's talk a little bit about how to identify the right partnerships before we go into the pitching. For myself, I have this rule of either a product company that serves the same audience as me or a service provider where we don't compete directly. Those are my main targets, although my direct competitors, like Michelle, is on an entire series for April. She's a direct competitor of mine. But we still refer business to each other all the time. I think it's valuable to have someone who's actually in your same space that you can refer like, overflow to or that kind of thing because sometimes you get that and it doesn't necessarily mean you're like stepping on someone's toes. It's just you don't have the space, so why not give and she has. Strengths that I don't and I have strengths that she doesn't. So sometimes it just makes sense. Like the content or clients is raising their hand about a certain thing and you're like, actually she's better than me.

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Athletes give it to her.

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Yeah, exactly. For me, on partnerships, I don't usually have hard and fast rules like you do. I kind of go where my curiosity blows me and then I'll start paying attention to that person and seeing if they have gaps in their world, specifically in their content, like maybe in their podcast or what they're talking about with in their emails and if I can fill that gap for them. And a lot of times because I'm in such a unique niche you are? Yeah. I talk about Cold emails in a very different way than everybody else does. A lot of times it's an easy shoe in because people are super interested in Cold emails, but the mass advice out there is so sleazy and generic.

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Generic. And you don't ever see behind the email to see did it actually work? What happened afterwards. People don't share that stuff, whereas I do. So if you can start to identify what do I talk about in a way that's different from everybody else, what are kind of my controversial viewpoints on specific things that maybe I don't even know they're controversial, but I bring them up and people are like, really think that that's a sign for you. So start paying attention to those kinds of things.

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They come up in, like client kickoff calls.

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Your client will say, really? I've never heard that before.

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Pay attention to those little signs because that's like an opportunity for you to start talking more about that topic because people are interested in it. And so that might be something for you to flesh out, maybe into a webinar, talk about a podcast episode, but that could be a really good way for you to talk more about the topic and then start to find partners where you can kind of shoe them in. And then for the more nitty gritty part, it's a lot of paying attention to the people doing cool things that I kind of want to hook up with and kind of be part of their world.

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So do you do mostly training or do you work with clients on Cold emails? I work with clients on Cold emails, yeah. So when you're looking at potential partnerships or helping them discover what partnerships would make sense, what would be your advice? Do you create a list ahead of time of the people that make sense? That's a good question. A lot of times my clients are coming to me because they want clients to come to them, but they're not really sure how to engineer that piece because I feel like the world is very focused, hyper focused on content marketing. But we're not really talking a lot about that other piece of the Venn diagram, like that outreach part, which works in conjunction right, with the content.

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Because as soon as you start outreaching you've probably seen this. As soon as you start pitching partnerships, suddenly more partnerships kind of come in. Your door at the same time 100%. It always happens that way. Yeah, it's super cool. Along that same vein, when you're getting pitched as someone from that perspective, the first thing I do is look you up and see what kind of stuff you're creating, who you're creating it for. So you mentioned a kind of content marketing and outreach work together. They really do, because you're building out. Your expertise and your authority in content marketing, and you need that in order for partners to be like, actually, that person would be really great for me. I want to collaborate with them. And a lot of times the collaboration is content marketing. It's webinars, it's podcast. Yes, I'm glad you brought that up because a lot of times we think of content marketing as like, posting all the time on LinkedIn or like Twitter or like writing blog posts.

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But the stuff that you create within the partnership is content itself. And if you do a bunch of partnerships, that content will populate your Google search results yes.

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Without you actually putting a lot of hours into creating that content. Because I don't know about you, but a lot of my partnerships, we kind of talk about the same stuff.

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So I can reuse pieces of webinars or the framework of a webinar and adapt it to a different audience so you're not having to recreate all your content all the time. You kind of have your golden favorites and your Billy Joel getting up on the stage and you're singing like Piano Man for the thousandth time. But it's really fun.

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The perfect visual for what it is. I have, like, a standard set of maybe five talks that I give all the time, and I'll customize it for the audience and sometimes I'll create custom ones if someone is, like, paying me to do that. Yes.

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But yeah, I have a set number of talks and I know exactly what I'm going to be talking about. Well, it works.

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And you can repurpose that to high heaven, too. Oh, yeah, there's so many different ways that's totally your arena.

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We could talk more about that. But yeah, there's so many different ways that you can chunk it up and then talk about different parts or expand on different parts, depending on the audience.

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Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me and Laura today. And don't forget, next time we're going to be talking about how to pitch these marketing partnerships. We're also going to be talking about the different types of partnerships that you can have. And Laura honestly brought some up that I hadn't thought about before that are really smart and don't take a lot of time. You know, I love when something doesn't take a lot of time, so be sure to join us for that one. And don't forget to sign up for that webinar where me and Laura are going to teach you how to pitch these marketing partnerships and you're going to get a little DIY bundle as a gift for showing up. That is on May

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00 a.m. Central Time, and you can go down to the show notes page and click to sign up for that. Now, for your Action steps today, what is the thing that I want you to do to be able to make this partner marketing a reality for you? Today, you are just going to do one simple thing. You're going to open up a spreadsheet and you are going to make a list of potential partners that you could partner with on your marketing. Now, these could be product companies that have the same audience as you as a service company, or it could be service companies that serve the same audience as you. We're open.

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I certainly have some partners that are. Technically competitors of mine, but we're constantly giving each other work because overflow happens. So today Action Step, open up a spreadsheet and make a list of partners. And then next time we're going to be putting together a pitch together. So be sure to join us next time. Thank you.

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Hello and welcome to Tiny Marketing. I'm Sarah Noel Block and I teach small marketing departments that are tired of feeling overwhelmed and underresourced how to build and manage effective and efficient marketing strategies that work for them. Get ready. It's time to dig in and get a big impact with your tiny team.