Partnering with other businesses in your area is a great strategy to be involved in your local community and a great way to cross promote your brands with each other. One of the most difficult aspects of this is actually figuring out how to do this and what makes sense to do. Plus approaching random and people and businesses is always a major fear of people.

It doesn’t have to be scary when you think about the fact that you are not only promoting yourself, but you are promoting another business and helping them build their customer base, which is a win for everyone!

To start I would look at all the businesses in a 2-3 mile area where you are located. In that area you probably know a few of them and if you do, be sure to get in contact with them and talk about what you can do to help each other out.

If there’s a local coffee shop maybe you take some flyers for coffee, offer to buy their coffee and sell it in your facility and in exchange you get to put your information in their shop for their customers to see.

One thing that works well is to work something out so that your clients get some sort of deal on coffee and they give their clients or everyone who purchases from them a free consultation from you for a period of a week or two. Try to schedule something like this 3 times a year or so from various businesses.

Another strategy is to build up a content based relationship with other businesses. For example, we work with a lot of healthcare providers who can be an amazing resource for producing partnered content for our gym and it’s fairly easy to produce.

What you do with this strategy is get with your Chiro, Physical Therapist, Massage Therapist and create videos with them showing some techniques to alleviate low back pain, what a Chiropractic treatment actually looks like or even some stretches and exercises to get rid of shoulder pain.

The key behind this content strategy is that you are providing valuable information to people that you can put on your networks and that the healthcare providers can share in their networks and when they share to their networks you get exposure and credibility in their networks. It also gives you some amazing content to push to your network and new networks (hint lookalike audiences!).

Lastly start up a facebook live series and do it in a different business every week. The businesses that are interested in doing this with you will promote it in their networks and you can promote your live broadcast and their businesses to yours. Bam...another mutually beneficial relationship!

Partnering with other local businesses does not have to only be about working out financial agreements. It can and should be about working together to develop a mutually beneficial relationship that everyone is happy about and wants to continue promoting in the long run.

This is also a great way to establish yourself as a community leader in your area and to continue to grow your following to a local celebrity level!