Hands up if you are guilty of planning your brand x brand collaborations last minute? 🙋♀️ Yep, I’ve been there too. Sometimes it’s not our fault, like when we get a last minute request from our manager to run a social media giveaway. But if we can avoid this, it’s better for everyone in the team and better for your brand.
Here’s 5 reasons why you need to be planning them in earlier (Hint: like when you plan in the rest of your marketing and budgets for the following year).
💻 Workload
Brand collaborations can often involve multiple teams and generally a bit of back and forth. There’s copy that needs signing off, new assets, maybe a discount code creation. And depending on how complex your brand collaboration can be, like a whole new co-branded product, this can involve almost everyone in the company who has their own busy schedule! Planning these marketing activities in advance can help teams to manage workloads and avoid everyone scrambling last minute to bring the collab together. A smooth execution gives you a much higher chance of a successful collaboration.
💰 Budget
Some collaborations can be extremely cost effective and only require 1 free product for a giveaway, for example. But some collaborations need budget to be taken into consideration and planned in. You may need to include ad spend, content creation or product samples for a gift with purchase. Don’t get caught short and upset the Finance team and don’t cut any corners. A marketing activity is only worth doing if it’s done properly.
📈 Demand plan
It’s never ideal if you do a last minute push on a product but then run out of stock because you DIDN’T PLAN IT IN! 🤦♀️ You’ll end up with confused and annoyed customers and it puts unnecessary and added stress on the Operations and Warehouse team. You also won’t know the full potential the collaboration could have delivered had it been planned in advance and written into the demand plan to ensure you had enough stock.
📣 Marketing campaign tie in
If there’s a marketing campaign you’ve been shouting about across all channels for the last month and suddenly you drop a social media giveaway with a brand that is completely unrelated to your campaign it can be confusing to your audience. When building a brand you want to be authentic, trustworthy and credible. This is why careful brand collaboration planning is so vital to your brand.
❤️ Perfect partner
Planning your collaborations in advance gives you plenty more time to find the right partner to do the collaboration with. And we all know the importance of that. Because you’re relying on that brand to represent you in the right way to their audience. And choosing the wrong brand to partner with can also confuse your audience. Something you want to avoid!
You don’t need to have everything organised and set in stone from day 1. But I recommend having the theme, collaboration idea and dates pre-agreed to set you up for success.
Hopefully this serves as a good reminder to plan your collaborations in as early as possible to ensure workloads are managed, budgets are assigned and your brand collaboration activity stands the highest chance of success!
