Curious about collaborations but don’t know where to start?

Collaboration marketing can be insanely powerful for building your audience, but you’ve got to get it right.

In this episode, I interview Jess Ruhfus, founder of Collabosaurus to step us through How to Use Collaboration Marketing to Grow. 

With a background in fashion publicity and marketing education, Jess was frustrated sourcing cool brand partnerships in events, products & social media. So, she launched Collabosaurus, a match-maker for brands in 2015, which has now attracted over 6500+ brands including Porsche, ASOS, Olay, Topshop & one of the largest global retailers in the U.S. 

Jess won the 2019 B&T 30 Under 30 award in Entrepreneurship, & has spoken for Apple, Vogue, General Assembly, ADMA & Microsoft.

Let’s dive in.

 

Here’s what we cover:

• The assets every brand has to start collaborating right now.
• The clever ways collaboration can grow your outreach and audience for a fraction of traditional marketing costs.
• Some killer examples of killer collaborations across food, hospitality, events and more.
• Jess’s 4 Ultimate Tips to ensure your collaboration is a success.

 

Links and resources:

• Check out Collabosaurus website 
• Follow Collabosaurus on Instagram
• Connect with Jess on LinkedIn here
• Ready to launch & leverage your own gig? Download my free guide to starting and scaling your business over at theownerscollective.com/startandscale

 

Enjoy this episode?

Be sure to be subscribed on Apple Podcasts or if you’re an Android user you can follow on Spotify. While you’re there, I’d LOVE you to drop me a rating and review, as is helps get this podcast into the ears of more fine folks like you.

 

Full Transcript

Pru Chapman:

Hey, Jess. And welcome to the show.

Jess Ruhfus:

Thank you so much for having me, how exciting.

Pru Chapman:

Such a treat to have you here. We always have good chats so I know that this is going to be no different. Now Jess, you are the founder of Collabosaurus a matchmaker for brands that delivers clever collaborations and partnerships. Now, I’m going to talk you up a little bit here because you have attracted-

Jess Ruhfus:

Go for it, be my guest.

Pru Chapman:

You have attracted over 6,500 brands and some pretty big guns there, Porsche, ASOS, [Ole 00:00:34] Top Shop and just sneakily, cheekily winning the 2019 B&T Under 30 Award in Entrepreneurship. Congratulations.

Jess Ruhfus:

Thanks very much.

Pru Chapman:

Yeah.

Jess Ruhfus:

That was fun.

Pru Chapman:

You are a big deal, Jess, but what most people don’t know is that in the very early years of Collabosaurus you and I actually sat side by side in a shared office studio in [crosstalk 00:00:59].

Jess Ruhfus:

We were desk buddies, I miss my desk buddy.

Pru Chapman:

We were desk buddies. Poking our heads over the screen saying hi to each other in those early online days, which let’s be honest, no one knew what they were doing in those early days.

Jess Ruhfus:

Oh no, we were all winging it, that’s the fun [inaudible 00:01:14].

Pru Chapman:

But what I did know is that you had the big vision, you were like, this Collabosaurus is the next Facebook. And it’s just so cool to see everything that you’ve built from there. So I’m really excited to talk to you. And of course, we’re going to be talking about collaborations. So can you just take us back a little bit and tell our listeners how you first became interested in brand collaborations?

Jess Ruhfus:

Sure. So I had a little think about this because I think it’s a snowball effect of a bunch of different things happening. I was pulling together collaborations as part of my job. I was working in fashion PR and then marketing education and I was doing collaborations a lot, but then going further back, I think I first got interested in collaborations because I went to a fashion show, my very first fashion show. And it was with Watson X Watson, beautiful fashion brand. And they had collaborated with a new venue in Sydney that was only really opening for dinner, but they’d open it up in the morning for this fashion show, with media bloggers and very key industry people. And they also collaborated with Vittoria Coffee. So when you arrived, you got a personalized Vittoria Coffee with your name on it, inside this beautiful new restaurant venue that they had just transformed into this runway.

Jess Ruhfus:

And I thought this is so clever and it’s just created such an incredible experience where these brands are working together to do something really awesome. And then I found myself scrolling a blog by Designlovefest who is a fantastic designer out of LA. And she collaborated every single month with new artists and graphic designers and illustrators to create Dress Your Tech, which were free downloadable desktop backgrounds, which I thought were just so clever and I would download them every month. I was such a nerd about this blog.

Jess Ruhfus:

So that coupled with working in PR and doing collaborations all the time and getting frustrated with how long they talk and all of that stuff I think is where my interest in collaborations were born.

Pru Chapman:

I love that. And because collaborations can be done really, really well, which I think you’ve totally led the way in demonstrating and showing us how they can work, but they can be done pretty terribly as well, can’t they?

Jess Ruhfus:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s easy to stuff them up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Pru Chapman:

Yes. Time and time again. And typically what I see is it’s in the clarity, I think, that people really fall down. So usually in some kind of collaboration, you’ve got one brand that’s really winning and one brand that is not really winning.

Jess Ruhfus:

Yeah. In an unsuccessful collaboration, that is always the way they can only be successful if they’re win-win exchanges of value. And I think it’s really important to differentiate between work for hire and that you’re just getting for free. And then a true collaboration, which is really about two or more businesses teaming up and working together on a creative marketing campaign that help each other grow. And there’s that win-win exchange of value. It can’t be win-lose otherwise it doesn’t work.

Pru Chapman:

I think that’s really important. And something else that you just touched on there is it’s not just getting something for free situation, which I think in the early days before we were so educated on collaborations by yourself, your good self, that’s what people were looking at collaborations as, as I want free things for my goodie bags. So [crosstalk 00:04:36] collaboration.

Jess Ruhfus:

Yeah. I hated that culture of free. And when I was working in fashion PR it was constantly like, oh, where can we get 500 units of free coconut water for these goodie bags? And it wasn’t leveraged it wasn’t done properly. And there was so much opportunity getting missed there because if you team up really creatively with that coconut water company, and you have lots of points of leverage and exposure and ways that you can really make that collaboration win-win, it’s an exchange of value that really is just tapping into currencies other than cash, which that’s where I believe collaborations can be so powerful. It’s leveraging what you already have available to you in business to create something really amazing and reach new customers.

Pru Chapman:

Yeah. That’s so on point. So on point, especially now, when I feel like cash is actually moving a lot differently through our economy with the whole COVID situation. There’s still plenty of cash out there, but it’s moving in different ways. And I think that actually this situation has been really powerful in us looking at, okay, what other assets do I have to leverage? I think that’s across business. So leveraging assets, absolutely. But also from where I come from, from a mentoring perspective, also looking at redefining what those metrics of success are as well. Sometimes it’s growing your revenue, but sometimes it’s investing into community, sometimes it’s supply a good health, all of these things. So I think now more than ever, collaborations will really be coming to the forefront as we move out of this COVID situation.

Jess Ruhfus:

Totally. It’s one of the most cost-effective strategies when it comes to marketing. We did a research study with Kymera Media and established that on average, collaboration marketing is up to 25 times cheaper than other digital advertising, which is crazy, it’s like small businesses, big businesses, everyone needs to be tapping into that because it doesn’t require big budgets or budgets at all. 90% of the collaborations that happen through the Collabosaurus platform don’t involve cash exchange whatsoever.

Jess Ruhfus:

So I think right now is such an incredible time to be looking at collaboration marketing as a strategy because everyone is tightening their purse strings, cash is tricky to come by. It’s not impossible, but it’s tricky. But brands still need to be marketing. They just need to be doing it in a smarter way. So, a strategy like this where you don’t necessarily have to spend any cash at all to achieve huge impact and engage audiences and grow your communities is amazing.

Pru Chapman:

Yeah. And I honestly think that a lot of businesses will come out of this stronger. I think some won’t survive, but the ones that are really open to doing things differently and trying out different things, they will come out stronger because they’re not so reliant on old strategies like those tried and tested strategies that always worked, but they’ve actually had to open up to new ways of doing things. And then when you can really charge forward with the new ways of doing things, then also bring back the old way of doing things. You’ve just got such a more robust marketing plan and or business model.

Jess Ruhfus:

And I just, I love looking at, there’s a really popular graphic going around on social media at the moment, which has all of those really strong companies that came out of the 2008 GFC. And it was just like, oh, that is awesome to look at because you can see how these companies have really created something of value at a time when people are really selective with where they’re putting their money and all of that stuff and time. So I think absolutely businesses are going to come out of this stronger. And I think new businesses are going to form as well off the back of all of this to meet new needs and add new types of value, I suppose. So it’d be super interesting to see what happens.

Pru Chapman:

Yeah, I totally agree. All right. Now, why don’t you give our listeners a bit of a lay of the land? What are great collaborations and really why should business owners be paying attention to them?

Jess Ruhfus:

So collaborations in my opinion, the word collaboration gets thrown around so much. And I think it’s important to mention that I’m not talking about influencer collaborations when, in this conversation, I think influencer collaborations are more of a paid ad strategy whereas collaborations in my view are really when businesses team up with other businesses and work together to create a really cool marketing campaign. That’s always a win-win exchange of value. So a great example, I love is the Airbnb and Barbie Malibu, Dreamhouse collaboration. I don’t know if you saw that one.

Pru Chapman:

I didn’t, tell us about it.

Jess Ruhfus:

Oh my gosh, so clever. They found this mansion in Malibu and they decked it out to look like Barbie’s Malibu Dreamhouse from the ’90s. And it was so, so clever because it sold out in terms of Airbnb bookings in the space of a couple of hours, I think it was just booked out for months and months in advance.

Jess Ruhfus:

And it was such a clever way to tap into that win-win exchange of value where Airbnb were aligning with a legacy brand that’s super nostalgic in Barbie and Barbie were aligning with a super modern brand to create a new experience. So I thought that was super clever and a really great example of an experiential collaboration marketing campaign.

Jess Ruhfus:

There’s also things like product collaborations. So Tim Tam and Gelato Messina are releasing a limited edition flavor range together is a classic example of a product collab that’s really awesome as well. Tim Tam were able to freshen up their marketing and align with a really cool brand in Gelato Messina that has a cult following of a younger generation. Whereas Gelato Messina were able to instantly access so many more people through getting into every major supermarket around Australia, which is huge. And they ran a massive bus billboard campaign and all that stuff as well, which just had an added bonus and impact and reach and all of that stuff too.

Jess Ruhfus:

So really collaborations are when two or more businesses team up and work together to do something really cool. And the reason businesses should be paying attention, there are so many reasons, I’m a little biased, but so many. One of the biggest ones I would say is that it just has such massive impact for such a small investment of time and cash. American Express came out with a business collaboration report in 2017 that established brand collaborations for midsize companies in Australia. It resulted in an average of $319,000 worth of savings or $430,000 in increased sales for businesses. And that’s per business, that’s ridiculous. It’s crazy. So when they’re done well, they have such a huge opportunity to move the needle in your business in terms of really saving and reaching huge audiences or increasing sales as well.

Pru Chapman:

That’s incredible. I had not heard those stats, so, wow, that’s definitely, I’m sure our listeners are sitting up and paying attention. So basically it’s both brands, at least two brands they’re bringing something to the table and they’re getting mutual benefits, but quite often those benefits are different. And I think those examples that you just highlighted then really bring that to the forefront. It’s like some, particularly the Barbie and Airbnb one, it’s this legacy brand, but then there’s also the new and cool brands. So they draw a little bit on each. So mutually beneficial, but quite often in different ways.

Jess Ruhfus:

And the cross promotion there is so valuable because their target markets are fairly similar when you really look at it. Everyone who grew up with Barbie is now renting Airbnbs and parents are also buying Barbie for their kids. So, that cross promotion into each other’s audiences across social media, across email, across media attention, it all makes so much sense and helps both brands really grow in that way too.

Pru Chapman:

Yeah. And I love also that you mentioned, we were talking about a little bit earlier here that now is the time to be trying this out. I think hearing some of those stats, getting really creative with it, it’s like when money is a little bit hard to find, or money’s moving differently somehow in the economy. This is the time to look at what assets you’ve got that you can leverage. Like you say, a little financial investment, but it can have massive, massive impacts.

Jess Ruhfus:

And often you have a lot more to offer than you realize. That’s a really common conversation I have with customers is that if you’re sitting there going, I don’t really know what I could bring to the table in a brand collaboration, or I don’t have a big creative idea. I would say the first thing to look at are your time, your skillset, your products and your services. Immediately, that is four things you could bring to the table in a collaboration. And then add in all of the channels you have available to you, whether that be on Instagram, through Facebook, through Facebook groups, through LinkedIn, through a podcast channel or your website, you have so much available to you that you can bring to the table in a collaboration and leverage as currencies other than cash to tap into new audiences and achieve something really cool.

Pru Chapman:

That’s incredible. I imagine that so many people are sitting there thinking that they don’t… Look, what could I use, what assets do I have? And you’ve just pretty much nailed about 10, right there for people to start with.

Jess Ruhfus:

There’s so many. On page three on Collabosaurus if you want to list your brand as an opportunity, it works like a dating site and it’s free to do, but on page three, we have a checklist of prompts of everything we thought of that you could possibly offer in a brand collaboration. If you were sitting there and you were like, I really want to identify what I have available to me, I would head to our website, go to page three and you can see the checklist of everything that we could put together that we think could be valuable in a brand collab, so that might be a good starting point.

Pru Chapman:

That’d be a great starting point. And do you think that that’s people’s biggest hurdle to brand collaborations is that they just, they don’t know what they have to offer or they lack“ ideas?

Jess Ruhfus:

I think it really depends on the brands. The most common hurdles we come across with clients is that they don’t know what they have to offer or they feel they need to have this big creative idea in place before they even pitch to collaborate with a brand, which is the traditional way of doing things. And one of the reasons why we started Collabosaurus is because it’s such a headache to do it traditionally, you have to find the decision maker, which takes a fair bit of research unless you have an existing network, trolling through LinkedIn and Instagram to find the person that may be in charge of making that decision around a brand collab. Then you have to reach out to them with a fully formed idea and the benefits to them and be quite good at pitching, to be honest, and build that relationship.

Jess Ruhfus:

And then you can negotiate and all of that stuff from there, if you can get through the door, whereas with Collabosaurus we flip it a little bit. You don’t have to have a big creative idea in mind. We would suggest find the right partner first because the idea in terms of what you would do from a collaboration perspective with a food brand is going to be completely different to what you would do with a beauty brand. So we would say, find the right partner first and look at things like your target market is super important. So you want to be… If your target market of potential customers are females between 25 and 35 in Sydney who are really interested in, I don’t know, events and beauty, you want to be targeting a collaboration with a brand that also has a very similar target market demographic, because that way any cross promotion you do is going to be super, super valuable. So that’d be the first thing I look at.

Jess Ruhfus:

And then the second thing I’d look at is tie it back to a marketing goal. I think collaboration for collaboration’s sake is a really common mistake we see happening particularly with smaller businesses you go, oh, that social media competition collab went really well. So we’ll do that again. And we’ll do that again. And it’s like not really structured from a marketing strategy standpoint. So I would say, start with target market and start with your marketing goals. So if you really want to grow your email list, collaborate with a brand that has a similar goal in mind or is able to help you do that through a collaboration. And then the creative idea can come from there in conversations around what you’re both looking for, what your target markets are looking for, and you can create something really valuable that meets both of your needs and it’s mutually beneficial.

Pru Chapman:

Absolutely. And also because when you do find the right partner, then quite often ideas will naturally bounce between you as well. Something that you hadn’t thought of or they hadn’t thought of, it’s a collaboration of the minds just to start it off.

Jess Ruhfus:

Exactly. And also it’s another reason, it’s a way you can tap into the Collabosaurus team as well. We often have brands who have been matched, they’ve connected, they’ve started kicking off a conversation and they’re like, well, we have a couple of ideas, but we want to bounce them off with other people. That’s where we would step in and have a three, four way conversation on Zoom, for example, and just chat about ideas, because that’s what we do all day, every day to come up with collaboration.

Pru Chapman:

All day, every day. It’s a fun job.

Jess Ruhfus:

Absolutely. And you’ve touched some incredible brands. Well, for our listeners, what I would love to dive into now, Jess, is your top tips on how to use collaboration marketing to grow. So I feel we’ve already covered actually a whole bunch of them, if everyone’s living carefully, but if you’d like to bullet point them out for us, how do you, starting with the target market, surely?

Jess Ruhfus:

Yes. Target marketing goals are really, really important. So find the right partner would be tip one and make sure that you’re collaborating with someone that has similar target market demographics, similar goals, or can help you achieve the goal that you have in mind. The second one would be treat it as a marketing strategy. So don’t collaborate for collaboration’s sake. Make sure that you’re tying it back to a particular marketing goal, whether that be to boost media buzz, to generate a new revenue stream, to grow your social media community, have a goal in mind before you do anything else because you need to be able to track against it, just like you would any marketing strategy. I think that’s really important as well.

Jess Ruhfus:

And number three would be to leverage your collaboration. So because it’s a marketing strategy, you could have the coolest collaboration in the world, but if no one knows about it, there really isn’t a point. So great collaborations come down to clever leverage. And that is all about really identifying what marketing opportunities and channels you have available to both you and your collaborator and building a bit of a plan around who’s posting what, when? Where are we getting the most possible reach for this campaign? And getting everyone to talk about it as much as possible to get the best results.

Jess Ruhfus:

And the last but not least tip would be collaborate often and switch up the type. So that American Express report that I referenced before, I’m happy to send that report to anyone who wants to geek out with me on brand collaborations. They established that the optimal number of collaborations that a mid sized company in Australia should be exploring each year for the best possible financial results was five or more times. So we often recommend collaborate six times a year, collaborate once every two months.

Jess Ruhfus:

But the trick with that is to make sure that you’re switching up the type of collaboration that you do, because if you do an event collaboration every two months with a new event collaborator, it’s going to exhaust your audience. You want to be looking at doing things like a product collaboration. And then a few months later, you can look at doing an online virtual event collaboration, for example, then you could look at doing a competition or giveaway, for example. There’s so many different things you can do. We’ve got a bunch of ideas on the website, but I would say switch it up so that your audience don’t get exhausted. And switch up the type of the collaboration partners themselves that you collaborate with because every time you team up with a new brand, you’re accessing a huge range of channels and new potential customers that you’re getting in front of every single time you collaborate with someone new.

Pru Chapman:

Four hot tips there. They are fantastic. And I honestly I’m madly scribbling notes because I think they’re wonderful tips, but then the nuances within each of them I think are so important. So number one, finding the right partner and looking at having strategic goals and aligned goals. Number two, treat it as a marketing campaign. Number three, leverage the collaboration, tell people about it. And then number four, collaborate often and mix it up. Now I’m going to loop back just for a second to number two here, one thing that you said in there was, “Don’t collaborate for the sake of collaborating.” And this is a message that is coming across loud and clear in business right now. It’s stop doing things for the sake of doing things, make sure that you have a goal for what you’re doing. Call it a goal call it a milestone call it a purpose, I don’t really care.

Pru Chapman:

But make sure, I think we need to be simplifying our businesses. And I think during this COVID time, a lot of people are taking the time to do that is to simplify their marketing channels, to simplify their business development, to simplify all of the streams, just to make sure that you’re not doing all the things for the sake of doing all the things, which just makes you dizzy really it’s like collaborate with a purpose to achieve a goal that is going to either grow or better your business somehow. So I think that’s the really, really important one.

Pru Chapman:

And then just to come down to number four, where you said collaborate, often and mix it up. I love there as well that you’ve given that loose suggestion of collaborate once every two months, because I feel sometimes people can get overwhelmed by how much they should be collaborating. And then when they get so overwhelmed they get that deer in the headlights situation, they don’t collaborate at all.

Jess Ruhfus:

Yeah, I think as well, there’s a common misconception that every collaboration has to be this huge partnership, it doesn’t, it’s not every collaboration has to be with a huge brand or this huge release or a product. It can be in smaller scale collaborations as well. Some of the most successful collaborations I’ve seen in terms of impacts they’ve had and results they’ve had have been the smaller ones to be honest. So, I love the example between Little Gift Loft and Sofitel. That was a small business and a big business teaming up in Brisbane. They ran a Valentine’s Day, social media competition or giveaway. And they were able to mutually spike so much engagement and reach for each other. Little Gift Loft, they grew their social by 1,000 engaged people and their email list as well. And the reach and the alignment power was just massive off the back of that tiny little giveaway campaign. That was just social media focused. It didn’t go beyond that. And it took about 10 minutes to pull together. Whereas Sofitel we’re really able to spike engagement around their page. They were able to tap into a bit of new reach as well and offer something of value to their community, which I think is really important.

Jess Ruhfus:

So don’t get overwhelmed by the idea that you have to do this big partnership with Apple every two months. Look at mixing it up and maybe aim for one big, big collaboration every year. And then the rest can be scattered, lots of different little collaborations. Pru and I collaborated when we were both starting our businesses. I remember pitching a webinar I did. I don’t know if you remember that [crosstalk 00:24:06].

Pru Chapman:

I do, and we did it. It was great.

Jess Ruhfus:

I know we did it. But that wasn’t some massive collaboration launch that was us running a webinar together and bit by bit we were each able to help each other grow.

Pru Chapman:

Yes. I love that. That’s such an important point. And just to start somewhere as well, I think coming back, I remember when you and I were having that conversation, I was standing at the side of my house and I was like, “Yeah, okay, let’s do it a webinar.” And, for us, we were new brands back then. It was a step that felt like we could take, it was an achievable step is what I want to say. And it was really mutually beneficial because we both had audiences, small audiences at that stage, but we were able to collaborate on those audiences. There was the brand alignment between us as well. There was some really lovely things that come out of that. And I’m sure that there’s people listening to this that were probably on that webinar.

Jess Ruhfus:

I wonder, please shout, let us know if you’re happy.

Pru Chapman:

Let us know. We were probably stumbling over our words at the time with terrible graphics, but hey [crosstalk 00:25:07].

Jess Ruhfus:

I know I [crosstalk 00:25:08]. I’m just thinking about how because [inaudible 00:25:10] wasn’t around I would have pulled together all of the slides on a PowerPoint or something like that. Aerial font.

Pru Chapman:

Jess, I still do that. Don’t give it away. [Crosstalk 00:25:27] effective. Oh, they are brilliant, brilliant tips, Jess. And I just hope that everyone listening does have collaborations on their mind. In this time that we’re in now start thinking differently about your business. I think it can be we can get in a habit as business owners of putting more money towards things because that seems the easiest quickest solution. And it’s not always the smartest or the best solution for your business. I think when you can really look at the non-monetary ways to grow your business, not only does it, it’ll grow your bottom line, but it also grows your community. It also grows your brand equity. It grows all these other more intangible assets that actually come together to build a really sustainable business.

Jess Ruhfus:

Absolutely. And a fantastic byproduct of brand collaborations are the friendships and the networks that you can grow by collaborating with like-minded business owners in complimentary industry spaces. Some of my best business friends started out as collaborations and then we’ve kept in touch and we’ve collaborated again and again throughout the five plus years I’ve been running Collabosaurus, which has just been so fantastic.

Jess Ruhfus:

So there are immeasurables attached to brand collaborations, I think as well. While it’s a really powerful marketing strategy that you can track a lot of ROI against, there’s a lot around that credibility pace, the alignment pace and the relationships that you can build off the back of them that are really hard to measure, but they’re invaluable in business.

Pru Chapman:

I absolutely agree. Awesome, Jess. Well please, how can people connect?

Jess Ruhfus:

Many ways we’re all over the internet.

Pru Chapman:

All over.

Jess Ruhfus:

Instagram is a fabulous place. We also have a podcast. If you’re tuning into a podcast right now in one two and you’ve binged all of Pru’s podcasts.

Pru Chapman:

[crosstalk 00:27:16] so far.

Jess Ruhfus:

Exactly, exactly. You can head over to Stop, Collaborate & Listen, that’s our podcast channel or This Is How We Do It, so we’ve got an interview based one and a short, quick tip based one. And yeah, collabosaurus.com. If you want to get started, it’s free.

Pru Chapman:

Awesome head over there people. And even just to get your eyes across some of those great stats that Jess just mentions plus to get some creative ideas. Like Jess said, it’s free to get started. So I think it’s just open your mind to doing things differently. This is definitely the time to do it. Jess, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jess Ruhfus:

Thank you so much for having me.