“A sticking point for a lot of small businesses is knowing the gold mine of value that they’re sitting on. You might think, I don’t have a big social media following and I don’t have a big budget, and so therefore I can’t do partnerships. And it’s like, no, you actually have so much, whether it’s your products or services or your time or your skill set. Your window display is actually a marketing channel, things like that. So that’s what I would start with – a framework for understanding what value you could bring to your product, services, time, skill set, any budget available, and your marketing channels.”

“If they want to secure big partnerships, small businesses have to understand how to communicate the value that they could bring. Because at the end of the day, if they’re speaking to a marketer, that marketer will understand the value of certain reach or certain asset creation. I love bullet points for that, because psychologically, we scan emails, we scan decks, and we pull out things that are quantified, bullet points of value. Rather than just saying, ‘I can get you in front of a community of people’, how many people are in your community? Where are they based? What is their prerogative and agenda, and how can you help them achieve that?”

“In every partnership I’ve ever secured, it’s pretty much started cold. One of my biggest pieces of advice here is: don’t just reach out when you want something. A pet peeve of mine is when an Instagram DM comes through from someone asking for something, and there’s no chat history. There’s nothing that came before that. Offer something of value, which could just be what I call a ‘positive recognition spark’ – dropping in and letting someone know that you genuinely love something that they’ve just done. There are no strings attached and you can just open up the conversation.”

“I find AI is good as a brainstormer, but it doesn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. I’d definitely use it for brainstorming campaign concepts and creative ideas, but where I think AI is falling flat at the moment is that it’s terrible at writing email pitches. It’s very self-focused and long-winded. AI is there to make you feel good and important, and that doesn’t translate into an effective pitch, in my experience. So I would say use it for idea generation. And something that’s becoming more and more accessible, that’s going to be so exciting, is image generation to visually show what a brand collaboration could look like.”

“Leverage is actually the key ingredient. So many brands get caught up in the pitch, or who it is that you’re partnering with, or pigeonholing, where it can only be this one brand that you really want to team up with, when actually the result that you want to get from that collab is accessible through multiple different partners within the same category or industry space. 

“Leverage is where the magic is with partnerships, and leverage is all about understanding every possible marketing channel or opportunity you have available to you, every marketing channel or opportunity that your partner has available to them, and actually coming up with a promotional plan that makes sure you’re shouting from the rooftops about what you’re working together. Because you could have the coolest partnership in the world, but if no one knows about it, what’s the point?”