6 Simple Collaborative Ideas to Get More Wellness Customers

So, you’re looking for some quick and easy collaborative ideas!

Fortunately for you, we’ve been witness to and taken part in lots of collaborations. So, we have a few ideas that we can share with you.

Collaborative working is just one of the many things small wellbeing businesses love to do to support one another, be of value and help to reach more customers.

Here at Wellbeing Umbrella, as a collaborative community, we can completely understand why. Not only does collaboration help you minimise cost and effort, but it can also quickly increase awareness around your fabulous brand. The more positive visibility your lovely business gets, naturally the more it grows.

Collaborative working is all about sharing each other’s audiences, expertise and/or resources with the aim to increase each other’s businesses for the better. Here are six simple collaborative ideas you can start doing today to help you achieve just that.

Our 6 Simple Collaborative Ideas . . .

1. Swapping Business Cards or Leaflets

Swapping business cards and leaflets with other businesses that complement yours are two fabulous collaborative ideas. Both can be easily distributed to each other’s customers at appointments, in orders or at wellness events you exhibit at.

Business cards and leaflets offer a great way to share your contact information with others. They not only offer new customers the ability to contact you via their preferred method, but also to discover in their own time what wellbeing support and services you can offer.

Simply ask other businesses if they’d liked to take part in your collaborative idea. Then swap your business cards or leaflets with each other and as agreed share them in sent orders or at wellness events you have a stand at, along with your own. Don’t have collaborative business contacts? Put a request out in our Wellbeing Business Network Facebook Group.

Collaborative Ideas Benefits

• Increase your visibility with little effort
• Target your ideal customers
• Boosts your chances of a customer reaching out to you when they need it most
• Reach people you may not have reached through other marketing channels
• Increase your brand awareness
• Be introduced to a warm audience (via a known source)
• Costs are minimal
• Take the opportunity to offer an enticing discount or promotion

2. Collaborative Product/Service Swap

This is exactly as it sounds; you swap a similar value product or service with another business in exchange for each other’s opinion and sharing with your own audiences. Each other’s views or promotion of a product or service can be shared via various methods including review, social media, blog, video, email and/or podcast.

Product/service swap sits nicely under the banner ‘influencer marketing’. Yet, it is accessible to small businesses who don’t quite have the big bucks’ brands like Adidas or Pepsi do to pay others to shout from the roof tops about them.

The Collaborative Benefits Waiting for You

• Develop a strong professional network
• Warmly introduced to a new audience
• Costs are minimal dependent upon what you’re sharing
• Minimal effort
• Potential back link to increase your website ranking (via blogs, social media etc)

3. Wellness Event Collaboration  

There are so many collaborative ideas at your disposal when it comes to an event. You could run a wellness event with others on a given topic and choose to share the overheads. Or you could team up with a relevant venue and ask them to waiver the hire in exchange for social media exposure. You could increase your collaborative network and audience reach by partnering up with other businesses and asking them to guest speak. This could work both at an online or in-person event. 

If it’s an in-person event why not offer stands and stalls to local relevant businesses, ideas could include therapy, food, or gift stalls! These other businesses will naturally provide you with extra media exposure and share with their audience.

Another really good idea we have enjoyed is collaborative goodie bags! These are gift bags given to event attendees packed with vouchers, gifts, tasters, and resources from businesses aligned with your own lovely brand. Not only are you offering added value to attendees, but it increases the chances of social media photos and sharing!

The Amazing Collaborative Event Benefits

• Share your expertise, people get a better feel of you
• Marketing costs are minimal due to sharing, bigger budget more reach
• Each business brings their own audience

4. Joint Giveaway

This is one of our favourite type of collaborations and each time we do it we grow our business network and strengthen partnerships. Giveaways offer you the ability to promote a product or service, whilst also increasing your brand awareness, growing your audience and/or gain new sales.

Giveaways can naturally be carried out on your own and the rewards are great. However, imagine the impact and rewards when you come together with other likeminded business folk, everything has the potential to increase tenfold, especially when social media is involved.

We have run many successful wellbeing hamper giveaways. This has involved other wellbeing businesses offering services and products for the hamper, making the giveaway enticing. Then together we all promote the hamper as a giveaway. The outcome being that a lot of businesses gained new custom.

Plus, most increased their social media following, which naturally in time leads to a sale. For us we increased our own email list each time by at least 1000 and boosted our social media following and engagement too.

Joint Giveaway Collaborative Ideas Benefits

• Costs very little
• Increase reach through use of each other’s audiences
• If you’re running the giveaway – you get the signups
• Opportunity to sell at same time
• Backlink

5. Run A Challenge Together

Personally, we love a good online challenge, don’t you? It helps motivate and engage people, plus entice new peeps to take part. We have taken part in many challenges ourselves, plus hosted a few of our own also (checkout our Build Your Wellness Referral Network In Just 4 Days challenge HERE). They were really good fun on both sides, but as a host we reaped many benefits, including growing our social media community, email list and gaining new custom.

Do you know what your audience are struggling with now? Such as difficulty getting to sleep or overwhelm at work. Why not joint host a challenge with other experts to help your audience achieve some small win to move them from where they currently are and further towards where they’d like to be.

You could run a 5-day challenge that provides live, video, audio or helpful resources from guest experts who complement your own brand. That way they’ll be more than just you who are promoting, meaning more exposure, double or more increase in signups, engagement, and potential customers.

Collaborative Ideas Benefits of a Joint Challenge

• Share your expertise
• Costs very little
• Increase reach through use of each other’s audiences
• Opportunity to sell

6. Sharing Helpful Resources with Other Local Business

This is an ultra-simple, effective collaborative idea that works like a referral (word of mouth) for all businesses involved. Basically, it works by having a network of business folk who can add value to each other’s businesses.

So, say you’re a Crystal Therapist who has a lot of clients coming for treatments who experience stress, anxiety or overwhelm it. It would be advantageous for you to team up with other local practitioners who also help on this topic to provide a wealth of helpful resources for each other’s customers. It makes perfect sense as you’ve all got a similar client pool, looking for ways to help them manage their current challenge.

You could create a FREE helpful guide together or provide each other with separate useful resources. If a Crystal Therapist, Yoga Teacher, Acupressurist or Mindfulness teacher collaborated, they could offer some of the following.

An audio of mindful meditation, a guide on ‘Crystals that help with overwhelm’, a leaflet on acupressure points to help reduce anxiety or a video on Yoga poses to help reduce stress. All these helpful free resources would naturally have contact information on helping the customer reach out for further support should the wish.

The great thing is a customer already knows you, so they will look on the resources and support from others more favourably. It’s the same for the customers of the other practitioners you are collaborating with! It’s a win-win for all.

Sharing Resources Collaborative Ideas Benefit

• Increase your reach with little effort
• Introduced to a warm audience via known source
• Added value for your customers
• Costs are minimal
• Can also offer discount or promotions within free resource e.g., first session half price!

Collaborative Ideas Take Home

Now we’ve shared our six simple collaborative ideas, what would you love to collaborate with others on?

We hope you’re keen to get started now! In the small wellbeing business sector, you’ll always find fellow business folk keen to collaborate.

Just make those connections, brainstorm some collaborative ideas, and see how you can help each other. If you’re unsure who best to collaborate with checkout our ‘Knowing Who to Collaborate With – 2 Simple Ways‘ blog to help.

Before we go, if you’re interested in our collaborative mission and would like to be kept up to date about collaborative ideas and opportunities, you can subscribe to our wellbeing business email list HERE.