K atie c ouric

partnership with their users.
Strategic alliances work. They’re what got me Taylor Swift and Rihanna
as clients. I partnered with MTV on a platform I’d built and then MTV
introduced me to Taylor Swift and other big celebrities. As long as you
capitalize on your unique offerings, you’ll be amazed by the access you can
have to the right people who will help you grow.
Gifting
Gifting is another strategy many brands use to build partnerships (especially
out here in Hollywood). Brands pay to get into gifting suites, which allow
them to get their product in the hands of celebrities. You have to give your
product to the celebrities for free, but you can get pictures of them using or
holding it, which exposes your product to a larger audience and gives the
product more credibility in the eyes of fans.

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Writing Featured Articles
You don’t have to be an app inventor or techie or even be selling products
to make strategic partnerships work for you. You just need to figure out
who needs your skills.
Perhaps you’re a fashion blogger or a fashion designer. In this case, you
could do a featured article for another, slightly bigger (or huge) fashion
blog. Just make sure you find someone with an audience that matches your
target. You can offer to write a free article every week for a month as long
as your target uses your name and links back to your website. This will
expose your brand, platform, or products to other people.
Identify and Provide Value to People with Traffic
When I worked for film production and finance company Lakeshore
Entertainment, I wanted to form partnerships with movie bloggers. At the
time, most film bloggers weren’t taken seriously, except for Harry Knowles,
who founded and ran Ain’t It Cool News. He was the only person that
people in the movie industry wanted to work with, but they still didn’t
really treat him with respect. They just expected him to put their content on
his blog.
To change this dynamic and create better alliances with movie bloggers,
our team started hosting private parties where movie talent, like actors and
directors, would come and hang out with bloggers. We treated the bloggers
like rock stars and friends. We made them feel included in the process.
Additionally, we gave them exclusive content. For example, when working
with actor Jason Statham on the 2006 movie 
Crank
, we recorded custom
video introductions for the top movie bloggers for the release of the movie.
We used these tactics because we knew that the movie bloggers had big
audiences and the studio I was working for was dealing with smaller
marketing budgets, of around $15 to $30 million per movie. It may sound
like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the $50 to $100 million marketing
budgets of big studio releases. Our team had to find intelligent ways to
stand out and market our films. By creating partnerships with the movie

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bloggers, we established relationships that got more people to pay attention
to our content.
Now I am not saying you have to go out and throw big crazy parties.
You just need to identify who is influential and who has a large audience in
your industry and then show them as much genuine attention as possible.