Hello, Southwest Florida entrepreneurs! It’s your friendly Bradenton web design guru, here to tell you about why community partnerships are so important—especially for local small business owners!
What Do We Mean When We Say, “Community Partnerships”?
Here we’re just talking about building relationships within the community with other businesses and organizations in the area. For Deckard and Company—and so many of our clients!—our goal is to build community partnerships with small, locally owned businesses, area nonprofits, and other grassroots organizations in Sarasota and Manatee counties, Florida.
“Partnerships” are just mutually beneficial—and often informal—business connections. We’re basically talking Bradenton B2B networking.
What Do Small-Business Community Partnerships Look Like?
Here’s a good place to talk about Deckard and Company’s most recent community partnership event: Small Business Week. From May 1-7, 2022, my company initiated a promotional event for all of our clients. While it was open to all Deckard and Company clients, no matter their location, a lot of our Sarasota-Bradenton clients took advantage—including Bellagena, Healthy Water Systems, and Couch Courses—which really localized the event in a great way.
What this meant was that we gave online “shoutouts” to these partner organizations in the form of social media posts, custom videos, and blogs. In return, they shared our posts on their own social media pages.
And together, we told our followers about Small Business Week, getting them excited to patronize local businesses throughout the Manatee County area and beyond. And all of those followers got to hear about some amazing locally owned businesses.
Win-win-win!
How Do I Generate Community Partnerships for My Company?
Basically, we’re always open to meeting new, Bradenton-area entrepreneurs, small business owners, union members, nonprofit organizers, industry experts, and just local industry experts in general. No matter the industry, working—and leading—in Sarasota-Manatee is a shared experience, and we can all learn from one another and promote each other’s work.
- As the owner of Deckard & Company, I reach out and communicate with leaders of other Sarasota-Bradenton businesses. I email, post about it on my social media accounts (including LinkedIn and Google My Business), and attend Sarasota and Bradenton small-business events.
- Together with my boutique marketing team, Deckard & Co. cross-promotes other Bradenton businesses on our social media accounts and our company website, https://deckardandcompany.com.
- In turn, our community partners promote our company on their channels, website, events, etc.
- Community partners can do business with one another, share southwest Florida entrepreneurial tips and trends, and plan events, whether online or in-person.
Yes, we’re a boutique web design and online marketing company in Bradenton, and we love to get tips from other folks in our industry. But the point of community partnerships is to “cross-pollenate”—to get a variety of different industries together to see how we can benefit one another, and what we can learn and do together.
After all, no matter what we do and no matter how good we are at it, we can never do everything for our clients—they’ll still need a whole world of services that our companies don’t offer. (And, honestly, we’ll all need a lot of those services, too. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be a client of my own clients.)
So why not generate partnerships with other local companies you can happily recommend?
And ultimately, the most amazing thing about small businesses is the community we’re a part of. We want to demonstrate that “locally owned” isn’t just lip-service.
We’re local, and we’re proud of being a part of Bradenton. We want to take advantage of that as much as we can. Won’t you join us?
