You're an organization, a solo practitioner, or a business, and you need to hunt—in the business world, that means finding new followers or clients versus farming existing ones for growth. For the sake of this piece, we will use business. However, it could refer to any relationship where you grow your audience individually or collectively. 

You may be starting a new business, opening new geography, or expanding your existing customer list. There are times to hunt and times to farm.

If you go solo, the prize may be smaller, and each of us has a finite set of resources to close deals. However, working together with others --in this case, means more likelihood of deals being closed.

Working with others can help you reach new audiences and grow a more extensive customer base. Traditionally the growth is considered earned, owned, and paid. 

• Earned is an audience or customers that come from recommendations and third parties. It is word of mouth for the good things you have done and what people think of your brand. It is the highest compliment that can be paid to you, cannot be bought, and has the highest retention rate. The raving fanatics of Apple products are one of the better examples.
• Owned is content you create, control, and give away freely. Owned audiences (terrible term – let’s call them first-party audiences) have the second highest loyalty and retention. People follow your brand because they believe in the message or the content. However, there is a higher internal cost because you must keep your content evergreen. 
• Paid is the easiest, quickest, and likely the lowest retention. This is because you are investing hard dollars to do physical (e.g., billboards, flyers) or digital (e.g., banner ads, email) ads produced by a third party. Once you stop investing, the audience will only remember you if you have converted them into one of the other types.
• There is the opportunity to mix and match all of the above types. However, it would be best if you were visible to continue to retain your audience.

When you are responsible for the hunt, here are some tactical approaches

• Leveraging the power of the collective. 
• Companies generally create new products or services periodically. No one person can do everything. How can your colleagues help you? Are you aware of your whitespace? That is, where are your skill or experience gaps?
• Your audience is your best advocate, as discussed above. How can you enable them into raving fans who talk about you? Are you leveraging your social media connections?
• Leverage the connection between your or your client’s business partners. The most direct route isn’t always a straight line. Trust that you’ve built with others can be extended. Reciprocity is a thing, too; if assistance is offered to you, then offering it up is essential. 
• Do you need to create all the content? Successful curation of content gives you some credibility as a subject matter expert or someone who can bring great content creators together. Moderating panels is a different skill than being the one on the panel.
• The first and most obvious benefit of working in a group is the ability to brainstorm solutions. When working independently, it can be challenging to come up with ideas outside your perspective and experience. It also requires more work to critique your ideas constructively. However, there is strength in diversity (https://www.lawrenceilerner.com/gallery).