If you run a business, you know that an excellent product or service won’t sell if the marketing campaign for it is ineffective. Effective marketing is the pipeline that helps you reach your audience – those willing and able to buy your products or services. Effective marketing generates sales and helps you build a community of fans around your brand.
This guide will cover everything you ought to know about co-marketing. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a clear definition of co-marketing and understand how to run co-marketing campaigns that help you secure leads, generate more revenue for your business, and build your brand. With that in mind, let’s jump right into this guide.
What is Co-Marketing?
Co-marketing is when two or more companies collaborate to create content, usually across multiple channels, or run a marketing campaign. Companies will work together to devise a campaign and create the relevant marketing material. Through collaboration, the companies involved in a co-marketing campaign hope to reach a larger audience than they could independently.
This principle is sometimes referred to as an “affinity partnership”. One example of a co-marketing campaign is the collaboration between Uber and Spotify in 2014. Spotify Premium users created special playlists for their commute, which would play automatically as soon as their Uber trip starts. Uber users were able to control their music right from the Uber app without having to open Spotify.
Co-marketing differs from co-branding in that the latter involves the participating brands putting their creative energies behind a completely new product. The former is a collaborative effort between two distinct brands promoting different products.
In the example above, neither Uber nor Spotify had to create an entirely new product. All they had to do was accommodate each other’s existing products in such a way that would be attractive to both of their respective customers.
What Are the Benefits of Co-Marketing?
Co-marketing has become one of the most effective promotional channels today, especially for e-commerce brands. It has allowed brands to promote their products to new, different markets and expand their reach.
Here are a few reasons brands engage in co-marketing campaigns:
- Creating customer delight through co-branded promotions and giveaways
- Fostering and establishing the relationships between crowd-favorite brands, as each develops goodwill across a new audience
- Reaping the financial rewards of a newfound set of potential customers
- Saving costs by pulling the respective resources of all parties involved
- Helping build brand awareness online in new, untapped markets
Co-marketing is about sharing audiences and resources to create campaigns that none of the involved brands could execute alone. Whether you’re looking to increase your brand’s popularity on social media, grow your blog following, or just attract a larger audience, co-marketing can help tremendously.
Identifying the Right Partner
The most crucial aspect of executing a co-marketing campaign to perfection is finding the right partner brands. Several factors come into play in deciding whether another brand would be a good fit for the promotion you’re trying to run.
At the risk of sounding like a scene from one of the mafia movies, you must always have a firm idea of what all parties stand to gain from the partnership. Ideally, a co-marketing campaign should benefit you, your partner brand, and the end customer.
Any co-marketing pitch should highlight what both parties can get from it; otherwise it would be a tough sell. You must show the proposed partner that they will reap just as many rewards as you do – and make sure that statement rings true in reality.
This give-and-take might include:
- Sharing email subscriber lists and qualified leads generated by previous campaigns
- Benefitting from the other brand’s reputation
- Reciprocating guest appearances/content in social media platforms, blogs, and YouTube channels
- Showcasing partner brands across audiences
One recent example of a highly successful co-marketing campaign is the McDonald’s BTS Meal, a collaboration between one of the world’s largest fast-food brands and arguably the biggest boy group in history.
At face value, the BTS Meal is little more than McNuggets, fries, and Coke. However, the collectible packaging features the group’s signature purple color and logo, and it comes with not one but two special sauces inspired by the band. The sweet chili and cajun sauce have been popular in Korea for some years now and are reportedly the group’s favorite.
While McDonald’s and BTS each have their fanbases, the BTS Meal has caused the sales of McNuggets to jump 250% in Korea and 1000% in other markets. The packaging has seen wide circulation in online marketplaces, with some complete sets selling for roughly $100 each.
What can you learn from the BTS Meal? First, you need to choose partners who are already familiar with your brand, so it’s easier for them to fit your products into your narrative. Second, your partners’ products should be good. I never thought I’d like the Cajun sauce, but I’ve got to hand it to the band for bringing the sauce to my location.
Here’s a word of caution, though: If you’re looking to partner with another brand just because they’ve been trending lately, you’re not doing it right. Trendjacking can expose you to new audiences quickly, but the gains are rarely sustainable. Instead, look for partners that have a consistent social media and online presence to ensure that the effects of your co-marketing last longer.
How Can You Ensure a Smooth Campaign?
Ensuring a smooth co-marketing campaign usually involves you carrying out proper research on prospective partners to find out if their brand persona and product/service offerings fit in perfectly with yours. Whenever possible, try to rely on existing partnerships – provided that your values still align and your previous experience with them is positive. If the partner brand meets both criteria, you can work together on a new campaign.
Otherwise, there are hundreds to thousands of open co-marketing opportunities available to you at any given time. However, making those opportunities happen boils down to good old networking. Always be on the lookout for the following tips when searching for partner brands:
- Ideally, they must not be a competitor.
- Their brand persona and audience perception should match yours in some way.
- They should have a considerable audience on social media, email lists, or other channels that can support automated campaigns at scale.
- They are a company that is similar in size to yours. This ensures that there are no uneven expectations where one partner imposes their size on the other.
Running a co-marketing campaign requires that all the brands involved know what they’re getting into, agree on a common approach, and have a common set of expectations. If you feel that your co-marketing campaign doesn’t fit one or more of the three requirements, it might be wise to reconsider the partnership. Otherwise, you may start engaging the other brand and the audience you gain from the collaboration.
In Conclusion
Partnerships of all kinds are being struck every day in the corporate world. Co-marketing campaigns are one such partnership. Co-marketing allows brands to combine their resources to produce marketing clout that they otherwise cannot afford independently. A co-marketing campaign also helps you win over new audiences, whether you do it through products or just a simple sharing of contact lists.
To ensure the effectiveness of your co-marketing campaigns, you need to choose collaborating brands that have a good social media following, a similar company or audience size, and similar values.
Collaborating with the right partner brand will expand your horizons and allow your message to reach markets that you’ve been unable to reach before.
Co-Marketing: A Powerful Strategy for Business Growth
Co-Marketing: A Powerful Strategy for Business Growth
Co-marketing, partnership marketing, or alliance marketing is an innovative approach for dramatically increasing the reach, exposure, and resources available to participating businesses. It can open doors to new markets, save money, and allow companies to accomplish significantly more by working with aligned partners. Simply put, co-marketing involves two or more organisations collaborating to promote their products, services, events, or other initiatives to mutual benefit.
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Core Concept and Key Characteristics
At its heart, co-marketing enables sharing of customers, audiences, and marketing platforms between brands to boost results. Rather than competing for the same customers, co-marketers strategise to reach more prospects by combining their marketing assets and connections.
Key characteristics of an effective co-marketing partnership include:
- Shared Goals and Compatible Offerings: Partners should have complementary products, services, or missions that make sense to cross-promote. This creates real value for shared audiences.
- Joint Investment: There is an investment and commitment from both sides, whether financial, through staff resources, access to audiences and platforms, or a combination. This ensures mutual benefit.
- Coordinated Marketing Activities: Strategic coordination of messaging, campaigns, and platforms to minimise duplication and maximise exposure.
- Ongoing Measurement: Tracking reach, engagement, conversions, and other metrics to optimise efforts and demonstrate return on investment. This keeps the partnership accountable.
When executed thoughtfully with the right partner, co-marketing delivers exponential growth that is not achievable alone. Audiences receive more relevant offerings while partners split costs and effort. It’s a win-win.
Types of Co-Marketing Partnerships
Co-marketing comes in many shapes and sizes depending on the partners’ specific objectives, strengths, and audiences. Common types of partnerships include:
Brand-Centric Co-Marketing Alliances
- Cross-Promotional Partnerships: Joint promotions across owned marketing channels like social media, email lists, blogs, websites, and more. Popular for awareness building.
- Localised Partnerships: Teaming with local or regional brands for in-person events, local SEO, community giving, and hyper-targeted digital campaigns.
- Value-Add Partnerships: Collaborating with non-competing companies to provide bundled or complementary offerings that provide more value. For example, a software company is bundling consulting services.
- Loyalty Partnerships: Combining loyalty programs to increase appeal. Hospitality, airline, and financial brands often employ this style of co-marketing.
- Influencer Marketing Partnerships: Engaging influencers or brand ambassadors that appeal to both brand audiences and have existing authority with those groups. This taps into the power of earned media.
Mission-Focused Cause Marketing Partnerships
- Nonprofit Co-Marketing: Supporting charities, social causes, or other mission-aligned nonprofits expands community impact and brand purpose. Consumers increasingly support purpose-driven companies.
- Event or Experience Co-Marketing: Sponsoring or hosting experiences related to a cause mobilises audiences while showing commitment beyond dollars. For example, an eco-friendly fashion brand is co-marketing an Earth Day festival.
- Point-of-Sale Campaigns: Brands can partner with retailers or merchants on point-of-sale donations at checkout. This makes community support easy and accessible for customers. Popular examples include rounding up purchases or add-on donations.
- Employee Engagement Partnerships: Businesses increase stakeholder and brand alignment by giving back alongside employees. Examples are volunteer events, internal fundraising campaigns, skills-based volunteering matching professional expertise with causes, and more.
Stages of the Co-Marketing Process
Bringing a strategic co-marketing alliance to life involves careful planning and phased execution across four key stages:
1. Partnership Development
This step focuses on researching, identifying, vetting, and initiating contact with potential co-marketing partners. Key actions include:
- Conducting an audit of customer and prospect personas and buying journeys to identify logical partnership opportunities that offer mutual benefit
- Researching brands with complementary offerings that serve the same audiences but have little direct competition
- Assessing mission match beyond products and services for value-aligned pairing
- Prioritising best-fit partners and making initial contact to gauge fit and interest in collaborating
Vetting is critical to determining expected ROI potential, shared values, and the likelihood of developing the operational coordination required in later stages.
2. Planning and Scoping
Once mutually committed partners are secured, it is time to align expectations, ink contracts if needed, map assets, identify opportunities, and set goals. Key actions include:
- Conducting stakeholder alignment meetings to ensure all team members understand the objectives
- Defining each partner’s contributions and responsibilities in detail
- Completing any formal agreements required by legal teams
- Auditing owned, earned and paid media assets and channels available from each partner
- Brainstorming and prioritising campaign ideas with the highest ROI based on public platforms, budgets, and timing
- Developing documented co-marketing plans and timelines
Locking down details and documentation early prevents mismatched expectations down the road. This also protects brands legally and financially while setting clear ground rules.
3. Execution and Optimisation
With a documented strategy in place, marketers move to activation. This exciting stage puts plans into motion. Key actions include:
- Launching collaborative campaigns across respective marketing channels
- Ongoing monitoring of performance metrics and customer feedback
- Regular check-ins to discuss what’s working, identify potential improvements, and brainstorm new ideas
- Adapting efforts based on data and learnings to optimise impact
- Adding new opportunities, expanding reach, or testing additional platforms
Remaining agile to double down on what performs allows for growth over the campaign lifecycle. Having a culture of testing here separates good from great.
4. Reporting and Future Planning
The final step focuses on measuring results, demonstrating ROI across teams, celebrating wins, and planning the next steps. Key actions include:
- Compiling campaign recaps and post-event summaries
- Creating quantitative performance reports and qualitative recap decks
- Calculating marketing ROI across both brands to showcase business impact
- Planning sessions to identify future co-marketing opportunities
- Implementing continuous improvement feedback loops
Reporting out is essential to selling success internally and planning the evolution of partnerships. Savvy marketers leave time for this.
Benefits of Co-Marketing Strategies
There are incredible advantages to collaborating rather than competing alone. Standard perks realised from strong co-marketing alliances include:
Expanded Brand Exposure and Awareness
Partners double, triple, or increase reach exponentially by promoting content, messaging, and events across their combined owned channels. This rapidly accelerates growth.
Lowered Marketing Costs
Instead of overlapping budget and resource allocation, shared costs significantly reduce expenses while allowing more activity. Invest once, promote twice.
Increased Trust and Authority
Earned media exposure and recommendations between brand partners tap into established trust and authority with each base. Audiences depend on trusted brands.
Unlocked New Geographies and Customer Segments
Partners strong in specific regions or demographics provide new direct access to those buyer groups for expansion opportunities.
Enriched Customer Experiences
Strategic integrations and valuable combined offerings create better experiences, loyalty, and satisfaction through diverse solutions.
Advanced Innovation Capabilities
The exchange of ideas between organisations builds better solutions faster through collaborative knowledge sharing. Two heads are better than one.
The list goes on. Ultimately, co-marketing moves the needle across critical growth factors like awareness, consideration, trust, trial, lifetime value, and more to accelerate business development.
Keys for Co-Marketing Success
Like any business initiative, there are best practices that enable smooth execution and strong results when embarking on co-marketing. Core tips for nailing partnership marketing include:
- Start Slow, But Think Big Picture: Pilot a small controlled initiative while planning to build upon success over time. Think long-term.
- Prioritise Complementary Partners: Join products and services should complete one another, not directly compete at any level. Shared audiences are essential.
- Ensure Executive Commitment: Partnership promotion from the top down builds internal momentum, alignment, and resource allocation.
- Over-Communicate Expectations: Eliminate grey areas on objectives, responsibilities, timelines, and metrics early with clearly defined management plans.
- Formalise With an Agreement: Protect IP and regulated assets while outlining mutual benefit. Let legal teams ensure proper structure.
- Share Customer Insights: Aggregate data for a complete view of total addressable market size and buying triggers.
- Have an Exit Strategy: Be prepared to evolve, pause, or end collaborations that don’t yield expected performance. Stay data-driven.
Measuring the Impact of Co-Marketing
A final critical capability required for productive co-marketing alliances is robust measurement. Tracking performance optimises and enables data-driven decisions on continuing or ending partnerships and promotional investments.
Relevant metrics vary based on the types of campaigns and objectives involved but should include both quantitative and qualitative dimensions across four key areas:
1. Reach and Exposure Tracking
- Total impressions
- Brand lift surveys (unaided/aided awareness)
- Web traffic growth
- Increases in followers/fans on owned channels
- Earned media and publicity metrics
2. Engagement Analytics
- Click-through rates (CTRs)
- Time-on-site/page depth
- Content downloads and conversions
- Email open and click rates
- Social engagement rates
3. Business Impact KPIs
- Joint partner lead generation and hand-offs
- Channel-specific conversion rates
- Revenue and profit impact
- Customer lifetime value changes
- Service or product uptake
4. Experience Assessment
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
- Customer feedback analytics
- Review volume and sentiment
- Focus groups or interviews
Tying Metrics to Value
The numbers and dashboards tell the volume-based story, while the qualitative feedback offers richer context on sentiment, quality, and areas needing refinement.
Together, a mix of reciprocal metrics provides a 360-degree view of marketing success and partnership ROI. This informs decisions on:
- Optimising joint campaign performance
- Securing ongoing budget and executive support
- Modelling the incremental lift driven by collaboration
- Demonstrating the value of integrated platforms
- Guiding expansion plans and next steps
- Communicating achievements across stakeholders
- Maximising account manager commissions
Co-Marketing Best Practice Examples
While concepts are helpful, real-world examples better showcase creative applications’ proven results and inspire new partnership marketing possibilities.
Here are five best practice case studies celebrating meaningful awareness, innovation, conversion, and customer experience success through co-marketing excellence:
Lyft and Spotify: The rideshare app and music streamer partnered to offer passengers access to custom-curated playlists during trips based on the destination, weather, time of day and mood. This first-ever music integration in the auto space achieved 98% consumer awareness and a nearly 20% adoption rate, driving differentiation.
Apple and (RED): Over 15 years, the tech giant has contributed over $270 million to the nonprofit’s (RED) efforts to combat AIDS through special-edition product drops and proceeds from device purchases. This cause drive has funded prevention, testing, counselling, and treatment programs with measurable community health impacts.
Sephora and Headspace: The cosmetics retailer and meditation app company joined up to launch relaxation videos and in-store zen spaces, helping customers de-stress through mindfulness during the busy holiday season. Store associates saw a more positive environment, while shoppers enjoyed a differentiated beauty community experience.
Tostitos and Uber Eats: During the 2022 Super Bowl, the chip brand gave away over 46,000 free orders of party essentials like chips, salsas and soft drinks to fans with a minimum $15 purchase. In a mass consumer campaign, 3.3 million viewers saw Uber’s first TV ad integration, ultimately generating twice the expected sales and 72 million media impressions.
Zappos and Wag!: The online shoe retailer and dog walking app partnered for “The Pack Walk” event, encouraging people and pups to come together while promoting foot health and animal causes. The campaign attracted over 1,400 participants and generated solid local press coverage, social buzz and new user sign-ups for both brands.
The creative possibilities across industries are endless. Use these proven examples as inspiration for developing innovative co-marketing campaigns that deliver incredible awareness, experience, and conversion impact far beyond what is possible alone. The numbers and stories speak volumes.
Keys for Making Co-Marketing Work Long-Term
Co-marketing accelerates measurable growth across critical business metrics while enhancing customer experiences through partnerships combining complementary strengths and offerings.
However, one-off campaigns deliver a fraction of the value possible through committed, strategic alliances built thoughtfully over time. Below are best practices for enabling productive, long-term co-marketing relationships:
Plot a Roadmap with Stages
Outline a multi-quarter or multi-year vision where promotional areas slowly expand across marketing mix elements. Crawl, walk, and run are better than sprinting too quickly. Build trust and interdependent processes.
Envision More Ambitious End Goals
Dream big on what an ideal maximised partnership could achieve over three years—backcast milestones from that vision to motivate incremental progress toward the most ambitious targets.
Contract to Guarantee Commitment
Create ongoing contractual agreements protecting IP and outlining time commitments if helpful. This reduces risk while ensuring dedicated staffing and budget to fuel success.
Schedule Quarterly Reviews
Don’t let months slip by without touchpoints and priority calls. Consistent QBRs assess efforts, track learnings, optimise activities, and discuss additions. Reliable meeting cadences foster accountability.
Create Joint Performance Dashboards
Shared reporting on metrics, financials, and customer feedback helps quantify business lift and experience impact created. Celebrate milestones and wins together!
Incentivise and Reward Teams
Encourage teamwork through SPIFFs, positive reinforcement, and public internal recognition praising collaboration. Highlight partner-sourced wins and revenue during all-hands meetings.
Rotate Fresh Collaborators
Prevent siloed knowledge or bottlenecks by looping in new staff across departments annually. This magnifies idea sharing. Send innovators on reciprocal “embed days” to build empathy.
Always Be Brainstorming
Have an ongoing “parking lot” of new co-marketing possibilities across seasonal moments, emerging channels, economic conditions, and customer needs. Welcome all ideas.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Co-marketing delivers exponential growth unachievable alone by strategically sharing audiences, platforms, assets, creative ideas, and budgets between marketers with complementary offerings.
Winning partnerships require planning, alignment, coordinated campaigns, measurement, and relationship nurturing. However, the awareness, experience, and conversion dividends realised make the effort well worth it.
Key takeaways for marketers include:
- Effective partnerships must have shared goals, customers, and non-competitive offerings
- Commitment, coordination, and investment by both sides are prerequisites
- Numerous creative and mutually beneficial partnership styles exist
- Always progress through four stages: Development, Planning, Execution, Reporting
- Robust metrics across reach, engagement, business impact, and experience should guide efforts
- Long-term relationships deliver exponentially more value through roadmaps
- Co-marketing successfully unlocks awareness, innovation, trust, revenue, and customer delight
The proven examples and best practices shared offer inspiration to brainstorm your successive big partnership marketing win. Two companies can accomplish more together. Competitors can even become collaborators. Dare to think differently and co-market your way to new heights.
Frequently Asked Questions
That covers the core concepts around this innovative customer-accelerating marketing strategy. The door is now wide open for creatively collaborating to new heights!
