How Does Co-Marketing Work - The Only Stepwise Guide You Need

There is a popular term “Marketing” that helps people to promote their brands and services worldwide effectively. Marketers should know the right guidance to take advantage of unique strategies like co-marketing that is directly related to the marketing team.

This article is mainly posted to help you understand how co-marketing helps you in boosting your business. Top on that, once you give it a thorough read, you will find yourself more confident in finalising the right fit for your brand. So, without further delay, let’s start knowing what exactly co-marketing is, what procedure you should follow for productive results, and the kinds of detailed benefits.

Definition of Co-Marketing

Generally, it is a combined promotion strategy where two entrepreneurs related to the same kind of brand and services make equal efforts to promote their products and services.

Through this procedure, they advertise to another brand’s audience to enhance sales growth and make the product more visible to the online shopping freaks. However, it is quite crucial and difficult to find a partner that aligns with your brand’s marketing goals and audience.

Still confused about how it helps? Let’s understand in-depth with an example:

Co-marketing is the best way to save productive resources because when you promote the same products or services it tends to take similar time and money when you promote a single business. For instance, the food company agrees to use the celebrity in five advertisements, enhancing the star's visibility. The celebrity then commits to promoting the food brand to their audience by including it in five social media posts.

How Co-Marketing Helps

Similarly, knowing the co-marketing process and its advantages can be beneficial for any brand that wants to increase the number of its audience. Providing the new content to the online shopping enthusiasts will increase sales growth and brand awareness together.

In simple words, co-marketing benefits two businesses by allowing them to invest as much as the expense of promoting a single brand. That means double profit in a single investment. Both businesses are able to share their expertise with each other and provide value to their audience in order to build brand trust and reputation.

How Co-Marketing Works - Stepwise Guide

When you choose your partner company, you will need to work together on promotional efforts for a co-branded product that is being offered. In the partnership, both companies are legally bound to promote a similar brand or service so that they can share the results of the process. Co-marketing boosts the products’ awareness and delivers enhanced leads with less work, time, money, and resources.

Now, let’s explore the experts’ step-wise guidance you need to surpass your goals. Here you go below:

The first and foremost thing you need to ensure for a fruitful campaign is to select a top-notch organisation that consists of the best project management skills. Luckily, we have crafted this comprehensive guide to let you go with the flow. Give a shine to the below tips:

1. Select Your Deserving Co-Marketing Partner

You need to start by choosing with whom you want to start a co-marketing strategy and then a strong official connection is required. It's not enough to associate with a firm that has a domain authority equivalent to yours, if not higher. The most important thing that will take you both to the paramount in the domain is nothing but working with each other melodiously. Not considering this advice may give you unsatisfied results and you both would have failed in this campaign.

We understand that this is perhaps the most critical step you have to take for launching a co-marketing campaign. Therefore we have narrowed down the best tips to consider while choosing your partner company:

• Evaluate the brand value and principles of your partner company so that it can share the same values and beliefs that you do. This guide will make your work way easier, and this campaign will provide the exact sense you want while choosing your partner.
• Another thing you need to make sure of is their online reputation. Never ever take clients’ reviews for granted and consider them a top priority to go through. The relationship between your-going-to-be-a-partner-company with their current clients’ must be considerable and positive.
• Top on that, ensure that it would be the first time for the company to start a co-marketing campaign or that the company has done the same before. Ensure the previous collaboration and if you find any then do not delay in asking them about the behaviour and experience with the company you are thinking to collaborate with. In addition to this, ask them if there are any challenges they faced while working with that company. All these things will help you finalise the decisions about partnering with them.

2. Segregate In-Depth Your Roles & Expectations

Once you have decided with whom you are going to start this co-marketing campaign, it's time to deeply think about crucial roles, specifically who is answerable for a particular task. You don’t need to worry; we have brought that too for you. Just give it a look:

• You should decide the target and kind of your co-marketing campaign.
• Before reaching any official decision, just finalise who between both of you will host the webinars.
• Also, discuss what would be the most suitable date and time to launch this fruitful campaign.
• Furthermore, think about the best procedure to promote this amongst the targeted audience.
• Lastly, you need to decide who will design the joint landing page of the website.

3. Monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

When you both agree on your roles and responsibilities then taking a step forward you need to think about common metrics. We have enlisted the crucial points that you need to keep in the note during and immediately after starting a campaign.

• Total generated leads
• Total qualified leads
• Number of leads sent to your sales department
• Customer-to-lead ratio
• The number of visitors to the website
• And most importantly, how to generate more traffic to the official website.

Undoubtedly, these metrics are based on the desired goals of both your partner companies that you have decided while planning for this campaign. Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose you and your partner company want to enhance the sales of a service or product, then the metric “number of visitors to the website” won’t affect your growth, and no need to monitor this closely.  

4. Keep Updating Co-Marketing Proposals

You'll need to deliver something to your shared target audience that's tempting enough for them to perform the action you want them to do, just as you would with any other account-based marketing campaign. When deciding which offer to utilise in your co-marketing campaign, consider not just your target accounts' desires, but also those of your co-marketing partner.

Co-marketing offers that fall into the "sweet spot" shared by both of your target accounts is the most effective. Make sure to incorporate both your brand and the brand of your co-marketing partner when creating your co-marketing offer.

5. Design Your Joint Landing Page

Creating the landing page is the most exciting yet thoughtful step. It is important as you will share or post co-marketing content here to boost your audience for the best revenue. The only thing you need to consider while designing the landing page is that it must reflect your collaboration.

Both your partners’ logos must be visible to the website visitors as soon as they reach here. Also, it is recommended that selecting a neutral landing page will strengthen your partnership. Top on that, the landing page must be clearly spelled with all the features related to your work along with the clear name of your partner company. Considering this tip will help not give shocks to your clients while receiving emails from your co-marketing partner.  

Another most important thing that you can’t take for granted is creating an easy and unique tracking code so that both your partners can connect to this landing page. This way, both companies will automatically differentiate from other landing pages you use in your strategy. Still, keep in mind that the process of monitoring the performance of you both should be easy to monitor.

6. Consider the Promotion Tactics of Your Updated Offers

The best thing about co-marketing campaigns is that you get additional resources to promote your brands' related offers. However, there are some steps that need to be taken carefully. Here you go:

• Selecting the date of launching this fruitful campaign. It will enable you to work accordingly as per the decided schedule to promote all the content.
• The next step consists of deciding the useful tactics that you want to use while promoting your content about the related campaign.
• Furthermore, “Blog Posting” is the best way to promote your brands that are specifically written on the benefits of your co-marketing offer. Make sure the content of the blogs should be neutral, intellectual, informational, and acceptable to the audience. However, a promotional section should be added to the footer.
• Lastly, we all know the effect of hashtags. Therefore, creating the hashtag that directly reflects your brands and interacting using emails are additional yet effective tactics you can use to boost your co-marketing offer.

7. Timely Measuring the Co-Marketing Results

Technology enables you to review a campaign's performance without

asking you to wait till the end. If truth be told, it is now possible to check whether your hard work and tactics are effective in hitting your goals even during the process. Promoting your brands in the co-marketing campaigns is not a piece of cake and you should prioritise this step of evaluating the performance. This way, you will have the time to make adjustments if required, so you can achieve your goals.

It was about reviewing the process, but you cannot forget to measure your relationship with your co-marketing partner. For this, you can ask the following question we have attached to ensure how your relationship has been going so far:

• Have you had any issues dealing with them?
• How was the stuff they offered in terms of quality?

Stay in Touch with Your Co-Marketing Partner

Being a responsible partner, you should ensure that both partners have a complete list of all the leads generated by your campaign. You need to periodically communicate with your partner about this campaign.

It is recommended by experts that regardless of the result of the procedure, you should never cut off contact with your co-marketing partner after the end of the campaign.

Final Words

You can delight your audience by using co-marketing tools that also help reach those audiences who would have never heard of your business otherwise. The best way to keep the bond of a co-marketing partnership is nothing but just be neutral and natural by complementing the efforts of each other and knowing the synergy targets.

And, with the greatest tool ever found like DSers, you can give a spark to this campaign that your customer will never forget. They build productive co-marketing and co-selling campaigns that will give a thrill to your consumers. So, what are you waiting for? Just connect with them to get the spark of imagination and creative cooperation.