In a gritty fight for clicks, impressions, engagements, and conversions, marketers heavily rely on traditional and mainstream methods. The way businesses have evolved, with newer and more comprehensive technologies, marketers have to come up with more contemporary and fresh ideas to keep the ball rolling.
Co-marketing is a unique and innovative method for marketers to get the most out of their bucks. Marketers look for ways that can yield maximum benefit with minimum effort, and co-marketing is one such solution. Though co-marketing isn’t the newest concept, we see its heavy use on digital platforms. The ease of sharing resources, content, and products digitally has made digital marketers leverage this method. Digitally, it is more likely for services and products to complement each other, which is a basic necessity for co-marketing campaigns to succeed.
Many digital marketers use co-marketing as an integral part of their inbound strategy.
In this guide, we will be telling you what co-marketing is and how you can yield maximum benefit from it. We will look at ways you can use co-marketing to attract more leads and boost your conversion rate.
Getting familiar with co-marketing
Co-marketing, in its essential form, is when two companies with similar audiences come together to collaborate on content and promotional strategies where they mutually benefit from it. It is a partnership of two organizations to promote specific content or products and share the results of that promotion.
Organizations leverage the reach and relationship of their partner to generate more leads, create more buzz with less work. This means that with lesser resources and effort put into a campaign, both the partners can profit more than their usual efforts.
To illustrate an example, in 2014, Uber and Spotify came up with an exciting partnership. Users riding the uber received a special prompt to select a pre-made Spotify playlist for their trip. It resulted in a massive increase in user engagement at the Spotify app, and uber observed a boost in total rides.
You must have seen a lot of WordPress developers writing guest blog posts on websites of web host providers. This is a classic example of co-marketing, where the developer reaches out to new people through the network of the web host and receives new audiences. The web host establishes its credibility with its audience by working with well-known developers and might see better conversion rates because of this.
Here, the product of one company complimented the service of another; thus, this was a perfectly workable partnership.
In what ways co-marketing enriches your brand
A successful co-marketing strategy can be extremely fruitful for your inbound traffic. There are diverse ways co-marketing tactics can be used as part of your broader inbound strategy. We will quickly move on to explaining how and what you can do to strengthen your inbound strategy with co-marketing tactics. But before that, lets glimpse through how it can enrich your brand and how it plays an essential role in boosting inbound traffic.
Be leveraging the reach of partners, brands tap into newer audiences and can diversify their audience. They can also bring forward new and unique content in front of their audiences. This will directly impact the traffic rushing in on your site, and with correct tactics, you can optimize your conversion rates.
Co-marketing presents the brand as more inclusive and more extensive than it actually might be. This is really good for brands as customers feel good to engage with inclusive and more prominent brands. With shared content promotion and their audiences combined, brands slowly expand their mailing list and potential clientele.
Diving in!
There are two essentials to co-marketing, generating content in partnership, and promoting it mutually. Within this, we can twist and turn it in countless combinations to bring out unique tactics. Here let’s discuss these two aspects and the most commonly used tactics, which are very useful.
These are budget-friendly ways and do not require elaborate procedures. Let’s have a look at them.
1. Ebooks
An ebook is a prevalent form of co-marketing content because it is easy to split up the work. Usually, one partner can take care of the written content, and the other can look into the design. This also keeps the tone and design of the book consistent. However, this is not an ardent way to do it. You can mix and match how you would like to generate an ebook.
Ebooks are great resources to drive leads and bring awareness to new audiences. It creates a dependence among your audience, where they naturally turn towards you for support and guidance.
2. Blog Posts
This is, by far, one of the most popular and effective tactics. You must have seen a lot of bloggers guest posting on each other’s blogs. This gives them the leverage of the reach and popularity of another blogger, and this way, both the guest blogger and the website can share the collective traffic.
One partner can take care of hosting and planning a blog series, and the other can write its contents. The partners can switch their roles to and fro. Partners can leave backlinks to increase their inbound traffic and make cross-promotional efforts.
3. Video series
This is a successful method used by a lot of content creators and people with courses on online learning platforms like Coursera, Edx, Udemy, etc. You can start a video series with a partner and benefit by dipping into each other’s audiences.
This also is a beautiful way to create unique content, bringing together different skill sets to create something truly unique and useful. Videos were nearly 73% part of the last year’s digital marketing campaigns on the internet and received 40% more engagement and conversion in total. This can be a fruitful way and must be a part of your inbound strategy.
4. Digital Flipbooks
A flipbook is an interactive, online HTML5 publication that has the look and feel of a real, page-turning publication. It comes with a complete set of page turning sound effect, page shadow and much more. Flipbooks are replacing conventional PDFs, reports, presentations, magazines, catalogs, brochures, books, etc.
Flipbooks are easy to create as a part of your co-marketing tactic. You can even convert your old documents into flipbooks by a single click and give your co-marketing strategy a sleek and contemporary outlook. Flipsnack is an amazing tool that makes it very easy to create flipbooks with an interactive, drag and drop interface. In order to create a new flipbook, you can choose a free template from Flipsnack and customize it online. You can create a digital magazine, a brochure, a catalog & many more in just a few clicks.
5. Emails
It is the most classic tactic of co-marketing in action. Companies work hard to expand their mailing list. Seventy-three percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email. 59% of marketers say email is their most significant source of ROI. With the staggering stats, partners can benefit from each other’s mailing lists.
It is not meant that they share their mailing lists with each other. Instead partners can feature each other in their newsletters and emails in cross-promotional efforts. It is a more authentic and neat way to do it. People are likely to give you their time if you have popped up on their email via the brand they already trust.
Promotion
Cross-promotion is an essential aspect of successful co-marketing campaigns. Promoting your content across platforms is crucial to the results you create. Make sure that whatever co-marketing activity you involve yourself in, it is promoted on both partner’s social media platforms and other channels.
Promoting through social media platforms, emails, and blogs are some common ways of doing it. You can go a step further if you have the bandwidth and conduct offline events.
Conclusion
Co-marketing can work magically if you do the right things. Make sure to keep a healthy relationship with your partners. Though it is highly unlikely to work with the same partners over and over again, yet you never know when you come up with new ideas.
If you are a small business, then you can immensely benefit from co-marketing by tapping in a shared audience base and creating unique content.
