Co-Marketing Relationship Guaranteed to Expand Your Reach
Guest posts
Guest posts on each other’s blogs are a great way to introduce your respective audiences to each other. You can write original content for the post or republish an evergreen post (but be sure to add the rel=canonical to the original post). You could also interview a subject matter expert from your respective companies and include excerpts of the discussion in a an eBook, infographic, or blog post.
Podcasts and Videos
Podcasts and videos represent another great co-marketing opportunity. In the past, we’ve interviewed Vidyard’s Tyler Lessard for Act-On’s Rethink Marketing podcast to talk about the importance of video in B2B marketing. Those podcast interviews are the gifts that just keep giving in the form of blog posts, slideshares, videos, eBooks, and more. I’ve also created co-marketing podcasts and videos with some of our other close partners — including Gong.io, Oktopost, and ListenLoop among others.
Webinars
Co-marketing via a webinar is a fantastic way to get leads into the funnel quickly. Once you and your co-marketing partner have agreed to work together, you should start planning at least two webinars together — giving you both the opportunity to host and serve as a guest contributor. Make sure to prepare informative and professional presentation decks, coordinate with your webinar service to avoid logistical issues, and promote the event to both your audiences through numerous marketing channels beginning at least 30 days in advance of the event. The registration landing page should be on your website when you are hosting and vice versa.
We’ll talk about this more in the co-marketing agreement section, but you’ll want to be prompt in sending each other the attendee registration lists. And you will want to have a good co-marketing plan for following up on the webinar. Does this include sending a link to watch the webinar on demand? Will you be sending one email, or will each partner be responsible for sending an email? These elements need to be discussed ahead of time to ensure seamless execution.
eBooks/Whitepapers
When developing a whitepaper or eBook with a co-marketers, you could be working together on one overarching topic or interviewing each other’s subject matter experts for material to be included in new updates to existing content. Or, another potentially effective idea is to have a team of co-marketing partners working together to create an annually recurring trends and predictions eBook that is updated each subsequent year.
Original Research
Original research often results in some of the most effective content marketing initiatives. For instance, The Content Marketing Institute releases their annual B2B Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Report, and Puppet, the open-core software configuration management tool, release an annual DevOps Salary report — these pieces are link-generating machines!
Original research can be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive, but if you can split the resources with a partner, these projects become much more feasible. The easiest and most efficient way to do this is to create a survey to market to your respective audiences and then use those results to create assets like infographics and banner ads to support your demand generation efforts.
You’ve likely already been approached to participate in many of these tactics with partners (namely industry analysts or industry influencer consultancies) but at a cost exceeding your budget. These partnerships are always a potential option, but for the purposes of this post, we are focusing more on working with partners with whom you can split costs and share resources.