Joint campaigns with peers.
Co-marketing is a joint campaign between two companies that serve overlapping audiences but do not compete directly. The logic is straightforward: your partner has an audience that includes your potential buyers, and you have one that includes theirs. A joint webinar, a co-authored guide, a bundled offer, or a shared email blast lets both sides borrow the other's distribution and the implied credibility of the partner's endorsement.
The channel is low-cost in terms of media spend — you are trading promotion rather than paying for reach — but it requires real time investment to find the right partner, align on the campaign, and execute together. The audience you reach is not actively searching for you, so the conversion path is longer than inbound channels with existing demand. What you gain is a warm introduction from a trusted source, which is more valuable than cold reach at the same audience.
When it fits
- You can identify specific partners whose customers frequently use or need your product — the audience overlap is genuine, not just demographic.
- Both companies are willing to promote the other's content or offer to their own list. One-sided co-marketing is just lead generation for the other party.
- Your own audience has enough value to offer a partner in return; co-marketing works because both sides get something useful from the exchange.
When it doesn't
- You are too early to have an audience worth trading. A partner who is co-marketing with you is lending their audience to your product; if your offer is unproven, you risk the partner's credibility rather than building your own.
- The campaign goal is a fast, measurable return. Co-marketing relationships take time to identify, align, and execute, and the results accumulate over months.
The trade-off
Co-marketing can generate high-quality introductions to a pre-warmed audience at low media cost, but it requires finding and maintaining partner relationships, which is a sustained commitment rather than a campaign you can switch on and off. The asset is semi-durable: the content created together persists, but the distribution relationship requires ongoing attention to remain active.
How to run a first test
A co-marketing first test can show whether the channel is worth developing without a large commitment:
- Use a tool like Crossbeam to identify which companies in your ecosystem share significant customer overlap with you. Look for partners whose customers frequently use both products — that shared overlap is the foundation of a credible joint campaign.
- Approach one partner with a specific, low-effort proposal: a joint webinar, a guest email to each other's lists, or a co-authored short guide. The proposal should make the value exchange explicit and roughly equal.
- Agree on the audience segment you are both targeting, what each party will contribute, and how you will each measure results. Without agreed metrics upfront, co-marketing campaigns are hard to evaluate.
- Execute one campaign together and track registrations or list additions that came from the partner's promotion separately from your own. How many of the partner's contacts took action on your offer?
- At the end of the campaign, assess whether the leads from the partner's audience are a quality match for your ICP. If they are, the partnership is worth deepening. If the overlap is not as useful as expected, look for a different partner or campaign type.
See Systematic Channel Testing.
Tools & services to activate it
- Crossbeam — Partner ecosystem platform that shows which accounts overlap between your CRM and a partner's without sharing raw data. (Free tier; paid from custom)
- Impact — Partnership management platform covering co-marketing, affiliates, and influencer relationships with attribution tracking. (Custom)
- HubSpot — CRM and marketing platform for managing partner contacts, co-branded campaigns, and joint pipeline tracking. (Free tier; paid from ~$45/mo)
Related channels
More in Partnerships: Integrations / marketplace, Resellers / channel.