6 brands killing it with co-marketing campaigns
Co-marketing campaigns can become a game changer in the success of your marketing activities – if they’re done right. Co-marketing – also known as cross-promotion – means partnering with another company that isn’t your competitor, but targets a similar audience, and then creating a promotion that benefits both companies. Half the effort, double the results.
At Daxx and Chanty, we have experienced the joys of cross-promotion first hand, but before jumping into our story, we’ll show you how six big brands have used the power of co-marketing campaigns to grow their reach.
Airbnb and Flipboard
The media campaign co-created by news and social network aggregator, Flipboard, and Airbnb garnered 39 million targeted campaign impressions and generated 4.2 million page flips from 440,000 viewers on Flipboard. It also raised the number of Airbnb profile followers on Flipboard from 0 to 29,000 and drove 38,000 visits to Airbnb’s website. Impressive, huh? Here’s what their co-marketing campaign looked like:
Airbnb just launched ‘Trips’, a service that offers local experiences led by passionate hosts, which can include everything from cooking to street art painting. They’ve created great content with vertical videos and photo galleries around each host. All of it was mobile-friendly and perfect for the Flipboard audience.
Airbnb was looking to give more exposure to their new service. Flipboard, in turn, was looking to create meaningful content for current readers and motivate people who haven’t used the app for a while to check it out again. It was a match made in heaven.
Together, the two companies created four city magazines with 36 storyboards, along with targeted emails, push notifications, a microsite, and ads on and off Flipboard. The platform’s readers gave overwhelmingly positive feedback on the campaign, and both Flipboard and Airbnb have experienced the amazing results listed above.
HubSpot and Chatfuel
Messenger bots are the talk of the town, and HubSpot simply couldn’t pass up the chance to use them in their marketing activities. The leading provider of inbound marketing and sales software teamed up with a leading provider of AI Facebook chatbots, Chatfuel, to create a chatbot building ebook that their audience couldn’t help but download.
But before you can lay your hands on the goods, aka the BotBook, you have to chat with a Facebook Messenger bot that captures lead information about you, like your name, your company name and size, and your email address. After that, the bot takes you to a co-branded download page that has two CTAs at the very bottom – one to Hubspot’s contact page and another one to Chatfuel’s home page.
Five hours after downloading the BotBook, HubSpot’s bot sends another message asking for permission to send you bite-sized nuggets of the BotBook backed by charts and graphs within Facebook Messenger.
This ingenious content partnership isn’t just a great native ad for Chatfuel. It also establishes HubSpot as an expert on a hot marketing topic, which is new to most people.
Uber and Spotify
Uber and Spotify may seem like two very different products on the surface, but they share a common goal – to earn more users. To help each other do this, the two companies teamed up for a smart co-marketing partnership in 2014. Here’s how it worked:
Once you requested an Uber ride and got matched with a music-enabled Uber, you’re prompted to select music from one of Spotify’s ready-made playlists, your own playlists, or search for something new. When you get in the car, your favorite tunes are already playing from the loudspeakers.
I think we can agree that the ability to become a DJ for your ride is a huge reason to choose Spotify and Uber over their competitors.
Our experience of co-marketing campaigns
What if you don’t have the budgets of Uber or Hubspot, but still want to co-market your product? Don’t worry, small businesses and startups can embrace the power of cross-promotion as well. Let us share our experience.
Daxx is a technology partner that helps companies from all over the world build remote development teams. Chanty is an AI-powered business messenger that makes teams more productive. Our companies are a perfect fit – our target audiences overlap, but we aren’t competitors.
This is what our co-marketing activities include:
Exchanging guest posts
Both Chanty and Daxx have expertise in remote teamwork, but our perspectives are quite different. We decided to set up a knowledge exchange through guest posts on each other’s blogs. Daxx published a post on how to improve remote team collaboration with tech, accompanied by an amazing infographic, while Chanty posted an article on places where SaaS startups can hire software developers.
The results? For a while, Chanty’s guest post became the top piece of content on Daxx’s blog in terms of link acquisition. A part of the infographic was even featured by Wrike.
Daxx got new high-quality content with a linkable asset in the form of an infographic, and Chanty got the chance to publish its content on the more established and more frequently visited platform that is Daxx’s blog. It was also a great opportunity for a young startup to put its name in front of a new audience and get noticed by big brands.
Using the partner’s expert opinion
At one point, the marketing team at Daxx was working on a guest post about branding tips for young tech startups, and Chanty happens to be one of those. Branding is important for a team communication product, so it’s a big part of Chanty’s strategy. So Daxx was more than happy to add useful insights to the article.
As a result of this cooperation, Daxx saved time on finding good quality material for the post, and Chanty got a backlink from Lucidpress, which is a producer of online print and digital publishing software whose users are among the startup’s target audience.
Using each other’s creative content
Recently, Chanty posted an article on digital magazine Foundr featuring one of Daxx’s infographics. For Daxx, it resulted in extra exposure and the ability to attract Foundr readers, which includes entrepreneurs and startup founders, to its service. Meanwhile, Chanty saved time on creating graphics for its post and added weight to its words by referring to the established and trusted platform that is Daxx’s blog.
To wrap up
Apart from the activities we’ve already mentioned, Chanty has listed Daxx in the “As seen in” section of its homepage. We also frequently help each other out with ideas for new content and we like to experiment together and invite each other to closed groups for marketers and startup founders.
Here’s what all of these cross-promotion activities, along with the other marketing strategies we use, have done to our organic traffic growth:
As you can see from our experience, co-marketing campaigns work well on all levels and it can work for you too, whether you are a well-known company, small business or even a DIY solopreneur. We hope you found this article helpful, and that your co-marketing activities will be as successful as ours.
Guest authors:
This article is co-authored by Elena Ruchko, Head of Marketing at Daxx, and Olga Mykhoparkina, CMO at Chanty.
Extra tips from the Rebrandly team:
At Rebrandly, we’re big fans of co-marketing campaigns too. We love to share guest posts with our readers that can offer them different insights from other thought leaders in the digital marketing industry. Here are a couple of extra tips that can help you make the most of your co-marketing:
- Track the traffic coming from your guest posts:
When writing a guest post, include UTM parameters in the links to your website or social media. This way you can see exactly how much traffic and conversions are coming from your co-marketing efforts. - Use branded links to show off your partnership:
If like Flipboard and Airbnb, you want to go all out, create a custom domain for sharing links about the campaign. Sharing branded links will stand out and let people know that you’re working together. This is a great idea if you create social accounts or a microsite for the campaign, or even if you just want both names to be associated with all the links you share about the campaign. - Retarget your guest post readers:
Just because the post isn’t on your own website, that doesn’t mean you can’t retarget its readers with ads. When sharing a great guest post on Facebook or Twitter, make sure to shorten the link with Rebrandly and add retargeting pixels, this way you can retarget them with ads on that platform later on.
Further Reading:
- Building your brand identity: 11+ big questions to ask yourself
- UTM parameters made simple
- How to build brand trust on social media
- Online branding best practices
This Article is About:
- Co-marketing campaigns
- Co-marketing examples
- How big brands co-market
- Company cross promotion
- How to track co-marketing campaigns
Photo in main image by Štefan Štefančík via Unsplash
