How co-marketing campaigns work with partner brands

Co-marketing is when two businesses with the same kind of customer, and no direct competition, promote something together: a webinar, an ebook, an event, an integration launch or a swap of email features. Each side gets in front of the other's audience without paying for ads. It works best when both audiences overlap and neither partner is much larger than the other, so the effort and the payoff split evenly.

How to do it

1. List partners by audience, not by industry. Write down who your best customers also buy from or use: the tool before yours in their workflow, the tool after it, the service they hire. Those companies reach your buyer and do not sell what you sell.
2. Check size and fit before you pitch. Look at their newsletter, social following and webinar attendance if it is public. A much larger partner has little to gain from a swap with you, so aim for a similar audience size.
3. Propose one small, dated thing. Something like "one 30-minute webinar on a topic both audiences care about, on one date, each of us emails our list twice" is easy to say yes to. Do not open with a year-long partnership.
4. Write the split down. Who builds the landing page, who hosts the recording, who emails when, and what each side gets (registrant lists, a link, a logo). Agree on how leads are shared before anyone sends a single email.
5. Pick a format that gives the partner something real. Common ones: a co-hosted webinar, a short co-branded guide built from data both of you have, a shared integration announcement, a newsletter swap, or a joint event.
6. Measure on the day. Count registrations, signups and trials from each side's link (use separate UTM tags per partner). Review it together a week later and decide whether to repeat.

Examples

Spotify and Uber, 2014. Riders could link a Spotify account to their Uber profile and choose the music in compatible cars. The Next Web reported it would start on November 21, 2014 in ten cities including London, San Francisco, New York and Sydney. Each brand gave its own users a feature the other one supplied.

GoPro and Red Bull, 2016. The companies announced a multi-year partnership covering content production and cross-promotion, among other things. Red Bull took equity in GoPro, GoPro became its exclusive provider of point-of-view imaging technology, and the two share content rights on co-productions. This is a large-company version; a small team would copy the idea (shared content, shared channels), not the equity deal.

What it looks like in practice

Say you sell invoicing software for freelancers and a partner sells a time tracker. Your customers track hours, theirs send invoices. You agree on one webinar, "Getting paid for every hour you work," on a set date. You each send two emails to your own list, one a week out and one the day before. The partner's registrants get a trial link for your product on the follow-up page, and yours get theirs. After the webinar you swap numbers and decide whether a second session is worth doing.

When it backfires

• Lopsided deals sour fast. If one partner writes everything and the other only forwards an email, the partner is unlikely to want a second one.
• Email rules apply to you even when the partner sends. Under the CAN-SPAM Act, "you can't contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law." Each email in violation can carry penalties of up to $53,088, and opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days, per the FTC's compliance guide. Do not hand a partner your subscriber list. Have them email their own list, and send yours from your own system.
• Paid or traded promotion needs disclosure. The FTC tells people to "disclose when you have any financial, employment, personal, or family relationship with a brand." A swap that is presented as an unprompted recommendation, with no mention of the arrangement, can cross that line.
• Brand risk travels both ways. A partner's product outage or public controversy lands on your name too. Keep the commitment short until you have worked together once.
• Competitors in disguise. A tool that adds your main feature next quarter stops being a partner. Ask about their roadmap first.

Questions people ask

What is co-marketing? Two or more businesses run a promotion together and share the work, the audience and the results, for example a joint webinar or a co-branded guide.

What are good co-marketing ideas for a small company? Start with a joint webinar, a newsletter swap, a short guide built from data you each already have, or an announcement when you integrate with each other's product.

Is co-marketing the same as affiliate marketing? No. Affiliates are paid per sale or lead. Co-marketing partners usually pay no commission and trade audience access and effort.

Sources

• The Next Web: Spotify and Uber team up, read Oct 8, 2026
• GoPro investor relations: GoPro and Red Bull partnership release, read Oct 8, 2026
• FTC: CAN-SPAM compliance guide for business, read Oct 8, 2026
• FTC: Disclosures 101 for social media influencers, read Oct 8, 2026