How do you find the best co-marketing partners for your brand?

What are you looking to achieve of these co-marketing partnerships? Customers, valuable content for your audience, or compensation? This also happens to be what your potential partners are look for as well. Once you've figured out what you want to achieve, identify what audience you want to get in front of, also commonly referred to as ideal customer profile. You can reverse engineer this by looking at your customer base and asking yourself, "what customers are the most profitable for us AND what customers get the most value?" This is your ICP. Form there, think of complimentary companies/groups/associations that share the same ICP. This your shared audience. As a side note, you both might have different goals.

In my expertise as a Branding and Innovation Strategist, choosing co-marketing partners revolves around strategic brand synergy. Focus on: 1. Goal Clarity: Define your partnership objectives. 2. Brand Alignment: Select partners with matching values and customer bases. 3. Audience Overlap: Ensure complementary audiences for broader reach. 4. Past Collaborations: Review partners' co-marketing track records. 5. Product Complementarity: Choose partners with non-competing, enhancing offerings. 6. Partner Reputation: A strong market presence boosts your brand. This method ensures impactful, brand-aligned partnerships.

It's vital to assess your competition and possible co-marketing partners. You need to research if it aligns with your values. If the partner seems reasonable, having personalized message greetings and going the extra mile for in person visit that's convenient to them will go a long way.

The first place I go is ask your best fit customers (ICP) what other solutions they use or better yet, look through internal document or records to find out what other solutions your customers use that compliment yours. You can also use contact data providers like Apollo to find other technologies you customers use. This won't include service providers or communities, so make sure you ask your customers if you don't already know. If you have a vertical product (serving a niche market), research other solutions in that vertical market and find complimentary solutions. When you reach out, position the request to benefit them (customers, content, or compensation). If the organization is larger than yours, offer to do all the work!

The 1st campaign can sometimes be the hardest. Getting concessive. Buy-in. Start small, find a single campaign you can work to get a quick win. Maybe a webinar, a co-hosted podcast, or even write a blog for their website. Start small, execute fast. Be selfless and offer to do a lot of the work to get stuff set-up. If they are a larger organization, maybe offer to create all the content for the campaign. Make sure you have a written agreement on who is doing what and who is responsible for what. Make sure you get written permission to use their logo and likeness in promotional materials.

The hardest part of co-marketing is keeping commitments, on both sides of the agreement. If the process to identify resources, timelines, and finalizing an the agreement takes longer than expected or is more difficult than it should be, it may be a signal that the co-marketing partnership may not be the best suited for either partner. Pay close attention during this phase of the co-marketing process.

Make sure to capture requirements around metrics and optimization in the agreement. Include what will be measured, how frequently it will be measured and shared, and a timeline for when a plan will be put in place to optimize. Also, make sure there is alignment on how to measure success of the co-marketing program. This doesn't have to be 100% aligned but you should have an 80% alignment.

Measuring success can be hard as co-marketing a lot of times is a brand awareness strategy. You can't always track ever lead, click, etc. Play the long game with co-marketing partnerships. However, you can look at things like was their a lift in traffic on Google Analysis during the campaign? If there are leads associated, how many of them converted to the next stage? Depending on your sales/marketing cycle, it can take awhile to prove ROI. At the end of the day, find partners that have a complimentary product and share the same ICP and do great marketing that provides value to each other audience. You won't be able to measure everything.