Run co-marketing with a non-competing partner

Your best future customers are already reading someone else’s newsletter, using someone else’s product and attending someone else’s webinars. A co-marketing partnership lets you borrow that trust. You and a company that sells to the same people, without competing, make one useful piece of content together and both promote it. Each side reaches a new audience for roughly the effort of a single campaign.

Why it works

Trust that one company has built can be lent to another. When a partner introduces you to an audience that already reads or uses their product, those people give you attention they would never give a cold ad. Because the two products do not compete, recommending each other costs neither side anything.

The economics help too. Each company does part of the work, gets the whole piece of content, and reaches an audience it could not reach alone.

How to do it

1. List companies that share your customer. Look at the tools your customers use alongside yours, the agencies that serve them, and the newsletters they read. Integration partners are a natural starting point.
2. Check the fit before you pitch. Their audience should match your buyer closely, their brand should be one you are happy to stand beside, and their size should be within reach of yours.
3. Pitch one specific idea. Send a short note proposing a concrete project, such as a joint webinar on a problem both products touch, a co-written guide, or a swap of feature slots in each other’s newsletters. Say what you will contribute.
4. Agree the terms in writing. Cover who does what, the deadline, where the content lives, how each side promotes it, and how any sign-ups or leads are shared.
5. Make something genuinely useful. Focus on the shared customer’s problem. Keep product pitches short and balanced so neither audience feels sold to.
6. Promote with equal effort. Both sides send the email, post on social and mention it to customers. Tag links so each partner can see what their channels produced.
7. Review together and plan the next one. Share results honestly. A partner who delivered is worth a second project, and repeat collaborations usually get easier.

Example

A time-tracking app for design studios notices many of its customers also use a particular project-management tool. The founder suggests a joint webinar on pricing fixed-fee design projects. The project-management company brings a guest studio owner, and the time-tracking team builds a simple estimate template for attendees. Both send the invite to their lists, with a registration form that clearly states both companies will receive sign-ups. Afterwards each sends the recording and template to its new contacts, and the two companies agree to swap newsletter features the following quarter.

Metrics to track

• New contacts from the partner’s channels, measured through tagged links or the registration form.
• Share of new contacts who match your ideal customer, which tests whether the audience fit was real.
• Trials or pipeline from partner-sourced contacts over the following months.
• The partner’s own results, so both sides can judge whether the exchange was fair.

When it backfires

• Uneven effort. If one side promotes hard and the other barely mentions it, resentment follows and the partnership ends.
• A loose audience match. A partner with a large but unrelated audience brings sign-ups who never buy.
• Disguised sales pitches. Content that is mostly two product demos loses attendees quickly and embarrasses both brands.
• Careless data sharing. Passing on contact details without clear consent damages trust and can break privacy law.

Questions people ask

How do I share leads from a joint webinar without breaking privacy rules?

Tell registrants on the sign-up form that both companies will receive their details, and give them a clear choice. Rules differ by country, so check what consent you need before sharing any personal data.

What if the partner's audience is much bigger than mine?

Bring something they lack, such as a specific expertise, a useful dataset or a niche audience they want to reach. Smaller partners often get a fair deal by doing more of the production work.

How do we split credit when both sides promote?

Give each partner its own tagged links or a source field on the registration form, so every sign-up can be traced to the channel that drove it. Share those numbers openly in the review.