Recently DMi’s VP of Affiliate Marketing, Kristina Nolan, hosted a webinar on how eCommerce brands are benefiting from co-marketing initiatives. Through DMi’s industry-leading approach and fostering collaboration and all-inclusive marketing strategies, DMi’s affiliate marketing services can drive significant growth in revenue for brands in DMi’s client roster. During the webinar, Kristina and the ambitious, forward-thinking Affiliate Marketing team discuss how brands have leveraged each other to tap into new audiences and align brand partnerships.

Brand to brand or co-marketing efforts are opportunities to devise marketing strategies between two or more non-competing brands with similar target audiences. This alliance helps brands engage with each other’s audience and provide more benefits than just one brand on its own.

For DMi, helping clients establish brand-to-brand partnerships has been extremely effective, creating multi-million dollar sales channels for the brands we work with. Plus, even while the right partnerships are great at increasing revenue and customer engagement, the cost of brand-to-brand marketing efforts is typically very low. In a study conducted by Partnerize, it was found that for 54% of brands, co-marketing drives more than 20% of their revenue. In addition, these brand-to-brand partnerships have been effective at helping brands collect more first-party data and acquire new email subscribers.

For valuable brand-to-brand partnerships, one of the most important things to consider is audience alignment. Brands should seek to put customers at the center of brand experiences, which provides value to the consumer. Similarly, partner brands should be chosen to ensure that they will provide your customers with a positive experience and have something meaningful to offer. After establishing what the customer experience should look like, brands will want to define what KPI’s are meaningful for the co-marketing strategies, such as follower growth, giveaway entries, and how many sales were driven. Lastly, the execution of campaign strategies also factors into the success of brand-to-brand partnerships.

For example, two CPG brands catering to new and expectant mothers partnered on a giveaway of their products. With influencers sharing the giveaway for their followers to enter, the goal was to collect email subscribers that the brands could remarket to. Within the weeklong giveaway, the brands collected 5,000 opt-in email subscribers. Another co-marketing campaign came from two home delivery brands, one that delivers alcohol and one that delivers food and recipe ingredients. During football season, the two brands sent promo codes to the other brand to their email subscribers. For the customers using the promo codes, the lifetime value of the consumer was two times higher than their average LTV. Lastly, a product collaboration between a CPG brand and a major publisher resulted in driving significant orders and content generation surrounding the collaborative product.

From securing brand partnerships to external buy-in for the partnership, brand-to-brand marketing isn’t easy but has significant long-term benefits. Ensuring the right brand alignments and maintaining customer-focused initiatives are both equally important to co-marketing success. Once partnerships have been established, ensure that there are defined KPIs to measure success and a structure for tracking and analyzing co-marketing data. If brands keep these factors in mind, they can better prepare for successful brand-to-brand partnerships.