Guest post written by David Campbell, a digital marketing specialist at Ramp Ventures. He helps manage the content marketing team at Right Inbox. When he’s not working, he enjoys traveling and trying to learn Spanish.
Co-marketing is a strategy in which complementary brands combine expertise, audiences, and distribution to create something more useful than either could produce alone. For content teams, that can mean joint research, webinars, expert contributions, or other assets that earn relevant editorial backlinks because people genuinely want to cite them.
Products are not the only things you can promote through co-marketing. You can promote your content, and by extension, your brand. The strongest partnerships begin with audience value, not with a quota for swapping links.
In this article for Process Street, we’ll look at how co-marketing can improve your backlinking game without sliding into mass outreach or manipulative link exchanges.
- Co-marketing at a glance
- 3 reasons to adopt co-marketing
- Successful co-marketing examples
- Co-marketing: the step-by-step guide
- Your business’s key to success
Co-marketing at a glance
Co-marketing sees two brands work together to promote their respective businesses. The goal is a mutually beneficial relationship that accomplishes more than either marketing team could achieve alone.
Brands can collaborate in many ways:
- Host an event: A design company can team up with a merchant services provider to run a workshop on creating ecommerce websites.
- Offer partnership benefits: A cinema can pair a ticket with an offer from a nearby restaurant.
- Create a joint campaign: Complementary brands can share production and distribution while addressing the same audience need.
- Do content co-marketing: Brands can collaborate on a joint content strategy, shared research, an expert resource, or a webinar.
Co-marketing is different from co-branding. Co-marketing coordinates promotion and distribution, while co-branding usually brings two brand identities together in a product or offer. A partnership can use both, but the distinction matters when the goal is to earn editorial attention and links.
3 reasons to adopt co-marketing
Co-marketing can help brands reach relevant audiences and create more useful campaigns. The three primary benefits are straightforward.
Expand your network
Purposeful connections are central to a healthy business. When you collaborate with another marketer, you gain a working relationship with that person and visibility among people who already trust their brand. That can create future opportunities, but the immediate campaign should still stand on its own value.
The network benefit is strongest when the relationship is specific. A loose promise to “promote each other” is hard to act on. A shared research question, audience problem, or campaign deadline gives both teams a reason to introduce useful people, compare expertise, and build trust through the work itself.
Share production costs
Co-marketing can reduce duplicated work because partners share research, production, creative effort, and distribution. The point is not simply to split a bill. It is to combine assets that would be expensive or slow for one team to assemble alone.
Make the contribution explicit so the arrangement stays fair. One team might supply research and subject-matter experts, while the other handles design, production, or event operations. Shared costs are helpful, but clear ownership prevents the savings from turning into confusion.
Reach shared marketing goals
Partners bring different strengths. One may understand the audience, while the other contributes data, creative production, or distribution. When the offer and audience overlap without making the companies direct competitors, those strengths can produce a stronger result for both sides.
Set one primary goal before production starts. Brand reach, qualified registrations, referral traffic, and earned citations require different campaign choices. A focused goal makes it easier to select the right format and decide what success should look like.
Successful co-marketing examples
Broad brand collaborations are useful because they show the mechanics of shared attention. They are not direct proof that reciprocal backlinks improve rankings, but they demonstrate what happens when complementary brands combine audiences and distribution.
H&M’s luxury line
H&M is known for accessible fashion. Its designer collaborations, including the Versace collection announced by H&M, combined a luxury designer’s creative pull with a mass retailer’s reach. Each side brought something the other could not reproduce alone.
The lesson for content teams is not to imitate the product. It is to identify an asset that only the partnership can credibly create. That might be original research using one partner’s data, an expert guide pairing two disciplines, or a webinar in which each team teaches a different part of the same problem.
McDonald’s and Hello Kitty
A McDonald’s and Hello Kitty promotion created such intense demand that Sky News reported a 40% increase in the number of toys ordered. The campaign paired a familiar distribution network with a collectible audience.
For a backlink-focused campaign, the equivalent is a resource with a natural reason to be cited. Shared original data, a useful calculator, a benchmark report, or a well-produced educational event gives both partners something worth distributing and gives publishers something worth referencing.
Co-marketing: the step-by-step guide
Content co-marketing can earn referral traffic and editorial links, but links should be a consequence of creating something useful. Google says links help it discover pages and understand relevance, while its spam policies warn against excessive reciprocal exchanges and partner pages created primarily for cross-linking.
Here is a practical four-step process.
Create a specific outreach email
Email remains a practical direct channel for partnership outreach. Use an authenticated business domain, keep the pitch concise, and make the collaboration idea specific enough that the recipient can quickly judge the fit. A template should support personalization, not replace it.
- Introduce yourself and explain why you chose this partner.
- Name the audience problem you could solve together.
- Offer something concrete, such as data, expertise, production, or distribution.
- Suggest one manageable next step.
A good message leads with the shared outcome, not with a demand for a backlink. Before sending, replace every generic field, verify the recipient’s role, check grammar, and make sure the proposal reflects something the company is actually doing. Avoid bulk automation that trades relevance for volume, and follow Google’s current Gmail sender requirements.
A simple pitch can name the specific work that prompted the outreach, propose the shared asset, explain what you will contribute, and ask whether the idea is worth a short conversation. That is enough structure to save time while leaving room for a genuinely personal reason to collaborate.
Choose and contact suitable partners
Partner fit matters more than list size. A useful prospect meets two conditions:
- They do not represent a direct competitor for your business.
- They serve an overlapping audience with complementary expertise or assets.
Start with companies already publishing useful material in your category. Review their site, contributors, campaigns, and audience before you contact anyone. LinkedIn can help identify the right role, while an email-finding workflow can help organize research without turning it into indiscriminate outreach.
Look for evidence of fit: recurring themes, a product that complements yours, a useful dataset, a strong newsletter, an active event program, or experts whose perspective fills a gap in your own content. Exclude sites whose only apparent value is domain authority. A credible partner should improve the resource even if search engines did not exist.
If a person does not reply, one or two respectful follow-ups may be appropriate. Stop when there is no interest. Relevance, timing, and trust matter more than persistence.
Use a shared campaign tracker with the partner, owner, proposed asset, status, next action, due date, and live URL. That prevents duplicate outreach and makes handoffs visible.
Agree on campaign parameters
Once a partner is interested, define the collaboration in writing. Agree on the audience, asset, contribution from each team, approval process, publishing date, ownership, distribution, attribution, and measurement plan.
Clarify who hosts the primary version and whether the other partner will publish an excerpt, landing page, or supporting article. Agree on how updates will be handled after launch. This avoids duplicate versions competing with each other and prevents a useful asset from becoming stale because neither team owns maintenance.
Lead with value. You might contribute original data, a subject-matter expert, a guest section, design support, or a distribution channel. Useful co-created formats include benchmark reports, webinars, comparison guides, templates, data stories, and interactive resources. Choose the format that best explains the idea instead of producing an infographic merely because it is easy to trade.
If links are included, they should be editorially relevant, use natural anchor text, and help the reader. Do not insist on guaranteed reciprocal links, a fixed number of links, or keyword-rich anchors. A legitimate partnership can succeed through reach, trust, leads, and reusable content even when every publisher makes an independent citation decision.
Track delivery and results
Track both delivery and outcomes. Delivery covers approvals, asset completion, publication, and promotion. Outcomes can include qualified referral traffic, registrations, earned mentions, editorial links, conversions, and insights for the next campaign.
Review the campaign with the partner after launch. Compare what each channel contributed, which questions the audience asked, where production slowed down, and which part of the asset attracted citations or referrals. Record those lessons while the details are fresh, then decide whether the partnership deserves another campaign.
Use Google Search Console to review external links and its performance data to examine queries, clicks, impressions, and position. Linkody can remain an optional specialist for backlink monitoring, while BrandMentions is better treated as a mention-monitoring tool. Measure referral and business outcomes alongside search data so a campaign is not reduced to a link count.
For campaigns with several owners and approvals, Process Street provides a single Compliance Operations Platform. Teams can keep governed campaign briefs in Docs, run approvals and publishing work in Ops, and use built-in AI to assist drafting and checks. A relevant set of customer engagement tools can support the wider handoff from campaign response to follow-up.
Your business’s key to success
Co-marketing works when each partner contributes a real advantage and the audience receives something useful. It can expand your network, reduce duplicated effort, and help both teams reach a relevant market. It can also strengthen your backlinking game when the shared asset earns citations on its merits.
- Choose a complementary partner with an overlapping audience and a clear reason to collaborate.
- Build an asset that neither side could produce as credibly alone.
- Define contributions, approvals, ownership, distribution, and measurement before production begins.
- Treat backlinks as editorial outcomes, not guaranteed trades.
- Track delivery, referral value, earned mentions, links, and qualified outcomes.
The best partnerships compound. A campaign creates a useful asset, the asset earns attention, and a well-run process makes the next collaboration easier to execute.
Co-marketing FAQ
What is co-marketing?
Co-marketing is a partnership in which complementary brands combine expertise, audiences, or distribution to promote a shared campaign or asset while retaining their separate identities.
How can co-marketing earn backlinks?
It can earn backlinks when partners create original research, expert resources, tools, webinars, or other material that publishers independently choose to cite. The value of the asset should come first.
Is reciprocal linking allowed?
Occasional relevant links between genuine partners can help readers. Excessive exchanges, guaranteed link quotas, or partner pages created primarily to manipulate rankings can violate Google’s spam policies.
How should a co-marketing campaign be measured?
Track delivery milestones and outcomes such as qualified referral traffic, registrations, earned mentions, editorial links, conversions, and the insights that improve the next collaboration.