Every page that ranks for co-marketing was written for a software company. Read four of them and you will come away thinking you need a co-branded landing page, a joint content calendar, and a partner marketing manager. I sell expertise to a list of a few thousand people, and so do most of the entrepreneurs I work with, and almost none of that translates.
What Co-Marketing Is
Co-marketing is two businesses building one thing together and each promoting it to their own audience. A joint webinar, a shared guide, a co-hosted event. Both names go on it, both audiences see it, and neither party is selling the other’s product. It is a trade of reach, which is what makes it different from an affiliate or joint venture promotion.
The Distinction Nobody Draws Properly
There are three things people mix up here, and getting them straight decides which one you should actually be running.
Co-marketing is a shared asset. We make a thing together and we both mail it. Nobody sells anything directly. The return is audience, positioning and goodwill, and it shows up slowly.
Co-promotion, or a joint venture promotion, is one partner mailing their list about the other’s offer, usually inside a window, usually with a revenue share. There is no shared asset. There is a seller and a promoter, and money changes hands. The return is immediate and measurable.
Co-branding is a product decision, not a marketing one. Two brands on one product, permanently. It is the one that needs lawyers, and it is almost never what an entrepreneur selling expertise wants.
The reason this matters is that people run one while expecting the return of another. A joint webinar is co-marketing. If you go into it expecting the sales of a promotion, you will conclude co-marketing does not work, when what happened is you built an audience asset and measured it as a launch.
What Changes When You Sell Expertise
Four things, and each one flips the standard advice.
Your asset is a session, not a document. Software co-marketing produces reports and benchmark studies because that is what their buyers download. My buyers want to hear somebody think out loud. A live conversation with a partner, recorded, is worth more than a co-branded PDF and takes a fraction of the effort.
Your audiences overlap more than you think, and that is fine. The software world worries about audience overlap because their metric is net-new leads. Mine is trust, and a person hearing me alongside somebody they already respect is a stronger signal than a stranger discovering me cold. Overlap is not waste in this business.
You are the product, which caps the volume. You cannot run six of these in a quarter without the quality collapsing, because you are personally in every one. Two done properly beat six phoned in, and partners notice which one they were part of.
The relationship outlives the campaign. In software, co-marketing ends when the campaign ends. In this business the person you co-hosted with in September is the person who introduces you to somebody in March. If you optimize the campaign and neglect the relationship, you have taken the smaller half of the return.
Choosing Who to Do It With
Co-marketing fails on partner selection more than on execution, and the selection criteria are not the obvious ones.
Same audience, different job. You want somebody whose people are your people but whose service is not your service. Too far apart and neither audience cares. Too close and you are competitors doing a joint session, which is awkward for everyone and rarely repeated.
Comparable audience size, roughly. Not identical. But a collaboration where one side brings ten times the reach turns into a favor, and favors do not repeat. If there is a real imbalance, acknowledge it and rebalance the effort so the smaller party carries more of the production work. Everybody knows the score anyway, and saying it out loud removes the resentment.
They actually mail their list. Check. Subscribe to it for a month before you propose anything. A partner with a large list they never use will produce nothing, and it is not rudeness to establish this before committing weeks to building something together.
You have watched them handle something badly. This sounds strange and it is the most reliable filter I have. Anybody is pleasant when things go well. What you want to know is what happens when the tech breaks, an attendee is rude, or the numbers come in flat. If you have never seen that, you are guessing.
The person who fails all four but is enthusiastic is the trap. Enthusiasm is not a qualification, and it is the thing that most often talks people into a collaboration they later regret.
How I Actually Run One
Start with the person, not the idea. I do not go looking for a co-marketing opportunity. I notice that a conversation with somebody has been genuinely good three times, and the collaboration proposes itself. Reversing that order is how you end up with a polite yes and an unpromoted webinar.
Agree what each side is putting in, out loud, before anything is built. Not a contract. A list. Who makes the asset, who writes the emails, how many each side sends, what the dates are. Most co-marketing disappointment is one party quietly doing eighty percent of the promotion, and it is entirely preventable in a ten minute conversation.
Make the promotion easy for them. Send finished copy they can edit rather than a request that they write something. This is the single highest-leverage thing in the whole practice, and it is the thing almost nobody does.
Then do the follow-through that nobody does. Send them everything afterwards, including the numbers that were unflattering. Partners repeat with people who were honest about a mediocre result far more readily than with people who went quiet.
If you want to see where I put the structured version of this, it sits inside the DealFlow System as partner channel mapping and conversation engineering, which are two of its four steps.
What to Actually Make
The format matters less than people think and the effort profile matters more, so pick by effort.
A live conversation is the highest return per hour of work. Two people who know their subject talking for 45 minutes with questions at the end. No slides, or very few. It is the lowest production burden and the highest trust transfer, because the audience watches two people think rather than watching a presentation.
A working session is a step up in effort and return. Instead of talking about the subject you do the thing live on somebody’s real situation. This converts far better and is much harder to fake, which is exactly why it works.
A written asset is the lowest return for an expertise business and the one most people default to, because it feels like the professional choice. Unless you have something genuinely proprietary to put in it, skip it. A document does not transfer trust the way a voice does.
A recurring series is the advanced version and it is the one worth building toward. Same partner, four sessions across a year, promoted each time. The audience compounds, the production gets easier every round, and by the third one you are no longer persuading anybody to show up.
Whatever you pick, decide before you build it whether it lives on somewhere afterwards. A session that becomes an evergreen page keeps earning; a session that exists only as a calendar invite is gone the following week. That decision costs nothing at the start and cannot be made retroactively once the recording has gone out unedited.
The Legal Bit That Applies to Both of You
When you mail your list about something you built with a partner, or when they mail theirs about yours, that email is commercial email and the rules apply.
The Federal Trade Commission’s compliance guide for the CAN-SPAM Act states that each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $53,088. The part that matters specifically for partnership work is the next sentence, which says more than one person may be held responsible, and that both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that originated the message may be legally responsible.
Read that again if you run promotions. Your partner’s list hygiene is your exposure. In practice I ask two questions before any promotion, which are whether the list is genuinely opted in and whether unsubscribes are honored promptly. Nobody has ever been offended by the question, and one answer has stopped me proceeding.
The Mistake I Made for Years
For a long time I treated co-marketing as a lead-generation activity and judged every collaboration on how many people came across. On that measure most of them looked mediocre, and I nearly stopped doing them.
What I was missing is that the audience is the smaller half of the return. The larger half is that you now have a working relationship with somebody, tested under mild pressure, where you have both seen how the other behaves when a deadline moves or a platform breaks. That is the qualification you cannot get from a coffee, and it is what makes the next thing possible, whether the next thing is a promotion, an introduction, or a referral three years later.
Once I started choosing partners on whether I wanted a long relationship with them rather than on the size of their audience, the collaborations got better and so did everything downstream of them. The counterintuitive part is that the audience numbers improved too, because a partner who genuinely wants the thing to work promotes it properly.
Measuring It Without Lying to Yourself
Registrations and attendance are the vanity pair. They tell you the promotion worked, not whether the collaboration did.
I look at three things instead. How many people from the partner’s side stayed on my list after 60 days, because that is the actual asset. Whether the partner would do it again, which I ask directly. And whether the relationship produced a second thing, an introduction, a mention, an invitation, in the following quarter. That third one is the compounding, and it is invisible in campaign reporting.
Set expectations from the low end. A good co-marketing session with a well-matched partner adds a modest number of genuinely interested people. Run four a year with people you like and the effect at the end of the year is not modest at all.
Where This Sits Alongside Everything Else
Co-marketing is the patient half of partnership work. It builds the relationships and the audience that make promotions possible later, and on its own it will not hit a revenue target this quarter.
If you need revenue this quarter, run a promotion instead and be honest that that is what you are doing. If you are building a business you want to still be enjoying in five years, do both, and put the co-marketing in first. That sequencing is most of how I think about scaling without ads, and it is why podcasts and speaking work the way they do as an inbound channel rather than a promotional one.
The room where I see this happen fastest is the Flow Mastermind, which is the year-long version of this rather than a one-off. A couple of days in the right room is enough to have the three good conversations that turn into next year’s collaborations, which is a strange thing to say about an event and the honest reason it works.
If you want the background on how I came to work this way rather than through funnels, that is on the about page.
The ways of working together are set out separately if you have already decided and just want to know which door.
FAQ
What is an example of co-marketing?
Two people who serve a similar audience without competing run a joint session, record it, and each send it to their own list. Neither is selling the other’s product. Both names are on the asset and both audiences see it. A shared guide, a co-hosted workshop, or a jointly produced series all work the same way. The test for whether it is co-marketing rather than a promotion is simple. If nobody is being sold to, it is co-marketing.
What exactly is co-branding?
Co-branding puts two brands on a single product or offering, usually as a lasting arrangement rather than a campaign. It is a product and legal decision rather than a marketing tactic, and it involves shared rights, shared liability and usually a contract. For a coaching, consulting or course business it is rarely the right instrument. What people generally want when they say co-branding is a co-marketing collaboration, which achieves most of the same visibility with none of the entanglement.
Can you give me an example of co-branding?
The textbook examples are consumer products where two companies put both marks on one item and sell it as a single thing. In a services context the closest equivalent is a jointly delivered program that carries both names and both parties’ obligations, sold as one offering. Notice how much heavier that is than a joint webinar. That weight is the whole difference, and it is why I steer almost everyone toward the lighter version first.