One of the greatest challenges for DTC brands nowadays is coming up with new and exciting ways to market their products and expand their business – especially since more traditional methods are no longer providing the results they used to. In 2023, we reckon one of the best new marketing methods available for brands to try is co-marketing.
Co-marketing is a powerful way to grow your DTC brand by collaborating with other brands and leveraging each other’s resources and expertise. It’s the perfect opportunity to work alongside your competitors instead of against them!
Here are just some of our favourite ways that co-marketing can help to grow your business:
Tap into a New Audience
With two brands, you get two audiences! One of the main benefits of co-marketing is that both companies are able to instantly tap into a completely new market.
If you collaborate with a similar-minded brand, you’re likely to each have a customer base of the same demographic. They’re your competitor for a reason, after all. In this case, it can actually be an advantage. It means that when you advertise your products or services to each other’s audience, it’s more than likely that they’ll take an interest in what you both have to offer.
On the other hand, partnering with another brand that has a different demographic to yours can also allow you to connect with an audience that otherwise wouldn’t have been accessible to you, and help you bring more diversity to your brand. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of campaigns and try working with partners that you might not have considered at first.
Increase Revenue
Not only is co-marketing one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing, but it can also help to increase your revenue.
By partnering with another brand, both you and your competitor have access to a bigger pool of resources and talent for no extra cost. This can be particularly helpful when entering a new market, since partnering with a brand that’s already well-established in that market means you’ll need to spend less time and money building brand awareness and credibility.
Usually finding an audience of people interested in buying your products is a task that can take a lot of effort and a large budget, but by tapping into your partner brands’ customer base and making them aware of your business and your products. You instantly have access to countless new customers who will buy from you and boost your profit!
Learn from another Brand
You can learn from your partner brand’s expertise to inspire your own growth!
Co-marketing is a brilliant opportunity to pull your resources together and experiment with new methods and strategies that you might not have had the chance to before.
It can give you an interesting insight into how other marketing teams work and you’re both likely to learn something new along the way, which isn’t just beneficial during your co-marketing campaign, but for all the projects that your team will work on afterwards.
Don’t be afraid to ask your partners for their insights and feedback on your business or industry – they could have valuable insights or perspectives that you haven’t considered before!
Pay attention to how your partners approach marketing and running their businesses. What strategies do they use that seem to be effective? How do they interact with their customers or clients? You can learn a lot by observing the way they do things.
Data & Insights
Working with another brand can provide you with valuable data and insights to help guide your future marketing and business strategies.
Once your campaign is live, keep a close eye on how it’s going. You can use data and analytics to see what your campaign’s strengths and weaknesses are, and make adjustments where you see fit. There’ll always be something that you’ll learn from the collaboration that you can use to improve your next one.
For example, if you find that a gift with purchase works really well, you could go on afterwards to implement a loyalty scheme for your customers. If a social media cross-promotion works really well, you could then go on to work with even more brands to team up on rotation and leverage that highly engaged audience.
Co-marketing can also provide an opportunity to gather feedback from customers who may not be familiar with your brand, which can really help you to understand the needs and preferences of new customers and inform your marketing efforts in the future.