PART 1

Introduction to Co-Marketing


Co-marketing is a powerful promotional tool that allows several brands to all grow their businesses simultaneously.

You may have heard of co-branding before, and this is different than co-marketing.

What is Co-Branding?

Companies have been co-branding for years. Nike partnered up with Apple to create the ultimate work-out and music experience. Hershey's partnered with Betty Crocker to create the chocolateiest brownie ever. These two companies combined their products together to create an even more valuable product.
Source: HubSpot

So co-branding is where two or more brands work together to create a product or service, or to make a product even better than it already is. In Apple’s case, they partnered with Nike back in 2006 to launch the Nike+iPod, which allowed the iPod to talk with certain Nike+ footwear products to track your workouts.

Co-marketing is different though.

[Co-Marketing is] the opportunity for two brands to work together on promotional efforts with a co-branded offer. In a co-marketing partnership, both companies promote a piece of content or a product, and share results of that promotion with each other.”
Source: HubSpot

So picture this: you want to run a sweepstakes or contest to promote your business and your products and drive in new email subscribers and sales. Now, how much better would that promotion be if you had a second business promoting your offer to their audience as well? What about a third business promoting the offer? This is a big "ah-hah", lightbulb-overoyour-head epihany for most people.


With co-marketing, you are able to unlock the door to entirely new audiences, and the cost to do so is very low compared to other forms of marketing.


Remember, you could use co-marketing for almost anything: to market new products or services, to promote courses, books, videos, and even events too.

In this guide, we’re going to show you how to use co-marketing to launch successful sweepstakes and contests.

You’ll learn how to acquire partners for your campaign, how to setup a campaign with multiple partners, how to market the campaign, and everything you can think of in between.

Meet your Co-Marketing Guru


Lauren Applewick from Netted

Lauren Appelwick

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Lauren is the Marketing + Partnerships Director at Webby Media Group, which produces The Webby Awards and Netted by the Webbys. Netted is a daily newsletter and a can't-miss resource for the best apps, products, and services the Internet has to offer.

She has grown Netted by the Webbys newsletter list by over 300%, thanks in part to the ViralSweep platform.

See What Lauren Says

"Partner promotions are great for list building because you can easily triple your distribution while keeping the cost of acquisition incredibly low."


Lauren has been an active user of ViralSweep for over a year, and she's run over 50 co-marketing sweepstakes. As someone who has run successful promotions for years, garnering hundreds of thousands of impressions and entries, we’ve caught up with Lauren to pick her brain to find out how she manages to pull off these co-marketing promotions, and how you can, too.

But first, we wanted to know why Lauren prefers partner promotions over just running a promotion where only her brand is involved.

“Single-brand promotions are great if the objective is to generate activity within your own audience. (e.g. Hosting a giveaway on behalf of a sponsor, or converting newsletter subscribers to Twitter followers.) But they're not always successful or efficient when it comes to list building.

Partner promotions are great for list building because you can easily triple your distribution while keeping the cost of acquisition incredibly low.”

Lauren’s right, while running a single promotion with just your brand can be successful, it doesn’t beat having multiple brands promoting a single offer, which opens the door to multiple audiences that you could only previously access by paying for advertising.

The first step in getting a partner promotion started is to identify and acquire partners.

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Part 2: Partner Acquisition

On to Part 2