Brandcurve - branding and marketing

Promote Your Business with Co-Branding

by Susan Gunelius on August 11th, 2007

Co-branding is a broad topic covering a wide variety of marketing strategies that can help to boost a business’s sales and profits.  Today, I was searching the internet about a completely different topic when I came across a post on Avalanche Internet Marketing’s blog from April that spoke very succinctly about promoting your website through co-branding on physical products. 

In the post, Matt Larsen describes an effective co-branding campaign wherein a company that provides reviews of developmental toys advertised their website inside a Diaper Genie.  Not only is his story personal and funny, but his take on co-branding on physical products to promote websites is great as well. 

Matt provides the following action plan to create this kind of co-branding program:

1. Create a list of related, but noncompetitive companies & products.
2. Find out what physical products they have.
3. Brainstorm innovative ways to get your direct mail piece viewed if you were able to get it packaged with the product.
4. Contact the vendor to see if they are willing to add it. There will probably be some cost for this, but you may be able to barter if you can reciprocate with something of value.
5. Create a direct mail piece with a special offer code that you can track back to your product, or a special URL like, “Take our sales self test at http://www.ashertraining.com/salestest”
6. Test the direct mail piece with the use of pay-per-click advertising to get quick feedback on its success rate.
7. Submit the direct mail piece to the company for inclusion.
8. Monitor your results via a quality analytics package.
9. Rake in money and laugh all the way to the bank.

Again, I think Matt did a great job of summing up the basic steps of creating a co-branding program.  I think co-branding is a viable option for both large and small companies.  In fact, I think it’s often overlooked for “bigger” promotions, but co-branding can be a relatively inexpensive way to build awareness of your brand and product, generate leads and boost sales and profits (including co-branding on physical products to promote websites).

What do you think?  Is there anything you think should be added to Matt’s action plan?

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POSTED IN: promotion