Co-Marketing Strategy for SaaS: 2026 Guide

A co-marketing strategy is a plan for two or more companies to jointly create and promote campaigns that reach both audiences. For SaaS companies, that usually means partnering with a complementary product — not a competitor — to produce webinars, ebooks, landing pages, or events that neither could pull off alone.

Unlike affiliate or referral programs, where one party pays the other for leads, co-marketing is a two-way investment. Both companies contribute resources, both promote, and both benefit from the shared audience. When done right, co-marketing campaigns generate higher-quality leads at lower cost than most paid channels.

This guide covers everything you need to build a co-marketing strategy that actually drives pipeline: how to find the right partners, which campaign types work best, how to structure agreements, how to measure results, and how co-marketing fits into a broader multi-channel partnership approach.

What Is Co-Marketing (and Why SaaS Companies Are Doubling Down)

Co-marketing is when two companies jointly create and promote a piece of content, campaign, or event to each other's audiences. Both brands appear as equal partners. Both invest effort — whether that's content creation, email promotion, ad spend, or sales follow-up. And both walk away with leads.

This is fundamentally different from other partnership models. In an affiliate program, one company pays commissions for referred sales. In a referral program, customers earn rewards for bringing in new users. In a creator partnership, an influencer promotes your product to their audience. In all three cases, the flow of value is primarily one-directional. Co-marketing flips the model: both brands contribute, both promote, both benefit.

SaaS companies are investing more in co-marketing in 2026 for three reasons. First, customer acquisition costs keep rising — the average SaaS CAC has increased 60% over the past five years, making paid channels increasingly expensive. Second, organic reach is harder to earn alone, and partnering with a trusted brand gives you instant credibility with a new audience. Third, the growth of integration ecosystems means SaaS products increasingly complement each other, creating natural co-marketing opportunities between tools that share customers but don't compete.

How to Find the Right Co-Marketing Partners

The single biggest factor in co-marketing success is partner selection. A great campaign with the wrong partner produces low-quality leads. A mediocre campaign with the right partner still drives pipeline. Here's how to identify and evaluate potential co-marketing partners.

Audience Overlap Without Product Overlap

The ideal co-marketing partner serves the same buyer persona you do — but with a different product. If you sell CRM software, your ideal partner might be an email marketing platform, a proposal tool, or a sales enablement solution. Your customers likely use both products, which makes the partnership feel natural to both audiences.

To assess overlap, ask:

• Do our ideal customer profiles share the same industry, company size, and buying role?
• Would our customers benefit from using both products together?
• Is there an integration (or potential for one) between our products?
• Are we competing for the same budget, or do we sit in different budget categories?

If you answer yes to the first three and no to the last, you've found a strong candidate. Browse your existing integration partners and technology ecosystem first — companies you already work with technically are the fastest path to a co-marketing partnership.

Evaluating Partner Readiness

Not every company with audience overlap is ready to co-market. Evaluate potential partners against these criteria before reaching out:

• Marketing capacity: Do they have a marketing team that can actually execute? A one-person startup may want to partner but can't deliver assets on time.
• Content quality: Review their blog, webinars, and social presence. Will their content quality match yours? Mismatched quality hurts both brands.
• Audience size: Their email list, social following, and web traffic don't need to match yours exactly, but a 10:1 ratio creates an imbalanced partnership where one side contributes far more reach.
• Lead-sharing willingness: Some companies are happy to co-create content but refuse to share the leads it generates. Clarify this before investing time.
• Track record: Have they done co-marketing before? Partners with experience execute faster and set realistic expectations.

Use a partner portal to organize partner profiles, track conversations, and manage the evaluation process as your co-marketing program scales.

Starting the Conversation

The best co-marketing pitches lead with value for the other company, not your own goals. Instead of "We want to get in front of your audience," try "We've noticed our customers frequently use [their product] alongside ours — here's a campaign idea that would help both our audiences solve [specific problem]."

Where to find co-marketing partners:

• Your integration ecosystem: Companies you already integrate with are warm leads for co-marketing
• Industry events and communities: SaaS Slack groups, conferences, and mastermind groups surface potential partners
• Complementary content creators: Companies publishing content for your target audience but solving different problems
• Customer stack analysis: Survey your customers about what other tools they use daily — those vendors are partnership candidates

5 Co-Marketing Campaign Types That Drive Pipeline

Not all co-marketing campaigns require the same level of effort — or produce the same results. Here are the five most effective formats for SaaS companies, ranked from highest investment to lowest.

Joint Webinars

Joint webinars are the workhorse of SaaS co-marketing. Each company promotes the webinar to their email list, you both appear as speakers, and you split the registrant list afterward. A typical joint webinar doubles your registrations compared to running one alone, and attendees perceive higher value from hearing two expert perspectives. The key is choosing a topic that sits at the intersection of both products — not a product demo for either.

Co-Authored Content

Gated ebooks, research reports, and comprehensive guides carry more weight when two brands co-author them. The content feels more authoritative, and both companies gate it behind their own landing pages — generating leads for each side. The best co-authored content involves original research or data that neither company could produce alone, such as a joint benchmark report using anonymized data from both platforms.

Integration Launch Campaigns

When two SaaS products build an integration, the launch itself becomes a co-marketing event. Both companies announce via email, social media, and blog posts. A shared landing page explains the integration's benefits and drives sign-ups for both products. Integration launches are particularly effective because they provide a concrete, product-level reason for both audiences to care — it's not just thought leadership, it's a tangible improvement to their workflow.

Co-Branded Landing Pages and Bundles

A co-branded landing page showcases the combined value of both products for a specific use case or audience segment. This works especially well when the two products create a workflow together — "Use [Product A] for X and [Product B] for Y to achieve Z." Bundles take this further with joint pricing or trial offers, though these require more alignment on commercial terms.

Newsletter Swaps and Guest Content

The lowest-investment entry point for co-marketing. You write a guest article for your partner's blog (or newsletter), and they write one for yours. Each piece includes a CTA driving readers to the guest company's product. Newsletter swaps are particularly effective for testing a partnership before committing to a larger campaign — if the audience response is strong, you have data to justify a joint webinar or ebook.

Track the performance of each campaign type using multi-channel tracking and compare results across partners with cross-channel analytics.

How to Structure a Co-Marketing Agreement

A co-marketing agreement doesn't need to be a 30-page legal document. But it does need to exist in writing. Even a one-page brief prevents the misunderstandings that kill partnerships — especially around who gets the leads.

What to Include

Every co-marketing agreement should cover these elements:

• Campaign scope: What exactly are you building together? Define the format, topic, and target audience.
• Roles and responsibilities: Who creates which assets? Who handles design, copywriting, landing pages, email sends?
• Brand guidelines: How each brand should be represented. Include logo usage, color requirements, and approval workflows.
• Lead sharing: How registrant/lead data will be split, formatted, and delivered. This is the most important clause.
• Promotion commitments: Minimum promotional activities each side agrees to (e.g., 2 emails, 3 social posts, 1 blog mention).
• Budget and costs: If there are paid elements (ads, tools, event space), who pays for what.
• Timeline: Key milestones with dates — content drafts, review rounds, launch date, post-campaign debrief.
• Success metrics: What KPIs define success for both parties? Agree upfront so the debrief is productive.
• Termination clause: How either party can exit if things aren't working, without burning the relationship.

Use commission tracking to manage any revenue-sharing components of your co-marketing agreements, and reference the Growth Partnership Framework for structuring partnerships that scale beyond a single campaign.

Lead Sharing Models

The lead-sharing model is the make-or-break element of any co-marketing agreement. Three common approaches:

• 50/50 split: Both companies get the complete registrant list. Simple, transparent, and the most common model. Works best when audience sizes are roughly equal. The downside: both sales teams may contact the same lead, creating a disjointed experience.
• Qualified-lead routing: Both companies get all registrants, but you agree to route only qualified leads to sales. Leads who engage with Company A's content go to Company A's SDR team; leads who engage with Company B's content go to Company B's team. This requires more coordination but produces better lead quality.
• Mutual access with ownership rules: Both companies access the registrant data, but leads are "owned" based on pre-agreed criteria — typically by which company's audience the lead came from (determined by UTM source). This prevents duplicate outreach and is the most sophisticated approach.

Running the Campaign — Step-by-Step Playbook

A great co-marketing strategy fails without disciplined execution. Here's a week-by-week playbook for running a joint campaign from planning to follow-up.

Pre-Launch (Weeks 1-2)

• Align on ICP and messaging: Confirm both teams agree on the target audience and the campaign's core message. Misalignment here cascades into every asset.
• Create the campaign brief: One document with scope, roles, timeline, and success metrics. Share it with every stakeholder on both sides.
• Assign ownership: Name one campaign lead per company. These two people are accountable for deadlines and decisions.
• Set up tracking: Create UTM parameters, build dedicated landing pages, and tag leads in your CRM so you can attribute results to this specific campaign. Multi-channel partnership platforms like Elinkages centralize campaign tracking across co-marketing, affiliates, referrals, and creator channels.
• Build assets: Content, landing pages, email copy, social graphics. Build in two review rounds — one for each company.

Launch and Promotion (Weeks 3-4)

• Coordinate cross-channel promotion: Both companies send emails, post on social, and publish blog content on the same day (or within the same window). Synchronized promotion creates momentum — a registrant seeing the campaign from two trusted sources is more likely to sign up.
• Align timing carefully: Time zones, email send times, and social posting schedules should be coordinated. A shared promotional calendar prevents both teams from emailing the same audience on the same morning.
• Monitor early metrics: Track registrations, landing page conversion rates, and email open rates daily during the first week. If one company's promotion is driving 90% of registrations, flag it early and adjust the other side's approach.
• Engage on social: Both companies should amplify each other's posts — likes, comments, reshares. This signals partnership credibility to both audiences and extends organic reach.

Use CRM integrations to sync lead data in real time and the commission calculator to model any revenue-sharing arrangements with your co-marketing partners.

Post-Campaign Follow-Up

• Execute lead sharing: Within 48 hours of campaign close, share the lead list per your agreement. Delay kills lead quality — registrants expect prompt follow-up.
• Run a joint nurture sequence: Instead of both companies blasting leads independently, coordinate a nurture sequence. Lead with value (recap, additional resources) before pitching demos.
• Schedule a debrief: Review performance metrics against the goals set in your brief. What worked? What didn't? What would you do differently? Document everything.
• Plan the next campaign: The best co-marketing partnerships are ongoing, not one-off. If the first campaign performed, propose a follow-up within 2-3 months. Repeat partnerships compound — the second campaign almost always outperforms the first because both teams know each other's processes.

Measuring Co-Marketing ROI

Co-marketing is one of the few channels where ROI can be difficult to measure — not because the results aren't there, but because attribution spans two companies, multiple touchpoints, and longer sales cycles. Here's how to measure it properly.

Metrics That Matter

Track both leading and lagging indicators to get the full picture:

Leading indicators (measure during and immediately after the campaign):

• Landing page traffic and conversion rate
• Webinar registrations and attendance rate
• Email open rates and click-through rates
• Content downloads and social engagement

Lagging indicators (measure 30-90 days post-campaign):

• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated
• Pipeline value created from campaign leads
• Closed-won revenue attributed to the campaign
• CAC comparison: co-marketing leads vs. paid channel leads

Attribution Challenges (and How to Solve Them)

The multi-touch attribution problem is amplified in co-marketing because leads interact with two brands across multiple channels. A prospect might see your partner's social post, click through to the co-branded landing page, attend the webinar, and then visit your site directly two weeks later to request a demo. Which touchpoint gets credit?

Three practical solutions:

• UTM parameters: Tag every co-marketing link with campaign-specific UTMs. Use a consistent naming convention (e.g., utm_campaign=comarketing_[partner]_[campaign]) across both companies.
• Dedicated landing pages: Build unique landing pages for each campaign. This gives you a clean data source for conversion tracking — anyone who converts on that page came from that campaign.
• CRM tagging: Tag every lead generated from a co-marketing campaign in your CRM with the campaign name, partner name, and source. This enables long-term pipeline and revenue attribution even as leads move through multi-week sales cycles.

Use partnership analytics to compare co-marketing performance against your other partnership channels, and multi-channel tracking to unify attribution across all campaign types.

Co-Marketing Within a Multi-Channel Partnership Strategy

Co-marketing is powerful on its own. But it becomes even more effective when it's part of a broader multi-channel partnership strategy that includes affiliates, referrals, and creators. Each channel reinforces the others, creating compounding growth that no single channel can match.

Think of it as a growth ladder. Most SaaS companies start with an affiliate or referral program because the mechanics are straightforward — pay for results. As the program matures, they add creator partnerships for brand awareness and content distribution. Co-marketing typically comes next, layering on top of an established partnership motion with deeper, more strategic collaborations. At each rung, you're building on the infrastructure and relationships from the previous one.

The Growth Partnership Framework sequences channel launches in exactly this way — starting with the channels that prove ROI fastest and expanding into more complex partnership types like co-marketing once the foundation is solid. This approach is more sustainable than trying to launch all four channels at once.

Platforms built for multi-channel partnerships — like Elinkages — let you manage co-marketing alongside affiliate, referral, and creator programs from a single dashboard. This unified view reveals which channels drive the best leads, where partners overlap, and how campaigns across different partnership types interact with each other. For a deeper look at how multi-channel platforms compare, see the partnership management software guide.

Key Takeaways

• Co-marketing is a two-way investment. Both companies create content, both promote it, and both benefit from shared leads — making it fundamentally different from one-directional affiliate or referral programs.
• Partner selection determines campaign success. Look for companies with audience overlap but no product overlap, strong marketing capacity, and a willingness to share leads.
• Start with low-investment campaigns. Newsletter swaps and guest content let you test a partnership before committing to joint webinars or co-authored reports.
• Put the lead-sharing model in writing before launch. The #1 mistake in co-marketing is leaving lead logistics until after the campaign generates results.
• Measure leading and lagging indicators. Track registrations and engagement immediately, but wait 30-90 days for pipeline and revenue attribution to assess true ROI.
• Commit to three campaigns before judging a partnership. The first campaign is a learning exercise; results compound with repetition.