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In the past few years, Instagram has quickly become the go-to social network. And if you think it’s just middle and high schoolers are the ones using the app, think again: Pew Research Center reported in 2015 that 26% of adult internet users use Instagram. Compare that with the 23% of adult internet users who use Twitter.

What’s more, 53% of adults ages 18–29 years old say they use the app every single day.

To help beginners and advanced Instagram users alike familiarize themselves with the platform, we’ve put together a list of 15 of the lesser-known tips and features Instagram has to offer. 

Whether you’re a recruiter looking to showcase your company’s culture, a marketer in the ecommerce industry, or an individual looking to take your Instagram game to the next level, there are tips and features in here for you. (I think we can all agree #4 is a game changer.)

And for further reading, check out this list of the 11 best photo and video editing apps for mobile.

Note: Before getting started, make sure you’re operating on the latest version of Instagram — version 7.13.1.

15 Hidden Instagram Hacks & Features

1) Get notifications when your favorite people post.

Never want to miss an Instagram post from your favorite people again? You can choose to get a notification every time a specific users post a new photo. All you have to do is turn on notifications for each user individually.

To turn on notifications for a specific user: Visit that user’s profile, and open up one of their posts. Then, click the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of the post, and choose “Turn on post notifications” from the menu that appears.

Want to turn post notifications off? Just follow those same steps.

Note: If you followed these instructions and still aren’t receiving notifications, double-check that you’ve allowed notifications from the Instagram app in your phone’s settings. Here’s how:

• To allow notifications on iPhone/iPad: Go to “Settings,” then “Notifications.” Choose “Instagram” and then turn on the setting to “Allow Notifications.”
• To allow notifications on Android: Go to “Settings,” then scroll down and choose “Apps,” then “Instagram.” Select the option to show notifications.

2) See all the posts you’ve Liked.

Ever wanted to see the posts you’ve Liked, all in one place? All you have to do is go to your own profile and click the “Options” button (a gear icon on iPhone/iPad and three dots on Android). Then, click “Posts You’ve Liked.”

To un-Like any of the posts you’ve Liked, simply go to the post and deselect the “heart” icon below it. The user won’t be notified that you’ve un-Liked their post.

3) See the posts your friends have recently Liked, commented on, and so on.

You already know how to see the posts of yours that others have Liked recently. But what about the posts the people you follow have Liked recently? Or what they’ve commented on others’ photos, for that matter?

To view the recent activity from the people you follow: Click the heart icon at the bottom of the home screen that shows which people have Liked your photos. Then, choose the tab near the top that says “Following.”

4) Look through pictures without worrying about accidentally Liking them.

Live in fear no more. This is more of a hack than a feature, but here goes: To look through someone’s Instagram photos without “double-tap paranoia,” scroll through their feed while on airplane mode. Without internet access, you won’t be able to Like their photo even if you accidentally double-tap it.

The pictures won’t load in the first place if you start on airplane mode, though. You’ll have to go to the feed first so the pictures load, then turn on airplane mode, then start scrolling. When you reach the end and need to load more pictures, simply turn airplane mode off, let more load, and then turn it on again.

To turn on airplane mode on an iPhone/iPad: Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and click the airplane icon. Or, go to “Settings” and then “Wi-Fi,” and switch “Airplane Mode” on.

To turn on airplane mode on an Android device: Swipe down from the top of the screen. Then, swipe from right to left until you see “Settings,” and then touch it. Touch “Airplane Mode” to turn it on.

5) Clear your search history.

I swear this blog post isn’t all about how to convince people you’re not a total creep. But let’s face it: there are times when we all wish we could just clear our search history on Instagram. Luckily, you can.

To clear your search history: Go to your own profile and click the “Options” button (a gear icon on iPhone/iPad and three dots on Android). Scroll down and click “Clear Search History.” When prompted, click “Yes, I’m sure.”

6) Reorder the filters, and hide the ones you don’t use.

If you use Instagram a lot, chances are you have a few favorite filters you use all the time, and others you never touch. To make editing photos easier, you can reorder the filters in your editing window and even hide the ones you never use.

To reorder or hide filters, upload a photo and begin editing it, as you would when editing a new post. When you get to the filters page, scroll to the very far right of your filters options and click “Manage.”

To reorder filters: Simply hold your finger down on the three grey lines on the far right of the filter you’d like to move, and drag it to reorder.

To hide filters: Deselect any filters you’d like to hide by tapping on the white check mark to the right of the filter.

When you’re done, exit the filter manager by tapping the “X” on the top right of your screen.

7) Use Instagram as a photo editor (without having to post anything).

Love Instagram’s filters and editing capabilities, but don’t necessarily want to post the photo to your account right now (or ever)? To use Instagram as a photo editor without posting anything, all you need to do is publish a picture while your phone is on airplane mode.

First, be sure you have “Save Original Photo” turned on in your settings.

Then, turn on airplane mode. Here’s how to do that:

• To turn on airplane mode on an iPhone/iPad: Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and click the airplane icon. Or, go to “Settings” and then “Wi-Fi,” and switch “Airplane Mode” on.
• To turn on airplane mode on an Android device: Swipe down from the top of the screen. Then, swipe from right to left until you see “Settings,” and then touch it. Touch “Airplane Mode” to turn it on.

Next, follow the normal steps to post a photo to Instagram: Upload the photo, edit it, and press “Share.” An error message will appear saying the upload failed, but you’ll be able to find the edited image in your phone’s photo gallery. 

8) Insert line breaks into your bio and captions.

When you write a caption in Instagram, you’ll see the keyboard doesn’t give you an option to press “Enter” or “Return.” The same is true for your bio. So how do all those people put line breaks in there?

Here’s a handy trick I learned from Stephanie in her blog, Life in Limbo: Write out your caption in a different app, copy it, and paste it into Instagram.

Stephanie’s found that this doesn’t work sometimes, but the app with the best outcomes has been the Facebook app. She suggests opening up the Facebook app and creating a new status by clicking “Update Status.” Write your caption in the text box as if you were going to publish it on Facebook, line breaks included. Then, instead of posting it on Facebook, copy the caption and paste it into your Instagram caption or bio. The app should preserve your line breaks.

While this is a great hack, keep in mind that Instagram recently started capping captions at three lines without users having to click “More” to see the whole thing.

9) Hide photos you’ve been tagged in.

When someone tags you in a photo or video on Instagram, it’s automatically added to your profile under “Photos of You,” unless you opt to add tagged photos manually (see the next tip).

To see the posts you’ve been tagged in: Go to your own profile and click the person icon on the far right below your bio.

To hide the posts you’ve been tagged in from your profile: Once you’re looking at the posts you’ve been tagged in, click the three dots in the top right of your screen and choose “Edit Tags.” Then, select the posts you’d like to remove from your profile. When you’re done selecting posts, click “Hide From Profile” at the bottom of your screen. When prompted, click “Hide From Profile” again.

This won’t remove the posts themselves from Instagram, but it will remove them from your profile so you and others can’t access them.

10) Adjust your settings to approve tagged photos before they show up in your profile.

Again, when someone tags a photo or video of you on Instagram, it’ll automatically be added to your profile by default. But you can change that so you can manually select which photos you’re tagged in show up on your profile.

To add tags manually: Go to your own profile and click the “Options” button (a gear icon on iPhone/iPad and three dots on Android). Select “Add Manually.”

Once you choose to add photos to your profile manually, you’ll still be notified when someone tags you in a photo.

To manually add a tagged photo to your profile: Tap on the photo you were tagged in, then tap your username and select “Show on My Profile.” (If you’d rather not, simply choose “Hide from My Profile” instead.)

11) Remove photos from your photo map.

Alright … if you’re seeing this for the first time, I’m about to show you something a little creepy. When you go to your profile and click the location pin icon under your bio, a map will appear, which groups photos by where you were when you posted them.

Here’s what the map looks like. As you can see, you can zoom in on that map to a better idea of the specific location that photo was taken … right down to the street level. Yikes.

If this realization creeps you out, you may want to remove the location data on some or all of your photos.

(Note: This is different from simply removing the geotag from an individual photo. Here, we’re removing all the location data that Instagram recorded and attached to a photo at the time that you took it. If you geotagged the photo, it’ll remove the geotag, too. If you didn’t geotag the photo, it would still have shown up on the map if your phone settings let Instagram know your location, so this step would remove the rest of its location data.)

Luckily, Instagram doesn’t make you go through individual photos to remove the location data from a photo. Instead, it lets you remove location data from photos in batches — and right from your map in the Instagram app.

To remove location data from photos: Go to your profile and click the location pin icon under your bio.

From there, you’ll see the map that groups photos by where you were when you posted them. You can zoom in and out on different parts of the map to get photos’ more specific locations.

When you’ve narrowed in on which group of photos you’d like to go through to remove location data, click “Edit” at the top right of your map. As shown in the screenshots below, the numbers on the photos will turn from blue (left) to green (right).

Tap a grouping of photos and click “Edit” in the dropdown menu that appears.

A new window will open that displays the photos from that grouping in one place. From there, you can deselect the photos from which you’d like the location data removed — either one by one, or by choosing “Deselect all.”

Once you’ve deselected posts to your liking, click “Done” on the top right of your screen. In the window that appears, click “Confirm.”

POOF — location data will be removed from those photos forever. (Note: When you remove the location data, it’ll be removed permanently.)

(One more note here: The language “Remove 4 geotags?” is admittedly a little confusing. To reiterate, you’re removing the location data from the photo entirely. If you geotagged the photo, it’ll remove the geotag, too. If you didn’t geotag the photo, you’ll be removing the rest of the location data that was attached to that photo when you posted it. In the end, whichever photos you deselect will be removed from your map permanently.)

12) Browse photos taken in certain locations.

One fun thing you can do on Instagram is browse photos taken at a specific location, or taken near your current location. I like to do this when I’m in a particularly beautiful place, or when I want to scroll through photos taken at a specific event or something like that.

Here’s how to do both of these things.

Browse Photos Taken at a Specific Location:

You can either search for a specific place, or you can click into a geotag on an existing photo.

To search for a specific place: Tap the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of your home screen, which will bring you to the general search page. When you click in to the search bar at the top, four tabs will appear. Choose “Places,” and type in the name of a place. When you press “Search,” it’ll show you all the top and recent posts that were geotagged with that location.

To look at photos from a certain geotag: Go to the photo that’s geotagged with that location, and click the geotag. It’ll show you all the top and recent posts that were geotagged with that location.

Browse Photos Taken Near Your Current Location:

Tap the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of your home screen, which will bring you to the general search page. When you click in to the search bar at the top, four tabs will appear. Choose “Places,” and click “Near Current Location.”

Choose which geotag you’d like to browse from the options that appear. Let’s say I chose to browse photos tagged with the HubSpot geotag. When I click “HubSpot” on the menu, I’ll see the top and recent posts that were geotagged with “HubSpot.”

13) Drive traffic to an external website.

One of the biggest frustrations people have with Instagram — especially businesses — is that it isn’t a great platform for driving traffic away from the app to a website, a Twitter page, or somewhere else. Why? Because clickable URLs aren’t allowed anywhere except the single “website” box in your bio.

If you put a URL in a photo caption, it’ll appear as plain text, meaning users would have to painstakingly copy the URL, open a web browser, and paste or type it in there.

One sneaky way to get people to visit your Instagram profile, which is where that one clickable URL is allowed, is to use your photo captions to encourage people to visit your profile for a link. Then, update that URL frequently to point to your latest blog content, YouTube video, product, or offer.

Check out the example below. On the left, the photo caption provides a text call-to-action to visit the user’s profile so you can click the link related to the post. On the right, you’ll see the link itself. Update this link frequently to point to your latest content or offer.

Image Credit: SmartInsights

14) Hide ads you don’t find relevant.

Instagram, like its parent company Facebook, tries to show you ads that are interesting and relevant to you. You might see ads based on people you follow and things you Like on Instagram, your information and interests on Facebook, and the third-party websites and apps you visit.

If you see sponsored posts you don’t find relevant, though, you can let Instagram know and slowly teach its algorithm what you like and don’t like to see.

To hide ads on Instagram: Tap on the “Sponsored” label on the top right of any ad, and choose “Hide This.”

From there, it’ll ask you to share why you don’t want to see the ad anymore.

You can also opt out of seeing ads based on sites and apps off of Instagram and Facebook from your device’s settings. Note that even if you choose to opt out of seeing these types of ads, you’ll still see ads based on your Instagram and Facebook activity.

• To limit ad tracking on an iPhone/iPad: Go to “Settings” and choose “Privacy,” then “Advertising.” From there, choose the option to “Limit Ad Tracking”

• To turn off interest-based ads on Android: Go to “Google Settings,” then “Ads.” From there, choose the option to “Turn off interest-based ads.”

15) Send photos privately to your friends.

Sharing posts with all your followers or with the public isn’t the only way to share photos on Instagram. You can also share them with individual users or with groups, kind of like a Facebook message or text.

You can either send a new photo to friends, or send a photo that you or someone else has already posted.

To send a new photo privately: Upload a photo and begin editing it, as you would when editing a new post. When you get to the “Share to” page, choose “Direct” at the top of your screen. From there, you can pick and choose whom you’d like to send the photo to, whether it’s an individual, a new group, or an existing group. When you click “Send,” it’ll start a direct conversation with that person or group.

You can access your direct messages at any time by clicking the mailbox icon at the top right of your homepage.

To send an existing photo privately: First, open the photo. It can be your own photo or someone else’s, as long as they have a public account. Next, click the curved arrow icon to the right of the Like and comment icons underneath the photo. From there, select whom you’d like to send it to. You can add a message if you’d like, and then click “Send.” 

What other lesser-known Instagram features do you know about? Share with us in the comments.

A few weeks ago, HubSpot deliberately unsubscribed 250,000 people from its marketing blog and reduced its list from 550,000 to 300,000. Crazy, huh? As you can imagine, we had a lot of anxiety about this test (but forced ourselves to go through with it, anyway).

As it turns out, the decision was a good one. What we found was that ‘trimming the fluff’ improved engagement. Not to mention, we tackled our big ‘graymail’ problem: because HubSpot was sending more than four emails to certain segments per day (and who has time to read that many emails from one company these days?).

Digital media is unchartered territory, and HubSpot had reached an inflection point that few companies are fortunate enough to experience: our audience grew so big that it was actually time to trim down and laser-focus on a core subset. But we didn’t want to jeopardize are web traffic by trimming down our list either.

Long story short: we didn’t lose any web traffic, and we actually improved the quality of our responses from customers, too. It’s a powerful lesson for our company–that less email marketing yields an overall net positive outcome. Here’s how this perspective applies to the world of digital media.

Digital Media Has Historically Been a Numbers Game

It’s always been about website traffic, reach, name, and reputation–in other words, behemoth visibility. But today? Marketers are realizing more and more that ROI comes from precision in targeting. The principle of ‘casting your net wide’ is obsolete: today, the name of the game is ‘reaching the right audiences at the right points of their buyer journeys.’

Digital media companies need to appease two stakeholders: advertisers and audiences. You can’t prioritize one group over the other, and you can’t neglect either set. What both groups want is the same thing: relevant, targeted messaging. It’s the media companies that can deliver this promise that will come out strong. Precision is the value proposition of the future–but many publishers are still stuck in ‘big numbers games of the past.’

Things need to change–which is why publishers are exploring new revenue models that are based on personalization and higher targeting levels. For more information on these strategies, I suggest looking at HubSpot’s 2015 Publisher Benchmarks Report.

So How Does This All Tie Back to Email?

Email marketing is consistently ranked among the highest ROI channels out there. But it’s also getting more and more flooded, with consumers feeling bombarded with information overload.

According to one report, one-third of marketers think that personalization tech will be most important to marketing in the future. With industries moving in this direction, it’s important that media companies keep up. It’s the only way that publishers can (1) stay relevant to digital audiences and (2) deliver ROI to advertisers and other stakeholders.

Email is a high-performing channel because it’s the most direct way for companies to connect with their target audiences. But these same readers are bombarded with so much information that they’re missing key details in your messages.

It’s time to make a change: trim down your list to make every audience interaction count more.

How to Get Started Trimming Your Email List

The process won’t be straightforward. For instance, you won’t want to create a sudden jolt to your audience composition or subscriber base. You want to be methodical and make sure that you’re creating a value-add–not a deficit.

Start by conducting a landscape analysis. Here are some questions that your team should explore when trimming your email list: 

• Who are your highest engaged audiences and why?
• What are some reasons why subscribers may be interested in more or fewer emails?
• What types of email content are your audiences finding most valuable, and why?

With an understanding of this contextual data, and the ability to tie it back to subscriber emails or personal profiles, you’ll be well positioned to ‘do more with your lists’—to reduce the headcount of your subscriber base while improving your marketing efficiency.

You’ll want to take this step by establishing specific goals and an action plan around the following:

Develop Subscriber Personas

Most media companies are still blasting their entire lists with the same, one-size-fits-all messaging. But as audiences get bigger, they also become more diverse. It’s critical that publishers pay attention to these different needs and craft email messaging that’s relevant. For a guide to developing subscriber personas, check out this template and guided exercise from HubSpot.

Improve Quality of Email Marketing Content and Ads

It’s common for subscribers to treat their email lists as afterthoughts and add-ons to their core website browsing experiences. But consumers are finding themselves more time strapped and attention spans are shrinking. Email is one of the most powerful ways to maintain a steady, ongoing conversations with audiences. Don’t just throw together any email marketing content or ads: make sure that every word and graphic adds value to your subscribers’ core experiences.

Improve the Substance of your Messaging

This point is key. It’s not only invaluable from a user experience perspective: it will also improve your email deliverability, spam, and complaint rates. As a publisher, you already know this—it pays to have exceptional content. Your email list is no exception to this perspective.

Think Small to Win Big

After reading this blog post, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and wonder what to do. How can you ensure that you have the right plan in place and to get the ball rolling? The answer is simple: focus on making small improvements every day. Begin making subtle improvements now, even if you’re still defining your brand and revenue strategy. Especially with content marketing, the little things add up.

As marketers, we are always looking for new ways to get more bang for our buck. Co-marketing allows two or more companies to work on a project together, doing less work for more reward. Who doesn’t want that? 

So to help get you started, we’ve collected a ton of tips and tricks below for creating a successful co-marketing campaign and relationship, from start to finish. 

Co-Marketing

Co-marketing is when two companies collaborate on promotional efforts for a co-branded offer. In a co-marketing partnership, both companies promote a piece of content or product, and share the results of that promotion. By levering the relationship and reach of a partner, co-marketing campaigns are designed to deliver more leads, buzz, and awareness, with less work.

Download our free marketing campaign checklist here to make sure you don’t miss a step in campaign planning.

Co-Marketing vs. Co-Branding

You’ve probably heard the terms “co-marketing” and “co-branding” thrown around quite a bit — but what’s the difference? Is there one?

Turns out, they’re actually pretty similar.

While co-branding refers to a partnership in which two companies combine their products or expertise to create an even more valuable product or offer (Think: Doritos Locos Tacos), co-marketing takes things a step further.

Co-marketing campaigns provide teams with an opportunity to work together to promote a shared offer — such as a co-branded product or piece of content. In a co-marketing partnership, both companies promote that offer, and share the results of that promotion with each other.

Why Should You Do Co-Marketing?

Co-marketing helps brands build a new audience, and get a new type of content in front of their audience. The most common form of co-marketing is for two companies who have similar audiences to work together on a piece of content, and promote that content to both audiences.

This content — ebook, webinar, templates, etc. — typically sits behind a lead generation form to capture contact information. The goal is for both partners to share the downloads from the offer, thus getting twice the leads that they normally would. 

But that’s not the only way to carry out a co-marketing campaign. Straying from the approach above, two partners might agree to host an event together and split the costs. Or, on a smaller scale, partners could agree to a series of guest blog posts on each other’s sites. 

The most important thing when deciding to do co-marketing with a certain partner, is to make sure the purpose and goal of the project is similar for both parties. If one partner wants leads, but another is looking for ticket sales to their annual event, you will be hard pressed to find a project that satisfies both needs. 

When determining whether or not to do co-marketing with a partner, I look for the following things:

1. Do they have a similar type of audience that my company has and wants to grow? If not, the value I would get out of promoting our content to their audience may not be worth it.
2. How many new leads am I going to get from this partnership? Is it large enough to be worth my time? Only you can decide what is worth it. 
3. Do they have some expertise that I don’t have? Let’s say my audience is dying to know more about how to optimize for local SEO, but my knowledge base is limited to general SEO knowledge. Maybe I partner with an expert on local SEO. 
4. Does their brand and name have a good reputation? Don’t partner with people who will bring down your credibility.
5. Are the people you are working with enjoyable to work with? This is a new one I added recently, but it is important. Sure, co-marketing is a job, but it should still be enjoyable. Look for partners that you actually look forward to working with.

How to Find the Right Co-Marketing Partners to Work With

In any co-marketing relationship, you want to make sure there is mutual benefit to working together. Check out tips in determining if a partner is a good fit here.

Once you determine that you’d like to work with a partner, it’s time to come up with an idea pitch. When approaching this step, always do your homework first: Learn what you can about the company and their audience, tailor your ideas to what would be appealing to them, and show them the value you are going to provide.

Odds are, if you are the one pitching the idea, you are the small fish and they are the big fish. In other words, it’s easy for them to say no. To combat this, go the extra mile to show them that they’d be crazy not to work with you. 

If you are on the other end being pitched to, remain open to ideas. Even if the person pitching you isn’t a pro at this, don’t completely disregard it. If it’s totally unrealistic, be honest with them. 

And if the idea sounds interesting but it’s just not a great time for you to take on the project, consider adding them to a backlog of people you want to work with in the future.

How to Plan a Co-Marketing Agreement

You’ve found a partner to work with — that’s great! — but what’s the next step? 

For things to run smoothly, it’s important that you set expectations and a plan for your project. In the end, this process will help to ensure that both partners hold up their end of the bargain. Here’s what we suggest:

• Be very clear on your goals. If you want leads, make sure they know that, and that they also want leads. If you don’t, neither partner will get value out of the relationship. 
• Agree on the topic and theme of the content. Decide on a topic that is going to be mutually beneficial and appeal to both audiences. 
• Determine the timeline that makes sense for both partners. For a larger piece of content like an ebook or webinar, I suggest doubling however long it takes your team to write one on your own. This will allow for time for approvals and feedback.
• Decide what your strong skills are. It is likely that between the two companies and teams, some people are better at certain tasks than others. If you assign tasks based on who is good at what, the process will be less painful, and much more efficient. 
• Write up an agreement that covers the basics:
  • Topic you will be covering
  • Timeline for the project
  • Goals
  • Ownership of content and assets (who is creating what?)
  • Where the content will be hosted
  • Lead sharing agreements 
  • Timeframe for promotion
  • Promotional plan

With an agreement in place from the start, you have something to point back at if anything goes wrong or any miscommunications arise. This can be a legal document if your legal team wants to get involved, or a non-legal document of good faith.  

How to Handle Co-Marketing Content Creation 

Time to decide what type of co-marketing project you’re going to work on. Below are a few common examples to help get the wheels turning. 

Choosing a Project Format

Ebooks 

An ebook is a very common form of co-marketing content because it is easy to split up the work — someone lays out the design, someone else writes the content, etc. Below is an example of an ebook HubSpot created with the LinkedIn Sales Solutions team:

Blog Posts

Co-creating a blog post is one of the lower effort ways to do a co-marketing project. Here is an example of a Q&A hosted by SEMRush featuring Buzzsumo’s director Steve Rayson:

Webinars

Webinars are often the go-to type of co-marketing content. Why? Well, it’s pretty easy to find an expert who is willing to talk for an hour on the topic of their expertise. It is also a well-known format for educational materials.

Below is an example of a webinar we hosted with Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick on how to make amazing social media posts: 

Videos

Co-creating a video with a partner is a great way to have your message heard. Below is an example of a video from MOZ and Wistia, on how to use video:

Twitter Chats

A Twitter chat is a virtual event where people gather to discuss a common topic. For example, Google and Twitter partnered on a campaign about Small Business Saturday. In the week leading up to SBS, they dished out helpful advice on Twitter using a common hashtag, and then aggregated all Tweets on this webpage:

Online and Offline Events

Co-marketing can also take form in larger events, both in person and online. Last year Unbounce hosted the first ever #CROday, including speakers from around the globe who hosted online events and webinars around the topic of CRO.

Organizing the Project Execution

Before you get started …

Once you have chosen your topic and form of co-marketing, start with a shared doc to do a brain dump and outline your plan. I use a Google Doc from the start that I share with the partner, allowing them to add content if they have something of value, or comment on what is there. In terms of timing, allow both teams about a week or so to hash out their ideas.

While you’re creating the content …

Once you have agreed on the outline, your writer can jump right in and start the content creation. Typically I split the creation of content between partners by having one partner write and another design, so that voice and design are consistent. The other option is to have each partner write up and design half the ebook, and then fuse the two together. Keep in mind that this will require a thorough consistency check once both parts are brought together. 

After the first draft is complete, send to the partner to give feedback or approve. Give ample time between a writing due date and a feedback due date. I like to give a week if I have planned far enough in advance to allow for this.  

While you’re waiting to finalize the content … 

During the content finalization period, have your promotional team begin creating the assets needed to promote the content, such as the landing page, emails, social media images, infographics, SlideShares, blog posts, etc. Since working with a partner will likely take longer than a normal content creation process, this will help to save you some time.  

Don’t know how to approach landing page creation and promotion? Don’t worry. We’ll dive into that next. 

How to Create a Shared Landing Page 

Both your content and landing page should be co-branded — and it should be obvious. This means using both partner’s logos in the header, and mentioning both partners throughout the content.

Since you will likely be sharing the offer’s downloads with your partner, you will need to consult with your legal team about the proper disclaimer to include at the bottom of the form. For example, ours simply states that we are authorized to share their information with the specific partner after they download this ebook:

To keep things organized within your marketing automation tool, we also suggest that you come up with a unique code for naming these co-branded pages to differentiate them from your existing ones. Not to mention, this will make it easy to locate them via internal search.

How to Promoting Your Content

It’s important to set an agreed upon launch date with the partner. On this date, both teams’ email, social campaigns, and blog promotion should start.

About two or three weeks prior to the launch date, have a brainstorm with all people involved from both teams to discuss what promotional tactics you will use and the timeframe for promotion. Will you both promote the same hashtag on Twitter? What audiences will you be promoting it to?

Below are a few examples of how you can promote your content across various inbound marketing channels:

Blog Posts

Blog posts are a great way to drive traffic to your upcoming co-marketing offers. At HubSpot, we promote our content on the blog in two ways. First, on the launch day, we create what we call a “launch post.” These posts are different then our normal educational posts, as they run only a few hundred words, and their main purpose is to inform our audience that we have an exciting new offer.

To set the expectation, we allude to this in the title:  

The second way we promote our content in a blog post is through the use of tweetable text and an eye-catching call-to-action:

Social Media

Promoting your content on social media is a great way to drive awareness for your campaign and attract visitors to your site. For added value, don’t forget to tag your co-marketing partner in the tweet. Below is an example of a tweet sent out by Twitter to promote a webinar we did with them on holiday marketing best practices:

You can even include both partners’ logos right on the image — check out what HubSpot did to promote the same Twitter webinar above:

Email

Email is still one of the best ways to get a large number of people to attend your co-marketing event, or download your piece of content. Keep emails visual, and be clear that this piece of content is co-marketing, meaning there are two companies involved. The last thing you want is for people to be surprised when they start hearing from both companies. Check out the email we sent out promoting a webinar with Unbounce:  

To track your partner’s promotions efforts vs. your own, be sure to create unique tracking URLs. This will help you determine which leads came from where. For more on how to do that using HubSpot, check out this resource. 

How to Measuring Your Co-Marketing Efforts

Your campaign is live and being promoted — good work! Now it’s time to look back and see if your initial efforts were successful.

First and foremost, was the original goal hit? If so, good. If not, why? What happened? Did you fail to hit the mark, or was it the partner? Keep these things in mind when making decisions to work with them a second time. 

Next, look to see if the leads generated were as high of quality as the leads generated by your own, individual content. Things to consider here are: lead-to-customer conversion rate, quality rating within your automation tool and CRM, and whether or not your sales team felt the leads were up to par.

Finally, take a step back and measure in a more qualitative way: Was the partnership successful? Was it difficult to work with them, or smooth? Did you get high quality content that you may not have been able to make without them? What worked? What didn’t? 

How to Follow Up With Your Co-Marketing Partner

Now that your project is well under way — or maybe even completed — it’s time to follow up with your partner.

If you hosted the landing page on your website, take the initiative to send over the leads generated from the form, as set up in your agreement. Often times, the easiest way to do this is to simply download the CSV file of leads from your database. If you are looking for a less manual process, I suggest using a tool like Zapier to send specific leads from your marketing automation platform to your partner’s. 

Once that’s taken care of, be sure to keep in touch. While it typically doesn’t make sense to do one project after another with the same partner, there may be an opportunity to work together again in the future.

What are your best tips for executing a co-marketing partnership? Share them below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

 

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