Case Study: The power of co-branding
Don't have the excess in your pocket for innovative advertising? Why not consider co-branding?
Not every company has tens of thousandsââ,¬"-let alone millionsââ,¬"-of dollars to devote to online marketing strategies. Fortunately, there are still affordable ways to use the Web.
LatPro.com, a growing 12-person company that used to outsource its marketing needs, now manages them in-house. The company relies predominately on co-branding with related Web businesses.
Founded in April 1997 as an online career centre for Spanish and Portuguese-speaking professionals, LatPro initially pursued a co-branding strategy at the suggestion of Terra Networks, a site geared toward the Latin American and US Hispanic market that wanted to include job listings.
LatPro embeds its content on other sites where visitors are likely to be interested in its services. Dan Canning, LatPro's marketing director, says his company has broadened its distribution by putting LatPro's content on high-traffic sites. As of January, LatPro had partnered with nearly 40 sites. According to Canning, co-branded sites currently deliver about 30 percent of LatPro's total site traffic. Over the past five months, LatPro has generated 8,500 new registrations.
And LatPro's savings on marketing are impressive. Canning estimates that to achieve an equivalent amount of traffic, registration, and sales to the co-branding program, LatPro would have to spend US$8,000 to US$10,000 per month on traditional advertising, such as targeted business publications, or US$7,000 to US$8,000 per month on a Web affiliate program. Instead, the co-branding program costs only US$1,000 a month-ââ,¬"and most of that is salary expense for the program's part-time manager.
