How to Collaborate with Other Brands for Black Friday Promotions

Store windows plastered with bold, tempting promises of savings. Emails flooded with subject lines that scream urgency and “can’t miss” bargains. Social media lit up with HD ads and hyped flash sales with irresistible discount countdowns—all signs of the impending shopping frenzy.

That’s Black Friday, your multi-billion dollar ticket to landing a bullish revenue just before Christmas. And one of the most effective strategies to maximize your earnings during this period is through cross-collaboration with other brands.

In this article, we will explain why brand collaboration for Black Friday promotions is important and a few ways to do that.

Why is Brand Collaboration Essential for Black Friday?

Black Friday presents seasonal opportunities for businesses to scale their revenue through spiked sales that occur only once a year. With over 200 million people participating in this shopping trend annually, you have a broader market to target.

However, there’s a limit to how many potential customers you can reach.

Brand collaboration helps you solve this problem by leveraging other businesses’ audiences and turning them into yours without conflicting interests. This leads to increased visibility for your brand products and services, increased lead generation, faster conversions, and a sales boost.

6 Ways to Collaborate with Other Brands for Black Friday Promotions

Let’s quickly go through simple ways to promote your products through brand collaboration and boost your metrics.

Co-Branded Product Promotions And Deals

Co-branding means pooling resources with another brand for promotional purposes, broader visibility, lead generation, and reputation building. In some cases, you might even create a product together.

A perfect example is from Nike and Apple. The latter created a watch that integrates Nike’s Run Club app for tracking runs and personalized coaching while offering exclusive Nike-inspired watch faces.

Combining both brands’ audiences—both hundreds of millions—for promotional purposes proved to be successful. Fans of Apple and Nike also rolled out user-generated content (UGC) that generated millions in views, like Driggsy.

“Of course, Black Friday is just a few weeks away, which means it’s not ideal to go looking for ways to co-produce with another brand, except it’s just a mini-product. But you can look out for collaborative promotions featuring dual visibility between your business and another”, Gary Hemming, Owner & Finance Director at ABC Finance, says.

Here are some extras to keep in mind when doing that:

• Find brands outside your niche that complement your product’s effectiveness. Nike, a fitness brand, did this with Apple Watch, a growing favorite among sportspeople.
• Ensure there’s no potential competition between the brands you’re collaborating with. You definitely don’t want another person racing off with your customers.
• Seek collaborative opportunities that mutually benefit both brands. This starts by ensuring your goals align—leads, conversions, and revenue growth.

Albert Kim, VP of Talent at Checkr, advises, “Once you’ve found a suitable partner, conduct market research to see what’s common to your audiences and leverage that as a focus for your Black Friday marketing. Create video content featuring this branding, roll out ads, and get seen together.”

Bundle Products Or Services Together

If you’re a frequent buyer on platforms like Alibaba or Amazon, you’ve probably encountered bundle deals a number of times. For example, if you want to purchase a laptop, Amazon might recommend laptop bags and ergonomic stands from different brands to complement your package. That’s product bundling.

Product bundling is a retail strategy that discovers and curates a brand’s own complementary products and offers them to shoppers. But this time, you’re not bundling your own complementary products, and neither are you waiting for Amazon to do that for you.

Instead, you formally contact a brand that offers products complementing yours and create promotional materials featuring both products while delivering the services together at a discount.

An example is Blue Apron and Wine.com. This bundle partnership offered a meal kit service paired with wine selections. Customers could purchase a meal kit from Blue Apron that included wine pairings from Wine.com, enhancing the dining experience and encouraging customers to explore both brands.

Another example of bundling is Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs. The latter is a brand that launched a line of ice cream flavors inspired by Starbucks beverages. Their collaboration included bundled deals in stores that allowed customers to purchase Starbucks coffee along with Häagen-Dazs ice cream, appealing to customers looking for dessert pairings.

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Why did it work? Häagen-Dazs is a less popular brand despite calling itself “Ice Cream of Ice Creams.” Bundling their servings together with Starbucks’ coffee ensured they could also appeal to the latter’s massive fan base.

To do the same:

• Look for high-end products that complement yours.
• Source brands with a bigger audience or customer base. That’s what you want to leverage in the first place.
• Contact and ask for permission to bundle your products. You can also negotiate a discount for buyers on every bundle purchase.
• Ask them to promote the bundle on their marketing channels, including social media, with a link to your website (where the bundle offer is).

To boost sales, you can add other Black Friday tactics to this bundle, such as urgency words, almost out-of-stock labels, odd pricing ($1.99 instead of $2), and countdowns.

Joint Giveaways Or Contests

Humans, especially online shoppers, love freebies—special discounts, coupons, buy-one-get-one-free (BOGO) offers, etc. Interestingly, giveaways record 34% more conversions than other types of marketing content. Landing pages running a contest giveaway yield 700% more email leads, and over 61% of consumers have interacted in one way or another with a brand for an incentive.

Now imagine combining this with a sleek collaboration, say one between you and a bigger, complementary business. That’s a double buster for sales.

BlendJet—known for its portable blenders—and Kiehl’s—a luxury skincare brand—collaborated on a joint giveaway that combined their unique products to create an appealing prize package. So far, this collaboration has generated over 6000+ likes and 4000+ comments from customers of both brands, blending (pun intended) wellness and skincare in a way that highlights self-care.

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Likewise, Krave Beauty and ZitSticka teamed up for a joint giveaway that combined their skincare products, targeting a shared audience of beauty enthusiasts. Their collaborative giveaway generated millions of impressions and over 6,000+ likes.

Olipop, a brand that offers healthy, functional sodas, went unconventional (in a now-deleted post) and indirectly featured multiple brands in its Instagram giveaway that’s worth $500. By leveraging the momentum of other brands, the marketing was successful and drew the expected attention.

There are many more other examples, but here’s why almost all were successful:

• Partner with at most two brands. A multiple-brand partnership like Olipop is a great idea but can be overwhelming since you need to negotiate individually with each brand.
• Use social media for giveaways and contests. Easily accessible and receives more visibility through shares and comments. Also, a bulk of your Black Friday customers are there.
• Use simple and high-quality graphics that pop the products being marketed.
• Break down your Giveaway prices in the comment section.
• Give clear instructions with deadlines.

Also, tag the brands you’re collaborating with to reach their audiences.

Cross-Promote Through Social Media

“Cross-promotion means featuring another brand’s products or services on your channels while you also do the same in return. That’s like a win-win approach to reach more audiences beyond your common circle”, Jeffrey Zhou, CEO and Founder of Fig Loans, says.

Of course, for cross-promotion to be effective and natural, you need to create joint content featuring both brands. For instance, a random Nike promotional video might feature an Apple wristwatch, a subtle act that pushes Apple to Nike’s audience at the same time without sounding sale-sy or collaborative.

Another example of brands engaging in cross-promotion is Red Bull and GoPro. These two brands collaborate by integrating their products into extreme sports events. Red Bull sponsors high-energy, adventurous events, while GoPro provides action cameras to capture the athletes’ performances. The footage is then shared across both brands’ social media platforms, boosting their exposure among thrill-seeking audiences.

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You can also cross-promote through other channels like emails and websites.

Collaborate On Content Creation

Usually, you’ll need a two-in-one product like Apple Nike Watch to generate more attention through content but you can virtually do the same thing GoPro and Redbull or BMW i8 and Louis Vuitton are doing—bringing your distinct products together to create video content.

Content collaboration can look anything like this:

• Sephora’s make-up kit plus Glinny’s (your brand) hair attachment combo in an Instagram story.
• Clips from a daredevil hiking featuring your brand’s shoes and Nalgene’s outdoor bottles.
• A male fashion tutorial shorts showing how to don a brown-leathered pre-owned Rolex watch with different Gucci wears.

…and many others.

A single promotional video can feature your brand and many others. This improves visibility as the content is shared across each brand’s audiences.

Chris Aubeeluck, Head of Sales and Marketing at Osbornes Law, says, “Other content like blog posts are equally effective. You can reach out to top brands you’d like to collaborate with and ask them to include you in their product listicle articles. Let’s say Sephora writes an article on the top 10 Black Friday must-buy products. You can reach out to clinch the 11th position and get your product featured while you offer similar in return.”

Host A Shared Event Or Webinar

Talk about creating sensations. Reach out to brands outside your niche but complementary and suggest hosting a webinar, podcast, or even an event that can stir your audience together. Redbull does the latter quite well—hosting threadily dangerous events that feature GoPro, Can-Am, OANDA, and RockShox.

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If co-sponsoring an entire event isn’t feasible, consider partnering with a brand organizing a pre-Black Friday event and propose contributing to a specific aspect of their initiative. This could involve providing awards for attendees, creating promotional materials, or even offering exclusive deals related to your products. Samsung did this by providing the Redbull Rampage Trailblazer Award in 2024.

If you can sponsor an entire event instead of co-hosting, that works perfectly fine, too. You can invite well-known brands that complement yours to bring their audience on screen.

“Podcasting helps create awareness weeks or even months before Black Friday. You can invite different brand owners, talk about product lists, share intriguing experiences that serve as allures to both brands and then subtly refer them to make a purchase”, Peter O’Callaghan, Head of Marketing at ScrapingBee, concludes.

Tips for Effective Black Friday Promotional Collaborations

Here are a few tips to help you scale your collaborations more effectively.

• Choose complementary brands: Partner with brands that offer products your customers might also be interested in but aren’t direct competitors. For instance, a fitness gear company could team up with a nutrition brand, and a beauty brand can partner with a wellness company.
• Define shared KPIs early: “Whether it’s increasing sales or growing email subscribers, clear metrics ensure both brands are aligned and can measure success effectively. This also impacts the type of promotional materials you create and the channels engage”, says Rodger Desai, CEO of Prove.
• Offer exclusive, combined deals: The collaboration must promote something that resonates with customers from both sides, such as a joint discount or bundle deal where each brand’s products complement each other.
• Engage Omni-channel distribution: “Every Black Friday aims to push your product to more people by borrowing another brand’s momentum. To ensure that works, utilize every possible channel you get your hands on—social media, email, website, webinars, etc. Your customers are everywhere”, Nora Sudduth, Founder & Owner at Nora Sudduth Consulting, shares.
• Utilize influencers or ambassadors: If both brands have existing partnerships with influencers or ambassadors, collaborate with them to amplify your joint promotion. Influencers can authentically highlight the complementary nature of both brands.
• Plan post-collaboration follow-up: After Black Friday, keep the momentum going with follow-up promotions or content. This ensures long-term brand recognition and engagement, converting new customers into loyal ones.

Wrapping Up

Black Friday collaborations present a seasonal opportunity to scale your annual revenue projections. But that’s only possible if you do it right. For a start, co-brand product promotions and deals, bundle complementary products or services from another brand, and conduct joint giveaways or contests.

You can also cross-promote through different channels, collaborate on content creation for shared visibility, and host events, trade shows, or even virtual meetings via webinars and podcasts. Note that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, meaning you can combine as many of the strategies we shared.