Gatekeeping is out. Sharing audiences is in.

Attention is the thing we’re actually competing for

There are only so many hours in the day and an increasingly ridiculous number of brands trying to occupy them.

According to DataReportal, internet users globally spend more than two hours a day using social media. That’s a lot of attention, but it’s also an extremely competitive place to find it.

The standard marketing response has been to produce more.

More content. More paid social. More creators. More emails. More posts desperately trying to stop a thumb mid-scroll.

There is another option.

Instead of constantly buying more reach, brands can share relevance.

If another business has already built an engaged community containing the people you want to speak to, there could be considerably more value in finding a credible way into that community than trying to reach the exact same people from scratch.

That’s not stealing somebody else’s audience.

It’s recognising that audiences were never exclusive in the first place.

Your customer has other interests. Promise.

This is where brands need to stop thinking exclusively in demographics.

Knowing your customer is 25 to 34, lives in London and has a certain disposable income tells you something.

Knowing what else they’re interested in tells you considerably more.

If you’re a food brand, what restaurants do they visit? What do they wear? Where do they work out? What newsletters do they read? Which chefs do they follow? Where do they go on holiday? What do they do on a Sunday morning?

This is audience adjacency, and it’s where things get interesting.

Rather than asking:

“Which brands look like us?”

Ask:

“Which brands are already part of our customer’s world?”

Those answers are unlikely to sit neatly within your own category.

And that’s exactly the point.

Sharing an audience doesn’t mean giving it away

There’s still a strange nervousness around introducing customers to another business, as though one brand appearing on your feed means people will suddenly forget you exist.

Consumers are perfectly capable of liking two things at once.

More importantly, complementary brands aren’t necessarily competing for the same purchase.

A coffee brand and a ceramics studio can occupy the same breakfast table. A drinks business and a restaurant can exist in the same order. A running brand and a skincare business can be relevant within the same routine.

The commercial opportunity comes from identifying shared behaviours without shared competition.

That’s a much more useful definition of audience fit.

Research into co-branding supports the importance of that fit. A meta-analysis of 37 co-branding studies found that the relationship between partnering brands had a greater influence on co-branding success than the characteristics of the individual brands, with brand-image fit particularly important.

In other words, the question isn’t simply whether two brands can work together.

It’s whether the combination makes sense to the customer.

The currency isn’t always follower count

This is another trap.

Brand A has 100,000 followers. Brand B has 20,000.

Therefore, Brand B needs Brand A more.

Not necessarily.

One brand might bring scale. The other might bring an extremely engaged niche community.

One might have the physical space. The other has the product.

One might have incredible CRM data. The other has cultural relevance.

One might have press pull. The other has access to a community that’s notoriously difficult to reach through traditional advertising.

Audience value isn’t the same as audience size.

Before approaching another brand, work out what you’re actually bringing to the table.

That could be reach, engagement, expertise, product, location, customer insight, content capability, PR potential, community relationships, sampling opportunities or simply a genuinely brilliant idea.

10,000 highly relevant people can be considerably more valuable than 500,000 people who couldn’t care less.

If you’re going to share, actually share

This sounds painfully obvious, yet it’s where plenty of partnerships fall apart.

A collaboration gets agreed.

Everyone gets excited.

There are approximately 74 emails about logos.

Then launch day arrives and one brand posts an Instagram Story.

Great.

If audience sharing is part of the objective, distribution needs to be built into the partnership from the beginning.

Who is posting? Where? How often? Is there a collaborative Instagram post? Is it going into both newsletters? Are both websites linking to it? Is there an offer driving customers between the two businesses? Is PR involved? Are creators involved? Can you capture data? How are you tracking where traffic and customers came from?

Every partnership should have a distribution plan alongside the creative idea.

Otherwise, you’ve created something together without actually sharing the thing that made the partnership commercially interesting in the first place.

Measure the audience exchange

This is where audience sharing becomes more than a nice marketing idea.

Treat it like acquisition.

Look at incremental reach, new followers, referral traffic, CRM sign-ups, first-time customers, unique code redemptions, website traffic, engagement from non-followers, earned media and branded search.

Most importantly, look at who you’re reaching.

If 80% of the people engaging with a partnership already follow both brands, you haven’t necessarily unlocked a new audience.

If you’re suddenly seeing meaningful engagement, traffic or purchases from people who had never interacted with you before, that’s much more interesting.

The goal isn’t simply more eyeballs.

It’s relevant new eyeballs.