Cross-Promotion Ideas to Triple Your Customers

Marketing, promotion, and advertising are essential to any business. It helps to bring new customers and increase sales. If you want to find new business horizons, try to review your current strategy and add some new mediums like cross-promotion, these ideas can help you achieve new heights. You will both benefit from such a campaign and grow the customers' list. Let's see how you can use cross-platform to bring your business to a new level. 

What Is Cross Promotion?

Cross-promotion is based on the principle of cooperation of several companies united to promote a group of goods. By pooling their resources and capabilities, these companies can achieve more efficiency in their promotional campaigns.

It is a tactic that helps several brands with similar target audiences exchange their audience. However, these brands don’t have to be similar as it will cause extra competition that might hurt each of you. If you sell clothes, for example, find accessories and shoe brands to run a campaign. Each brand will invest in promotion, and get customers.

Cross-promotional marketing strategy works with any niche, but it requires extra attention when creating a campaign. You should understand your audience as this knowledge will help you pick a suitable medium that works best for them: posters, TV, radio, social media, etc. Let’s say your primary audience is a 16-year-old girl who likes Hello Kitty accessories. Then, it is better to run campaigns online. But if you sell specific mattresses for people over 70, it is worth considering a TV campaign. 

Benefits of Cross Promotion

While certain benefits may be pretty obvious to both marketing specialists and business owners, there may be others that are not so clear. So, let's examine more closely the main ones:

Free Advertising. Since you are running your campaign for your own sake, while mentioning other businesses, you are not actually paying them for ads. The same thing applies to other companies that you've partnered with. Such promotions are more cost-effective and allow you to reach a similar audience. What’s more, if you and your partners decide to look for additional financing like sponsorships, you can split the cost, which will also save your budget.

Stand with locals. You can collaborate with your local business owners to highlight the products and services in your region. It is a popular marketing strategy as you can engage local people and develop a sense of loyalty and patriotism. This will save your budget when it comes to organization, transportation, and demonstration. 

Social media. This option works best for any audience as everyone uses social media. You can partner not only with businesses but also with influencers who have the same audience as you do. This will help bring new people who will enjoy your products and services. Such a method will also help you get new loyal customers as social media users believe their favorite bloggers. People might even start associating businesses and influencers together, leading to an increase in sales. But be careful when picking an influencer. If they do something controversial, it might impact your business.

Brand awareness. The more partners you have, the more brand awareness you get. It is as simple as that. Each brand has its own audience that is loyal and engaged. And when you find a brand with a similar audience to yours, you can ask for a cross-promotion. You can even do it with several brands at once. For example, if you run a fashion business and create outfits with your garments, offer another brand to mention their shoes or accessories. This will give them more attention, and in turn, they will have to do the same with your products. 

10 Cross-Promotion Ideas

There is an infinite number of marketing strategies. Creatives from all over the world come up with new ideas again and again. While it’s important to create something and develop an original approach, it is worth considering 10 basic cross-promotion ideas we’ve presented here. Trying something new is always fun, and it can lead to better results. With that said, let's check out 10 cross-marketing strategies.

Idea 1. Social Media

Social media platforms have an impressive marketing influence on all people. It shows products and services in real life, which allows many to imagine those products in their life or to see how they actually work. When it comes to cross-promotion strategy, social media seems to be one of the most popular tools. It is easy to find an influencer who shares your beliefs and life ethics, which means you might have a similar audience. You can also collaborate with several brands online to promote your business.

It is crucial to understand the specifics of each platform. While Instagram and Pinterest are rather visual platforms, Facebook and Twitter are based on text and information. So make sure to understand the specifics of each platform before working with them.

Idea 2. Emails

If you have a strong client base and work with email marketing (you should do that in any case), you might think about cross-promotion via e-mails. You can share discounts, bundle offers, referral programs via email. So, when you share information about your partners and their offers with your clients, your partner does the same. Thus, both of you get a new audience and more offers and profit.

Idea 3. Co-events

You can run events with your partners to promote each other. For example, if someone buys products in your store, you can provide people with a discount code for your partner's store and vice versa. You can do this not only with one store but with several ones. 

What if several stores around you took part in such cross-promotion? You can also give prizes or samples to those who shop in both your and your partner's store. This will increase the reputation of several stores who take part in such activity.

Idea 4. Run Campaigns

Another budget-saving technique is to share the campaign expenses between two or more companies. Imagine getting an opportunity to run a campaign in a newspaper or get a billboard. You can collaborate with another brand and share the expenses. We are sure that creative agencies can place both brands flawlessly in one campaign. For example, if you produce butter and want more people to buy it but lack the budget for a huge campaign, collaborate with a bread company. There is a high chance that after such a campaign, people will buy both butter and bread. 

Idea 5. Run Promotions

Offer promotions and reward programs with your partner. Meaning if your clients get something from you, you can offer them to visit another business that they might like. This works great with restaurants as you can offer another location where the customer can get a freebie or a discount. There is also an option to provide the customer with exclusive products that can be interesting for your and your partner's audience.

Idea 6. Public Events

This is a fun way that will get plenty of new people around you who can be loyal customers in the future. Organize something that might be interesting to your community and can be associated with your business. For example, if you produce sports goods, think about creating some kind of a sports event. If you produce clothing, think about some fashion-related event. For such occasions, you can invite people from other niches that might be interesting for your audience, and their audience might be interested in your business.

Idea 7. Location Promotions

The idea here is to promote the neighboring businesses. It doesn't have to be from one niche, as you promote each other based on your location. For example, if you are a beauty salon, you can create a cross-promotion strategy with your nearest coffee shop, so your clients can get a cup of black coffee on the house, or their clients can get a discount for any procedure. This builds strong marketing relations between you and your neighbor, creating a strong local community.

Idea 8. Create Products Together

Do you believe in friendship between businesses? We do! And this strategy is extremely fun and engaging for both businesses and clients. Create something together! It can be a product that includes all your strong qualities and promotes both you and your partner. For example, the most popular niche for that is fashion, where brands ask famous or local designers to collaborate on custom things. You might see H&M collaborating with Balenciaga or Mango collaborating with Leandra Medine. It raises the awareness of each brand and brings new loyal customers.

Idea 9. Referral Programs

Referral programs are great if you want to implement some kind of rewards for your cross-promotion campaign. You can promote several items from several stores, which will work as an advertisement for businesses that are in this partnership. It is not that important to pick a particular medium. You can work with any that feels best for you.

Idea 10. Webinars

Webinars might be a part of your marketing funnel strategy as well as a part of your cross-promotion strategy. Together with your partners, you can promote products and services while teaching people something new. For example, if you offer drawing classes, collaborate with a pencils brand or popular art store that will advertise your event while you will use their supplies and advertise them. 

The Power of Networking is Crucial

Cross advertising is an extremely engaging strategy as it includes many channels that will help you promote your products and services. Your business will rise in sales, awareness, and loyalty with a minimum budget. Besides, you can find new friends both in your niche and out of it. And you know how networking is important these days. 

If you want to find more or want Claspo to help you in building your cross-promotion strategy, feel free to contact us to discuss all your questions.