Cross-Promotion: The Smartest Way to Market with Zero Budget

Hello, my dear friends!

Today, I’d like to tell about the most effective instrument for any business owner/marketer.

It happens that the marketing budget is very limited, and you need to increase sales. But how, if the budget is limited or not at all?

Cross-marketing is an excellent tool for interaction between brands and companies. Simply put, this is an exchange of audience and advertising at the expense of partner companies that are not direct competitors. Although such a partnership is quite possible.

To begin with, in order to choose the right partners, you need to clearly define and answer yourself the main question:

Who has an audience that can buy goods from us and from them, but at the same time the product/service is not like ours?

Remember!

The most important element of cross-promotion is the choice of a partner since the success and effectiveness of the campaign depends on the right choice of a partner. When choosing a partner, you must be guided by several criteria:

• Partners should not be competitors.
• Partners must have a common target audience.
• Partners must be in the same price segment.

For example:

SPA. The target audiences are women/girls. And young people who buy gifts for girls/women in the form of certificates.

Who has the same audience, but at the same time it is not a SPA?

Flower delivery. Absolutely the same audience.

Then you need to find them and analyze their community:

1. Check out their social networks. Check for bots among subscribers.
2. To analyze the publications — we need those who at least somehow leads the community. This is already 50% of success.
3. Before you spend your time and energy on joint solutions for cross-marketing, check their business at all. Call the specified numbers or check its availability in Google maps.

What to do next?

Once you have decided with your potential partners, you need to contact them and offer to hold a joint competition.

We make the most simple conditions, both for partners and for the audience.

Three small details:

1. Like and subscribe it will be enough.
2. Make the contest short in time. 3–5 days will be enough.
3. Do not make a lot of conditions. Do not overload your audience.

Then we should place a contest in our groups and ask the partner to do the same.

After the end of the competition summarize the statistics.

Pro Tip: You can create multiple cross-promotions.

Advantages of cross-promotion:

• You can save your advertising budget;
• Increase your sales without huge expenses;
• Increase your customer database;
• Availability of expensive types of advertising (especially important for small businesses);
• Add the partner’s logo with a link to his website, and he, in turn, will do the same;
• Brand recognition.

Cross-promotion forms

1. Joint advertising campaign. In this case, companies, as a rule, indicate their partners in their promotional materials, and sometimes they also make joint promotional materials. For example, Calgon antiscale was mentioned in many commercials of washing machine manufacturers.
2. Joint discount (bonus) programs. They can be realized both in the form of granting discounts to partners’ clients and in the form of a single discount club uniting many partners. For example, some airlines implement a joint bonus program with hotels.
3. Joint promotion. As in the case of a joint advertising campaign, partners unite their efforts in promoting their companies (products). For example, the companies Opel and Mango (women’s clothing) held a joint presentation, during which a new collection of clothes and a new car brand were presented.

Also, remember to use ➡tools to analyze and manage your social networks.

Help each other, increase sales!

Good luck!