Kaye Marks |
Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of developments in color printing industry and how these improvements can benefit small to medium-scale business. |
Kaye Marks
has written 38 articles for SB Informer. |
View all articles by Kaye Marks... |
How to Make Cross-Promotion Work for YouMaking cross promotion to work for your advertising Kaye Marks
July 08, 2008
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Before getting into how you can use cross-promotion as a marketing technique, let’s define what exactly it is.
Cross-promotion
is when two groups (usually businesses) advertise together. Each group
pools their money together to slash advertising budgets or helps
promote the other group. Visa does this a lot. They’ll mention a
product or store in their commercials and advertisements, and in
return, their partner will mention using Visa to pay for purchases in
their store. Both groups benefit and are possibly bolstered by their
affiliation with each other.
Follow these steps for creating a
cross-promotion strategy that will generate more sales than you could
have produced on your own.
1. Find a partner.
Obviously, this
is a great first step for cross-promotion! Of course you can’t just put
your finger on a company in a phone book and partner with them. You
have two options for approaching this: do some research to find out
what other businesses your customers shop at, or find businesses that
have products that complement yours.
Once you find some
businesses that you think might be a good fit, do some more research to
find which companies share your values and want to reach the same
target market. Think about what companies you would be proud to be
associated with. You also want to pick a partner whose resources and
reputation are equal to yours.
2. Evaluate your shared customers.
Determine
what portion of your target market likes to shop at your partner’s
business and vice versa. These are the people you want to advertise the
most.
What do they like about your product and your partner’s
product? How can you enhance what they like about each by working
together? Check out their demographics: Where do they live? What kind
of car do they drive? You’re constructing a niche market out of already
niche markets so you need to get very specific to make sure you reach
your shared target market.
3. Decide on a test-run cross-promotion event or sale.
It’s
a good idea to start with a simple, small cross-promotion just to test
your relationship, make sure that it’ll work. One safe idea is to both
hold sales at the same time and include incentives for customers to
shop at both places.
For instance, a hardware store holds a
sale on wood and a deck builder has a sale on deck-building services.
They advertise for their sales together in one flyer, brochure or
commercial. They then split the advertising cost, which will either
save them money or allow them to afford using techniques, such as color
printing, that they wouldn’t have been able to afford on their own.
4. Evaluate the partnership.
How
did things go? Did you both bring in more business? If you did, great!
It’s time to brainstorm some more ideas to use later. If it didn’t
work, try to figure out why it didn’t and if there’s any way to correct
the mistake next time.
Or, you can start over again and find a
new partner. Seems like a lot of work, but it’ll be worth the time to
do it right than to have a partnership that isn’t working.
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