Setting the Groundwork
As previously mentioned, being successful in any cross-marketing initiative first comes down to who you are partnering with. While you may start by looking for companies that have a customer base that would be ideal for your product offerings, remember that you need to also be ready to explain what benefits your company could offer them in return. Even with overlapping audiences, many companies when approached about an opportunity like this will want to know what value you can provide their clients to make it worthwhile for them to promote your business. For example, a lender could find great synergy partnering with a title company or insurance company. Both of these companies are a complement to the lender’s origination process so the services they offer could be extremely beneficial to their existing customer base and in turn, a lender knows that potential clients are within these companies’ marketing audience.
Once you have identified the right partner and recognized there is mutual value, it’s important to work with this partner to develop the right messaging. It’s unlikely that you would do mass marketing without specific messaging to your client base, so why wouldn’t the same apply to your strategic partner’s customer base? You’ll want to discuss the finer details of cross-promotional efforts with your strategic partner. Ask questions like what pain points are your customers experiencing that our products could solve? If you offer multiple products, is it possible to segment their customer lists to offer more targeted messaging? Are there any special promotions or discounts that you could each run that would offer a larger incentive to potential clients? As these cross-marketing efforts may be some of the first times this audience has seen your products, you want to be extremely targeted and make that carrot at the end of the stick particularly appealing. You want to treat these touch points like you would any first-time marketing effort and build out a natural path for this new client base to follow.
The Right Channels for Cross-Marketing
Once you have laid the groundwork for your cross-promotional efforts, it’s time to figure out which channels you and your strategic partners will be using. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all plan, there are certainly marketing channels and marketing opportunities that seem to lend themselves well to cross-promotional efforts. First, email marketing tends to be a natural fit for co-marketing efforts. This can be for a variety of reasons, like there are great opportunities to send unique messaging to segmented lists that your strategic partner has already developed. You also can have the chance to ease into communication by appearing in something like a company newsletter rather than doing a hard sell email first, which customers might unsubscribe from. Finally, this can be an easy way to send a discount or promotion and track it by directing customers to a specific landing page or tracked URL and bringing customers directly into your sales funnel. The tracking capabilities and reporting you can provide from email marketing make this channel a great fit because you can easily show the effectiveness of your efforts to your partner and vice versa.
