Harness the power of cross-promotion to extend your brand’s reach
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You’ve surely seen countless examples of cross-promotions before, however, you might’ve not been aware of it, and for that matter let’s see what exactly is cross-promotion and why it is an excellent marketing strategy to grow your brand.
What is Cross-Promotion?
If we take the definition from Wikipedia,
Cross-promotion is a form of marketing promotion where customers of one product or service are targeted with promotion of a related product.
That’s rather straightforward. It basically is two or more brands having a joint product or collaboration on a product or a service with the condition that those parties are not in direct competition.
Popular Examples of Cross-Promotion
Apple & Hermès
If you are deep nested into Apple’s ecosystem you might know about their collaboration with Hermès on one of their Apple Watch series products.
For Hermes, this co-branded watch is another attempt to inject modernity and freshness into a brand famed for its perennial appeal and a DNA founded on tradition and heritage. Of all the luxury brands, none have managed the magic trick of selling in the millions but appearing to manufacture in the dozens better than Hermes. Similarly, the conservative appeal of Hermes could — so easily — start to appear boring and dusty. This limited partnership with Apple keeps Hermes very much at the cutting edge of luxury — while playing to their traditional strengths of leather goods.
For Apple the partnership is as clear a signal as we could get that it now considers itself to be a luxury brand fused from a potent combination of technology and design. Look at Apple’s price point. Look at their visual merchandising. Look at their creative directors. Look at their executive team. Look at their mythological founder. Apple is more Hermes than Samsung, and it clearly intends to keep it that way.
Spotify & Uber
Although an unexpected partnership at the time, it was a rather harmonious pair; for Uber in terms of up-lifting the comfort standards by providing the rider with the choice of playing their preferred tracks, and for Spotify in terms of reaching new public.
This partnership helped both platforms gain an upper hand on their competitors at the time by providing one unique benefit to each other;
Whilst no other ride-sharing platform has been providing riders to play their own tracks, no other music-streaming platform has partnered with a ride-sharing platform in order to bring users the benefit of playing their own music while ride-sharing.
What are the benefits of Cross-Promoting?
- Expansion into new markets or new demographic regions
- Strategic, mutually beneficial long-term partnerships with other brands
- Brand diversification
- Increased brand awareness
What are the steps you must follow in order to harness the benefits of a successful Cross-Promotion?
1. Setting the end goal
The most essential step when trying to find a viable cross-promotion strategy is to define the end goal.
- Is it more sales?
- Is it expanding your line of products?
- Is it expanding your line of services?
- Is it trying to improve the brand’s image?
Each option comes with a radically different strategy, so you have to keep that in mind before trying to recklessly choose a brand partner which might not help you achieve the intended goal.
2. Choosing an appropriate brand partner
This might be the hardest step in the entire process, as you have to take into consideration a multitude of factors when choosing a partner brand, such as:
- Not being in direct competition with each other
- Reliability
- Quality of products/services
- The complementarity of your partnership
- The demographics of the partner brand
Let’s take as reference the partnership between Spotify and Uber.
Those 2 brands have not been in direct competition with each other, one being involved in providing audio streaming and media services, whilst the other being involved in ride-sharing services/mobility as a service.
Both brands have been perceived as having great products within their own industries.
And both brands have had markets/demographics that the other party would benefit from, so the collaboration made sense, Spotify dominating the audio streaming market (31% of all market share — Q2 2021) and Uber dominating the ride-sharing services market (65% of all market share — 2018).
This partnership allowed users with Spotify Premium to listen to the music from the playlist in their Uber driver’s car. As a result, Uber users were eager to pay for Premium accounts on Spotify, and Spotify users booked vehicles from Uber.
3. Setting up the appropriate channels
The last, but certainly not the least important step is to wrap up the cross-promotion process and set up the means to achieving the goal of the partnership.
There are countless options when having to choose channels that range from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Youtube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Blogging Platforms such as Medium or Hackernoon, Emails, and so many more.
According to https://www.marketingcharts.com (September 2018), the most effective channels are, in this order:
- Email — 82%
- Social Media — 54%
- Website/Blog — 51%
- SEO/Organic Search — 29%
- Ads — 21%
- PPC/Paid Search — 19%
- Content Syndication — 18%
Summing Up
When thinking about collaboration, it is extremely important to choose a reliable partner with a good reputation, to define what the goal is, and what channels would be a great fit for it in order to achieve that goal.
These are the points that will influence your brand and pave your way to success.
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