Cross-Marketing as an Efficient Method of Promoting Your Online Store

Cross-promotion, also called cross-marketing, is a marketing technique that appeared fairly recently and started getting popular fast. That’s because it allows achieving great results with a rather small investment. Due to this, it’s gaining popularity with all types of businesses, from small online shops to huge corporations.

What Is Cross-Marketing?

The basic idea of cross-marketing is to promote complementary products together so every business gets a chance to access a wider audience. For example, an online store specializing in shoes can place advertisement banners of its partner shoe repair shop on its website. In return, the repair shop does the same.

The technique seems extremely simple and straightforward, especially for e-commerce businesses. However, the trick here is to find the right kind of company to partner up with for cross-marketing to produce most effective results. In order to find that kind of businesses, you should consider some highly specific factors.

Selling Complementary Products: How to Do It Right

For a cross-marketing strategy to be efficient, you need to partner up with businesses that offer products or services that complement your own. You can’t join forces with competitors, but you also won’t achieve much by working with distinctly different businesses. The key here is to find partners whose target audience is the same or very similar to yours.

For example, imagine you run an online store selling sportswear. In this case, a complementary business partner will include companies or shops that sell fitness services or sports food. Partnering up with them will enable you to organize promotions and contests that will allow all of you to attract more customers.

The Importance of Having Similar Goals with Your Cross-Marketing Partners

Before starting any kind of cross-marketing campaign you need to decide on your main goal, whether it is to boost conversions or traffic. Depending on the goal you have, you should be looking for the following partners:

• When your goal is to increase conversions, you should collaborate with businesses that will agree to provide discounts or gifts to your customers. For example, a fitness club might offer a 10% discount for the sportswear from your shop. This will motivate consumers to both buy a fitness club membership and to shop in your store.
• If you want to increase traffic to your website, you should find several businesses to collaborate with and set up a banner exchange with them. The people who come to your website through these links will be less motivated to buy, but the overall traffic will increase.

The Search for New Sales Channels

Your prospective partner must fit all the aforementioned requirements, but the most important one is for them not to be your direct competitor. Your goal here is to turn this partnership into a new sales channel, like a deal between a travel agency and a shop that sells travel supplies.

But remember, it’s essential to not only find new customers but to make them loyal as well. Therefore, you should be looking for partners that will help you to both attract new people and motivate them to make repeat purchases. One way to achieve this is to start a loyalty program with your marketing partner and provide your customers with a card that will offer discounts in both stores.

In Conclusion

Cross-marketing, which you can also call “free marketing” is one of the marketing methods that is guaranteed to stay popular for a long time. If you do your research right, set the right goal, and find suitable businesses to partner up with, you’ll be able to achieve impressive results at very little cost. This technique proves that today you can promote any kind of products or services without spending a fortune on advertisement. You just need to use what resources you have wisely.

Treumov Diomid