Juice Up Your Business with Cross-Marketing

This is a guest post by Levi Thornton. Levi is a serial entrepreneur who has built multiple successful technology-based businesses from the ground-up over the past 10 years. Levi’s background is strongly planted in internet based application development with a light touch of humor and a side of sarcasm. To learn more about Levi Thornton visit his LinkedIn profile (http://www.linkedin.com/in/levithornton).

If you have not already heard, cross marketing is big business, and if you’re not doing it already then you’re missing out on a large segment of customers.

When you hear people talk about cross marketing, your mind may conger up a marketing team that is developing a new product line for your current customer base, or maybe you have a wild imagination and envision a company opening up another gas station on the other side of the street. Frankly, this type of cross marketing has nothing to do with tagging your current customers with a new product or launching a large advertising campaign.

Cross marketing is a very cheap and lucrative method of marketing that allows two companies that have interests in each others customers, and can come to an agreement where each party advertises the other company’s service or product in exchange for the same amount of advertising or access to the customer base.

While the rules for cross marketing are wide open, there are a couple of things you must always keep in mind when reaching out to other businesses.

One of the first mistakes you see is small companies reaching out to competitors for their cross marketing. This is, will be, and has always been a bad idea. Your competitors have zero interest in sending you their customers, and if you happen to strike up some type of deal, they are really clueless or see an opportunity to swallow up your business overnight.

The next most common mistake your will run into is zero value. Many companies get an idea that they are providing a great value to other businesses, so they reach out to very large companies and try to pitch them the idea that their small customer base will somehow be good for the other business when their reach is 20x larger than the offering company.

As you reach out to pitch your cross marketing ideas, you need to find companies that fit your market, or have a customer base that has a high opportunity of buying in. Once you understand your customer profile, you need to analyze what it is that you can offer the other company and how they would see the value of the opportunity.

Your offer could be anything; advertising, data, technology, or a sponsorship. Just ask yourself what the other company would value the most. In most cases you should be able to develop an offer that has a higher face value to the other company, so that they feel they have a win-win and not another company trying to leach off of their customer base.

For example; many years ago one of my old competitors TheKnot, Inc (NASDAQ:KNOT) launched a cross marketing campaign. Their method was simple; they had traffic and plenty of content, but they wanted to grow their network and insure that they would be the first wedding site that brides used when they got hitched.

Their cross marketing plan was to offer articles and local vendor services to radio stations and news papers. In turn for the opportunity, the media outlets would have more content on their websites to sell advertising. Each media outlet would advertise their new service to their customer base through their normal operations in radio and print while the brides would use the content then follow links to TheKnot’s website.

In another example, Doggyspace.com did a cross marketing deal with the SPCA that helped raise awareness about the SPCA on a local and national level. In turn, the SPCA would attach Doggyspace to its marketing, press release, and give out media about the social network to the owners of people that adopted pets from the SPCA. Because of this, the organization and the social network helped each other reach their goals through cross marketing.

As you have seen in both examples, the rule is simple; help each partner reach a goal through their natural daily business operations. That way the expense of the deal does not outweigh the value of the opportunity.

While small businesses may think that cross marketing is too expensive and is only for companies with large bank accounts, it’s not. Even the smallest of the small companies can work out deals with companies of greater or equal size to their advantage.

Search engine experts can provide seal of approval programs to SEO software developers, social-based sites can provide brand awareness or a platform interface, while bloggers can provide professional Q&A for content rich sites. If you can dream it up and find a partner then you could have a great cross marketing plan that could grow your business as large as you want.