While online marketing seems daunting and complicated in general, you can break it down into small strategies for easier control and management. You know what? Cross-promotion, also known as “partnership,” proves one of the most effective marketing solutions for online businesses. And digital brands are not exceptional.
Partnerize demonstrated in its The State And Future Of Partnerships Survey 1/4 research that 54% of companies see an increase of 20% in their company revenue thanks to partnerships.
Plus, partnerships via digital channels gain 4 times the pipeline of those who don’t apply this method, according to Impact.
In this post, we’ll quickly define what cross-promotion is as well as 4 main reasons why you should apply it for your digital businesses. Then, we’ll walk you through a process of integrating cross-promotion to strengthen your digital products.
What Is Cross-promotion?
Cross-promotion refers to a marketing strategy that requires two or more companies to market each other’s products. Or they can join one marketing campaign to promote their products or benefit them in some ways.
The bottom line of this strategy is to expose brand awareness, promote products and services, generate leads, or boost sales.
One thing you should notice is that your target audience and your partners should be similar so that you both can use one campaign to get the most from these people.
Why Integrating Cross-promotion into Your Digital Product Business
As mentioned previously, partnership or cross-promotion brings various benefits to your digital product brands. Here, we will list out some reasons for building up a cross-promotion strategy.
Along with that, detailed explanations about why it is now more powerful and popular than ever are brought forward as well.
- Unlock Fresh Customer Segments
Partnering with other brands means that you’re targeting their customers too. If you pick the right partner to cross-promote, you can add new leads and customers to your digital business.
- Expose Your Digital Product Brand Awareness
The better you choose a partner, the higher chance you receive to increase your company awareness. Users will see you as a trustworthy business if you’re in connection with reliable brands.
- Prove a Cost-effective Solution
Cross-promotion saves you more money than expected. By sharing the advertisement cost with the partner, you invest less than one-half but receive double more than doing marketing on yourself.
- Improve Digital Product Website SEO
Connecting with big names allows you to write content about your products and publish it on their site. This gives Google a good hint that your site is linked back from authoritative sources. As a result, it will boost your site rankings.
How to Do Cross-promotion to Power Your Digital Products
There are a series of things you need to involve in and numerous new strategies to implement when it comes to cross-promotion. You’re required to use different social channels or try multi-purpose content. But before going into details, it’s significant to set clear goals and choose the right partner for your digital business.
#1 Set Clear Goals for Cross-promotion Strategies
The first and foremost factor you need to consider before taking further steps is defining your marketing goals. What do you look for when promoting with another brand?
List out everything you want to achieve, from expanding the market reach to increasing sales or even simply create a positive image with customers. Answer the following questions before seeking a business partner:
- Who do I want to attract through this cross-promotion strategy?
- What do you want to receive: money, fame, or a business relationship?
- What can you provide for the new audience?
- How does your audience benefit from this connection?
Once having the targets written down, you should outline actionable plans to achieve each goal. Determine who is in charge of which task is also important. Then, you can have a clear picture of what, when, and how things should be done as well as who’s responsible for it.
#2 Choose Your Partners Wisely
Similar to physical products, as digital product providers, you have to consider many factors before selecting a suitable partner for your business. We recommend working with non-competing brands.
Firstly, competing companies won’t collaborate with you, for sure. Plus, a brand of another niche allows you to reach out to a whole new customer segment. You have different choices. Going for influencers or nonprofit organizations is a bit easier. Local companies and supportive businesses are great selections as well.
You should spend time researching your partners to ensure the relevancy. If your digital brand sells e-books about technology but you outreach and write content for a food review site to introduce your products, it won’t drive many relevant users to your site.
#3 Use Different Social Channels
Social media has proved the leading position in digital marketing tools in the last decade. With the vast number of users, you can extend your target audience with ease.
On top of that, content on social platforms makes it easy to share among users. You have the right to decide the type of audience you intend to market, based on their ages, genders, locations, or even devices they’re using, etc.
There are a lot of social platforms for you to consider, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Youtube, and so on. You can run ads, provide giveaways, make live videos, tag people, and create hashtag trends.
#4 Try Podcasts and Webinars
Podcasts and webinars have made a huge impact on cross-promoting and spreading digital product brands. You and your partners can make use of a webinar to interact with clients, quickly solve their problems, and advertise new products or services.
Prefer doing podcasts? You can interview a guest, an influencer in your niche, for instance, to advertise your brands. It’s possible for you to sponsor one of the episodes and let your names be mentioned in the program.
#5 Outreach to Blogs and Content Sites
Writing guest posts is another simple way to cross-promote your intellectual product brand. It costs you nothing and delivers long-term results. You will receive referral traffic from the partner sites that are already interested in your content. Besides that, it benefits your site SEO performance thanks to quality backlinks.
You should share the content on other big communities such as Medium and Tumblr. These forums help you reach out to a larger amount of target users and at the same time gain new social media followers.
#6 Apply Email Marketing
No one can deny the effectiveness of email marketing compared to other traditional marketing methods. You can create a newsletter campaign for both sites. Anyone joining their campaign can become your potential leads and vice versa.
Email marketing allows you to keep subscribers in the know about sales, events, and updates on your products or services.
Start Your Cross-promotion Strategy Today!
If you’re not taking advantage of cross-promotion, you’re leaving money on the table. Integrating cross-promotion into your digital product business delivers a lot of benefits. Not only can you increase your brand awareness exposure, get more sales, but you also empower the site SEO with low expenses spent.
We have shown you 6 tips on how to perform cross-promotion for your intellectual business effectively. Before starting a cross-promotion strategy, you need to define your goal and choose the right partner. Then, think about different types of marketing platforms.
Ready to create your own cross-promotion strategy yet? Share your experience with us in the comment section below.
