Cross-marketing (also called cross-promotion or partnership marketing) is a partnership between two brands or companies in which each brand takes part in the strategy, cost, and yield of a marketing campaign. 

For example: let’s say you’re a design agency specializing in logo creation. To gain more exposure, you partner with an established brand like Canva to create a webinar or white paper explaining how to create a unique logo using Canva’s easy-to-use interface.

Canva gets a free piece of content promoting their product; you get to leverage the clout and audience of an established brand to promote your design agency. 

Make sense? Let’s talk a little more cross-marketing, why it’s so impactful, and how you can leverage it to make money for your brand. 

Why should you cross-promote your brand?

Cross-marketing is an advantageous strategy for any business that wants to increase brand awareness, broaden its audience, and offer unique content to prospects. Best of all leaning on a similar brand in your niche in a cross-marketing campaign allows you to access established, high-intent prospects that you know are interested in your products and services. 

Regardless of your industry, odds are you know how difficult it is to cultivate a large, engaged audience that has commercial intent. Cross promotion allows businesses to instantly expand their reach and bypass months of net new audience creation. Some of the other benefits of cross-promotion: 

• Better ROI than traditional digital marketing tactics (when done effectively)
• More scalable and cost-efficient than paid remarketing 
• The ability to build instant brand affinity and credibility
• Super easy to acquire new customers 

Want to run a targeted cross-marketing campaign that generates real revenue? Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. 

How cross-marketing works 

Two businesses willing to cross-promote need to have a similar audience. That’s prerequisite number one. Without audience overlap, cross-marketing falls apart. It also helps if your marketing goals are aligned.  

How to find the right co-marketing partner 

A lot of this comes down to selection. Think of it like dating. Finding and connecting with the perfect partner is the most crucial step when it comes to both finding cross-marketing opportunities and maximizing revenue once the partnership is established. When determining if a partner is a good fit, try asking yourself the following questions:

• Does the brand have a similar type of audience. If not, promoting your content and products to their audience is not going to yield strong results.
• How many qualified email addresses or leads are you going to get from this partnership? What about revenue? Map out the expenses of the campaign and estimate tangible return on investment. 

You know what you’re putting in. But how much are you getting back? 

• Does your partner have something that you don’t have? Let’s say you’re a web designer. You know your audience is excited to learn more about SEO, but you don’t have SEO expertise. Working with an SEO expert is a surefire way to capitalize on demand while also leveraging your partner’s client base for development referrals.
• Does your partner have a good reputation? The credibility piece is absolutely vital. You need credible partnerships to drive return. 

Two incredibly powerful cross-marketing campaigns

Let’s look at four brands who did cross-marketing right and reaped the rewards. 

BMW and Louis Vuitton 

This one’s a match made in heaven. Think back to the first question we asked above: 

When you think of these two brands, you think of a few things. Superior craftsmanship. Luxury. Popularity. These are called shared values, and BMW and Louis Vuitton have them in spades. 

To capitalize on these shared values, BMW and Louis Vuitton came up with a cross-marketing campaign in which BMW built a sports car (called the i8), while Louis Vuitton came up with an exclusive line of bags and suitcases that fits perfectly into the car’s rear parcel shelf.

They even look the same. Both product scream luxury, and each brand was able to capitalize on the others audience to move units. BMW promoted its cars to Louis Vuitton’s established audience of luxury handbags, while Louis Vuitton promoted luxury handbags to BMW’s established audience of luxury car buyers. 

Starbucks and Spotify 

What goes better than coffee and music? Starbucks asked that same question when they decided to partner with Spotify, a leading music streaming platform, to strike an innovative co-branding partnership.

The trade-off was simple. Emerging artists on Spotify’s platform would get exposure through exclusive access to Starbucks’ loyal coffee shop customers. Starbucks received the benefit of treating their customers to playlist after playlist of tasteful jams that would keep customers in their shops. 

This was another cross-marketing partnership made in heaven in which both sides received strong return on investment. 

How to generate leads (and serious revenue) through cross-marketing sweepstakes

We’ve discussed how powerful cross-promotion is when selling full-priced products. Now imagine the results when you and your partner offer free products, or exclusive deals on your products? 

That’s the power of leveraging co-branded sweepstakes like the ones we run here at FindKeep.Love. 

At FindKeep.Love, we know cross-marketing. Better yet? We do all the grunt work for you. 

Brands that leverage our services gain instant access to our network of over 7,000 best-in-class brands. We’re talking CEOs, CMOs, and Brand Managers--all at top consumer brands. 

We not only help your brand reach a wider audience by partnering with quality brands like yours; we make every aspect of the sweepstakes process smooth and utterly painless. 

Here’s how our cross-marketing campaigns work, in a nutshell: 

1. Get partnered. We partner you with a best-in-class brand in your niche. 
2. Compliance. We provide turnkey compliance set-up to make it easier for brands to partner in a cohesive way while complying with U.S. sweepstakes laws.
3. Live sweepstakes mediation. We closely mediate all cross-marketing campaign to make sure all brands contribute as equally as possible. 
4. Traffic and sales. On the user-side, giveaway entrants are taken through an immersive flow in which they have the opportunity to genuinely learn about your brand. 
5. Conversion rate optimization. We teach all our brands how to capitalize on sweepstakes traffic through high-ROI SMS and email marketing. 

Get started with targeted, high-ROI cross-marketing

It’s simple: When brands work together, they thrive. Cross-promotion or cross-marketing not only creates a buzz around your brand; it makes it super easy to increase brand exposure, generate leads, and close sales.