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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

What is cross-marketing?

This may seem like a simple enough question, but there are many forms of cross-marketing that are easily overlooked.  Traditionally, cross-marketing was deemed to be the practice of the “big guys”. You were cross-marketing if you ran print, radio and TV campaigns simultaneously. Cross-marketing was, and sometimes still is, discouraged by some professionals unless you have a very large marketing budget to work with.  But these are often professionals who are only used to working with large budgets and can’t fathom that a business could possibly launch a successful marketing campaign without the big bucks.

In today’s world of business, however, this theory no longer need apply.  The biggest trick with cross-marketing is to not over-extend yourself and don’t start something you can’t finish.  Cross-marketing effectively, requires the development of a well thought out plan, followed by consistent implementation. Actually, this is true of any marketing, but when you are juggling multiple methods of marketing on a limited budget, being organized and having a plan is even more crucial.

So, how can you setup a cross-marketing plan that won’t break the bank?  With a wee bit of creativity and a little investment of time - that's how.  There are so many options available that it would be overwhelming to cover them all, and there is no way I would succeed in keeping that information to around 500 words!

So let's just have a look at a few of the areas you can work with for affordable cross-marketing.
  1. Print advertising (in publications)
  2. Print materials (brochures etc)
  3. Targeted direct mail
  4. Website promotion
  5. Social Media
  6. Blogging
Woohoo – isn’t that great!  Never heard those suggestions before I’ll bet!  Lol

Ok, but the real question is HOW can you use these tools? As I was afraid when I started on this article, things got way out of hand and I now have pages and pages of information to share with you. So let’s start out with an easy point to get you thinking.

With all of the above, the most important key is consistency – if you’re going to post an industry tip at 6pm daily to catch people just after supper, then make sure that you do it EVERYDAY at 6pm; if you’re going to blog, pick a time of day and/or a specific day of the week and schedule your blogs to post automatically always at the same time.  People are creatures of habit (whether we like it or not) and this is a situation where it is better to go with the flow than against the grain. Be consistent in your timing and in your message, remember, the point is cross-marketing, so make sure that when you plan each campaign, that all of the marketing you do is directly connected to the same topic/message. You can offer variations of the same message to keep it interesting and you can say the same thing in different ways. But if your goal is to increase calls to your “24-hour plumbing hotline”, then make sure that every message you are putting out there for a specific period of time draws the customer back to that point.

Tomorrow I will start to offer a summary of the types of marketing that I have listed above with some insights into each of the points. These certainly aren’t the only methods out there, but they’re a good place to get started.

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