The fashion industry is incredibly competitive and everyone wants to get ahead. One way to ensure you reach the right audience at the right time is through cross-promotion.
What is Cross Promotion?
Cross-promotion is a marketing partnership between two or more companies where their marketing teams work together to promote both businesses.
You’ve probably seen examples of cross-promotion without realizing it whether that’s social media mentions, banner advertising mentions on their site, etc. This tends to be done by companies with similar audiences, not in competition and usually doesn’t involve the companies charging each other as the partnership is mutually beneficial.
Cross-promotion can increase the awareness of your brand, grow the audience you reach and, in some cases, can improve your brand’s reputation.
1 – Setting Initial Goals
“Don’t go into cross-promotion blind. Know what your goals are before you begin,” cautions Loraine Bean, a business writer for Assignment Services and UKTopWriters.
What is it you want to achieve? If you can’t answer this question, then you need to do so before you properly begin considering cross-promotion.
Work out what success will look like for your company and decide on the firm goals you want to achieve. For example: expanding market reach, creating a better brand image, or simply increasing sales.
Once you have the goals set, then you should identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will use to measure your success.
2 – Deciding Your Target Audience
Once you know your goals, you then need to decide your target audience. This might already be easy if you have a target audience as part of your business plan or that obviously fits your brand.
If you don’t know your target audience, then even basic marketing won’t be of any use as it will be too varied and vague. This target audience will influence a lot of your decisions going forward.
3 – Finding a Good Partner
With your goals set and audience identified it’s time to consider potential partners. Cross-promotion is all about the partnership so this is of vital importance.
Pull together a list of potential partners and consider some basic factors like:
- Do their brand values match yours?
- Do your target audiences overlap?
- Do they have a wide reach as a band?
- What can you offer them?
- Are their products in competition with yours?
Ideally, you want a partner who is not in competition with you and that targets a similar audience and matches your brand values. A good example may be an accessory brand with a women’s clothing line or a toy brand with a kid’s clothing line.
4 – Decide on the Methods
Once you have approached a partner and have successfully negotiated a partnership, you should begin to discuss the methods of cross-promotion.
“Ideally you should have some idea of the methods you wish to use before partnering with a company but these are likely to change and develop in your partnership as you both become aware of what each other offers,” says marketing blogger Tiffany Dooley of Boomessays and Custom Essay.
There are several ways to approach cross-promotion with more becoming available as social media expands and moves forward. Consider using your already existing presences online to promote each other, share posts on social media, or host a guest blog on each other’s site.
Create stuff together whether it’s a shared promotion that attracts both of your audiences or simply creating a video to show off both of your products together. For example, makeover videos using your partner company’s accessories to accentuate your clothing line.
Finally consider giveaways, contests, discounts and other traditional marketing cross-promotional methods that might entice both audiences. The easiest option is probably the discount as you could offer a discount for each other’s companies after purchase from your company. This needs to be agreed upon and clearly set out by both partners to work.
5 – Track Success
The true final step of the process is to track how successful the partnership is and consider the future of your partnership. This is where those KPIs you set earlier can really become handy as you can see how much your partnership has helped towards your initial goals.
To ensure you are checking the audience based on the partnership consider having a tracker for particular promotion codes or having a specific landing page for those using a link from your partner company.
If you are seeing a successful partnership ensure that you work together going forward if you can and maintain a very good working relationship.
If the partnership is not so successful, consider how you may make improvements going forward or where you can implement changes.
Wrapping Up
At the end of the day, cross-promotion is all about the partnership. If you can get a good partner and work together effectively, you should see success.
However, you need to take time to prepare in advance to ensure you can get the most out of your partnership with the least amount of risk.
Written by Fashion business writer Jenny Han, Write My Thesis and Paper Writing Service also takes time to blog about various topics on Custom Writing Service.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by Fashinnovation’s columnists are their own, not those of Fashinnovation.
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