Maximizing a company’s online sales is possible thanks to many techniques; one is cross-marketing, a strategy based on disseminating complementary products and services to potential customers to take advantage of latent business opportunities. Do you want to know more about her? Here we tell you everything!
Increasing the sales of a company is the central objective of all strategies. Do we agree? In this sense, cross-marketing has become an initiative capable of maximizing business opportunities by taking advantage of the dissemination of complementary products to potential customers.
Are you interested in learning more about this? Read to the end!
What is cross-marketing?
Cross marketing, also called cross-promotion, is a series of techniques and initiatives that seek to integrate the channels an organization uses to communicate with its audience and take advantage of them to send complementary messages and increase revenue.
It is generally a technique used in online media; for example, when a user visits your company’s website and takes advantage of their interest in some articles, different complementary products are promoted that could be useful for them.
Here are two cases for you to understand more easily:
Cross Marketing Example #1
Imagine that within your eCommerce, the customer is buying a laptop. Still, before he finishes making the purchase, peripherals such as external monitors or perhaps a stand for the computer are suggested.
What exactly is the goal of this strategy? Well, increasing the company’s revenue while also displaying what the company can do to improve the customer’s product experience.
Cross Marketing Example #2
Another example of this technique is discounting to help in the purchase decision. Let’s say that a user through your Instagram profile decides to take a test with your brand to learn more about her body fat index.
He clicks on an ad in your account and goes directly to a landing page where he fills in his details and takes an interactive test to learn more about his physical condition.
Once done, they receive the results by email, and within the message, there is a link that takes them to your e-commerce, where you show them product recommendations for weight control and body fat, but they leave without making the purchase.
Your brand gives him some space, and after three days, you send him an email with an exclusive offer of 25% on his first purchase for the products he left in the cart without finishing the process.
Then you will have developed an effective cross-marketing campaign strategy, and quite possibly, your potential customer has decided to stop consuming it!
Are you still confused? Don’t worry! We will explain you better.
How does cross-marketing work?
Many could say that cross-marketing and multichannel marketing could be the same. However, the operation of the first distances it.
This is how cross-marketing works:
In cross-marketing, the messages to users through the different channels are extremely personalized, both in content and the medium used to communicate with them.
Interactions between the user and other brands are tracked — for example, through a CRM — to create automated communication flows and real-time analytics to deliver messages that are relevant and tailored to the customer’s journey.
And in this way, complementary actions are carried out, seeking to add value to the potential customer and offering them attractive options and alternatives to finalize their purchase, as well as to increase their satisfaction and finally stimulate loyalty.
Why is cross-marketing important?
Some might think that cross-marketing, unlike other strategies such as Content Marketing, is somewhat aggressive with insistence. Showing the customer that they are eager to take him to his purchase decision, however, is not so; We already tell you why.
Most companies today use multichannel marketing as an initiative to satisfy the communication demand of their consumers. However, many others forget to generate a cross-promotional strategy that supports these actions.
Planning and deploying techniques and tools —such as SEO to encourage a company’s organic traffic— allow you to take advantage of all possible business opportunities.
What do we mean by this? Well, your sales force could take advantage of online and offline channels to take advantage of the interest of your ideal customer and the demand to use multiple channels to complement their purchases with products and services of interest.
That leaves us ready for the last topic of this blog post, and it is none other than the one carried out by this initiative.
How to implement cross-marketing?
If you have reached this point, you are likely convinced that cross-marketing is a perfect strategy to get the most out of your promotional actions, right?
Thus. Here we will give you a brief but valuable guide on doing it.
Take note!
Clarify your goals
This is a simple step; you have to ask yourself key questions such as:
- What do you hope to achieve with cross-marketing?
- What do you want your potential customer to do in your store?
- What are the ideal results expected by you?
Once you have this, you will know your expectations in this regard, and you will be able to build a strategy that achieves them.
Identify your ideal client or buyer person.
The first thing is to know your business model; it can be B2C or B2B. Whatever it is, it will give you a clear perspective of your client’s profile, and you will be able to build a model of the ideal consumer or buyer persona.
Thanks to this, you will know their interests, tastes, motivations, problems, pains, and demands to create cross-marketing strategies that respond to them and get the most out of your actions.
Define your KPIs
It is not possible to recognize the effectiveness of a strategy if it is not measured, right? A fundamental part of well-applied cross-marketing is the definition of KPIs that reflect the point of your actions and determine their progress or setbacks.
Collect information from your customer’s
Taking advantage of the fact that you will communicate through multiple channels with your consumers and potential customers, creating information collection strategies —within the legal framework— will provide you with relevant information about their experiences and purchasing habits.
You can do it through a newsletter, a lead magnet, or even through the purchase process of your eCommerce.
Determine the channels
As part of cross-selling —a key factor in cross-marketing— you must determine which channels will be present in your actions.
The good news is that you don’t have to guess all of them; you can start with two that can be email or WhatsApp and then add them as the results are given, and the opportunities of your strategy become evident.
Use remarketing
Remarketing is a system that allows you to set highly personalized ads for users who visit your website or eCommerce.
Thanks to this type of strategy, you can show your visitors a specific ad based on their behavior within the eCommerce that reactivates their interest in your products and motivates them to make their purchase.
In this way, you can increase your income and allow them to experience the use of your products and services.
Now, if you have created a powerful cross-marketing strategy, your company will begin to receive various benefits worth knowing.
Benefits of a cross-marketing strategy
Some of the main advantages of this initiative are:
- With a better relationship with your customers, since close interactions are executed between both, you will be able to identify that your company is interested in their needs through complementary products of great strategic value.
- Increase the organization’s sales, giving the sales force a greater opportunity to market complementary products of interest to potential consumers.
- Reach consumer loyalty through the use of various channels relevant to them.
- By displaying goods that can enhance the experience of using a specific product and saving you time looking, you can increase availability.
- Offer more suitable alternatives according to their needs, and that differ by price, brand, or characteristics.
You already know everything about cross-marketing and how to carry it out!
If you want to continue learning about interesting marketing techniques, we recommend discovering Co-Marketing and how to get the most out of it.
Do not miss it!