Working with what you’d call a “preferred partner” is a great way to drastically increase your brand’s exposure for no cost. It’s a form of cross-promotion companies can engage in with a carefully selected partner or partners. An easy way to implement this type of partnership is through an exclusive link exchange. This means you and your partner agree to provide prominent placement on each other’s websites, promoting one another’s businesses.

This concept is similar to a link exchange. The difference is that while some companies have link exchange pages loaded with sites, a preferred partner link is more integrated into your overall site, and your partner does the same for you.

You’ll commonly see this kind of advertising on sites owned by companies with more than one website. For example, the Palmer Cash website gives prominent placement to American Hips, an underwear company owned by the t-shirt label. While it certainly makes sense to promote your own businesses this way, the same type of promotion can be used by companies who share a customer demographic, and sell non-competing products. For example, if you sell bicycles but do not sell helmets or bike jerseys, you could choose a preferred partner company that does sell these things. Your site navigation could include a link to your partner’s site encouraging customers to get bike accessories from your partner. Your partner, who sells accessories but not bikes, could provide you with a link incorporated into their site navigation. The benefit here is that you are both marketing to bike enthusiasts, and this cross-promotion activity makes it easier for you to share customers.

Two of the biggest considerations for selecting a preferred partner are:
1. Do you and your preferred partner have a similar audience? Do you both have customers interested in what the other is selling. The more similarly appealing your product lines are to a customer demographic, the better chance you have of this type of marketing working for you.

2. Do you have a similarly sized audience? A company getting 1000 website visitors each day should not choose a preferred partner getting 100 visitors daily. It’s important to form a relationship that’s going to be mutually and equally beneficial.

This type of marketing can be great, but tread with caution before committing to a long term partnership. When developing this type of a relationship with a partner consider a trial period before you commit to anything ongoing. We recommend you agree to exchange links for 30 days at first, and then evaluate the success of the match up before moving forward.

Some other ways preferred partners can promote each other:
- Print ads
- Email newsletters
- Sweepstakes
- Printed promotional materials
- Word of mouth (This works especially well for service based companies,For e because they frequently talk to their customers. For example, if you provide web design services but not marketing, partnering with an online marketer and mentioning each other to your clients is a great way to build your business.)

The concept of working with a cross-promotion partner still seems to be fairly below the radar with a lot of business owners. The small biz and marketing blogs I read usually talk about search marketing, SEO and social media. These are all good things to talk about too but I am always pleased to see cross-promotion getting some buzz too. Today Dosh Dosh posted about creating strategic alliances (AKA cross-promoting or co-branding). You can view the post here.

Today for cross-promotion inspiration I’d like to share Mesh-Box It’s a blog dedicated entirely to co-branding and cross-promotion examples. Although they pretty much just talk about partnerships between large companies there are plenty of ideas here for the small business owner to borrow.

If you’re a small business owner, the concept of branding may be a somewhat nebulous thing. You might have your marketing strictly focused on your bottom line. Big companies care about this too, but their way of going about achieving their goals is a little different. They don’t expect to trace every sale back to the highway billboard sign you drive by every day, nor do they expect that the first time you see it you’ll make a purchase. The goal is to get their brand on your brain so that when you are in the market to buy what they’re selling, you’ll think of them.

What does this have to do with the small business owner? Last week I wrote a post about how to maximize your cost-per-click spending. While I am all for this highly traceable form of marketing, I am firmly against companies relying on it entirely. Cost-per-click marketing needs to be supplemented with branding efforts so that your company’s name can become familiar to your target demographic. This familiarity will bring your target demographic to shop with you rather than bothering to explore the web for your competitors. This type of marketing is what makes t-shirt companies like Palmer Cash and Noisebot premier destinations for t-shirt lovers. These two t-shirt companies have their names plastered all over pop culture websites like Perez Hilton and Cute Overload. Can consumers find better or cheaper t-shirts elsewhere? Probably. They choose these companies because they know them.

To maximize the effect of your branding campaign, be sure to really analyze your target customer demographic. Who buys from you and why? How can you reach these people in large numbers and in a cost effective manner? The more accurately you target your audience, the better your results will be.

A great way to research targeted branding opportunities is Google’s placement targeted ads. Two things I like to try are keyword suggestions and URL suggestions. Let’s say I want to run ads for a independent music record label. The first thing I might try is searching for the keyword phrase “indie rock.” This search will give me a list of URLs I can advertise on where this topic is discussed. I might also do a search for popular indie music website pitchforkmedia.com to see what URLs Google suggests that are similar to that site. My searches will yield a list of websites I can market my record label on that are visited by my target audience. Google accepts both impression-based bids and cost-per-click bids for these types of campaigns, so you can experiment to see what works for your needs.

If a branding campaign is too pricey for your budget, consider a co-branding venture with other companies that share your target customer demographic. A great example of this is ishopindie.com. This site enables small boutiques and artisans to all contribute to one large ad budget, and this budget advertises ishopindie.com. The companies contributing to the site’s budget all benefit from the marketing efforts because everyone who discovers ishopindie.com through its branding campaigns discovers the site’s member companies. When visitors to ishopindie.com have to buy birthday gifts or want to treat themselves, ishopindie.com comes to mind and the site’s member companies reap the benefits.

Ever notice how when you shop on a site like Amazon and you express interest in one book, Amazon suggests you buy a similar book along with it and offers you a price break for doing so? This “better together” type of promotion can be leveraged by two or more companies selling complementary products.

How it works:

1. Find a cross-promotion partner you want to work with. If you sell bicycles, partner up with a company that sells helmets or cycling jerseys. If you sell footwear, maybe you’d want to work with a company that sells handbags.

2. Provide your cross-promotion partner a coupon code for your business and have your partner provide one to you.

3. When your customers check out, offer them a coupon for your partner’s business and have your partner do the same for their customers.

As always, we recommend that you use a unique coupon code for each cross-promotion campaign so that you can track the success of your efforts. Even if you don’t see an immediate boost in sales from your cross-promotion efforts, this type of marketing still gets your company name in front of potential customers who may come to you in the future, coupon in hand or not.

Here at Brand Torrent we spend a lot of time and energy encouraging small business owners to work together to build their brands. Lest you think that co-branding is beneath your company, check out this popular Geico commercial that uses Mrs. Butterworth pancake syrup to simultaneously build both brands.

The humorous ad builds a positive association for both Geico and Mrs. Butterworth pankcake syrup. The ad’s humorous nature has also given the commercial some viral power, scoring over 18,000 views on YouTube.

Even if you don’t have a big budget for a viral video, sharing the cost to produce an entertaining viral video with another brand is a marketing option within reach for the small business owner. If TV air time is too pricey, with sites like YouTube at your fingertips you can still make use of a video marketing campaign.

In the age of internet marketing it’s easy to overlook more traditional mediums like good old fashioned mail. For many types of business this might make sense but before you rule it out for your own business take a closer look at how to leverage a direct mail campaign and some benefits of doing so.

Direct mail campaigns allow you to create marketing materials beyond subject line and copy. You can design an entire 3 dimensional object to put in your target audience’s hands and the choices you make can have a huge impact. Your direct mail piece can be in an attention grabbing color, it can contain product samples or promotional items. In short, it affords you the opportunity to make a much larger impact than digital communication can offer.

Below are examples of a few cases where direct mail campaigns made a lot of sense:

1. A skincare company I’ve done marketing for in the past designed a campaign to promote a new line of roll-on fragrances. Since this sort of thing can’t be sampled through the internet, the company sent out perfume samples to every customer who purchased from them in the last 6 months. In the sample packages the company included a coupon for 10% off any purchase of the new roll-on fragrances. The benefits of the coupon were two-fold. To begin with, it gave customers a money saving incentive to purchase if they enjoyed the samples. The other advantage of the coupon is that it allowed for tracking the success of the campaign. The coupon code that went out in the direct mail piece was only given to those customers so when orders came in with that coupon code, the skincare company knew they were getting sales from the direct mail campaign.

2. An interior design firm that catered to home owners with properties worth over 1 million dollars designed a campaign to entice new home owners to use their services. The firm made a favorable introduction with new home buyers by mailing them a “housewarming” direct mail piece. The firm put together gift baskets containing pens with their web address and phone number, brochures of past jobs they’d done and fresh baked cookies from a local bakery. To offset the costs of this direct mail piece the firm also included a value-pak type coupon pack for local vendors such as restaurants and dry cleaners. Each vendor participating in the welcome pack contributed to the expense of printing the coupons and mailing the packages. (Note that this case includes not only a smart use of direct mail marketing, but also employs the power of cross-promotion to offset the cost of the direct mail campaign!)

The costs for direct mail can certainly add up quickly so it’s a strategy that you’ll want to use sparingly most of the time. That said, for a big impact campaign or the promotion of a product that needs to be sample, direct mail can be a powerful tool for attracting new customers or wooing existing ones.

Editor’s note: Thanks, ReviewPage.com, for telling your visitors about Brand Torrent.

The mailing list is an invaluable tool in your marketing arsenal. It’s an entire list of people who think your brand is interesting enough to let you email them your marketing pitches on a somewhat regular basis. You may be wondering how a company gets consumers or clients to agree to such a thing, and honestly, it’s not always easy. We’ve got a few tried and true tips for making your mailing list bigger and better and we’re going to explore them today.

Before we get started, you’ll need to decide if you’re doing an email or direct mail list. Email is obviously much less expensive, but a direct mail list sometimes makes more sense for certain kinds of businesses. If you’re going to run a direct mail list, I’m going to get back to you. Direct mail is a totally different animal than email that deserves a blog entry of its own, which I will get to before the week is out. For now, I’m going to talk about building and maintaining an email newsletter.

Before you even start to think about email marketing, you must promise to observe the following rules:

1. Email marketing is for opt-in recipients only. Do not send your newsletter to anyone who didn’t agree to sign up for it. If you do, it’s spamming and it can get you in trouble with the law, your web host, your internet service provider, and it generally reflects badly on your brand.

2. All email marketing transmissions must come with an easy-to-use unsubscribe link. Not allowing people to leave your newsletter will also make you a spammer, potentially landing you in hot water and definitely fostering animosity with customers.

3. Use your newsletter strategically and sparingly. Do not email your newsletter contacts constantly. For most businesses a monthly newsletter is reasonable. If you have very compelling content, you might be able to get away with a weekly or daily message, but if you’re going to make your messages more frequent, keep in mind that you may have a harder time keeping people subscribed and getting people signed up. It’s also a good idea to let subscribers know if they can expect frequent messages so they know what they’re signing up for. For most companies, a monthly newsletter promoting a new product or service or offering a special deal is the way to go. This allows you to remind your customers or clients to spend money with you, gives them impetus to do so and, most importantly, doesn’t get on their nerves.

So how do you get all these fans of your brand signed up to receive your emails? There are many ways to go about this, but the following are tried and true in my experience.

1. Give something away. People love free stuff. If you can do a monthly or weekly drawing from your newsletter list for a free gift, you’re likely to attract more subscribers. Be sure to let your customers or clients know they’re eligible to get a free gift by joining your newsletter.

2. Offer special deals and discounts. Everyone loves the idea of being in on a special offer. Send your contacts a special coupon code or deal along with your newsletter. Be sure to tell potential newsletter subscribers about the access to exclusive deals when they subscribe. This company offers site visitors an instant 15% discount for joining the newsletter. That’s an offer that just about guarantees every paying customer is going to join up, since they’ll want to save at check out.

3. Offer interesting content. If you’re a subject matter expert on a topic that interests your customers or clients, offer them free information with your newsletter. This professional and personal coaching consultant offers newsletter subscribers access to a free book when they sign up. A company selling dog leashes might offer a newsletter providing pet parenting tips. A company selling gourmet hot sauces might have a recipe newsletter.

Whatever hook you use to interest people in your newsletter, make it easy for people to sign up. This means you should have a sign up form on every page of your site. Not a link to a separate sign up page, a form that justs asks for an email address and has the user click “submit”. You want as few barriers as possible to getting onto your newsletter. Take it from big companies like Crate and Barrel and Overstock.com. A link to a newsletter sign up is not nearly as effective as an actual sign up on each and every page of your site.

Once you’ve built up your list, you can not only use it to market your own company, you can use your list as a cross-promotion tool. The bigger your list is, the better position you’re in to cross-promote with another company with a big list. When you send out those deals and discounts you can mention promotions for your partner and they’ll do the same for you. This can add up to thousands of free eyeballs for your brand without spending a penny.

Spending money on your marketing efforts is a great way to build brand awareness, but it’s not the only way to do it. By pairing with a well-suited cross-promotion partner, you and your partner can enhance your respective brands’ visibility on the cheap, or even without spending a dime. Here are a few ways to do it:

1. Mailing List Cross-Promotion
To use this strategy you’re going to need two things:

• a base of customers who subscribe to your company’s email newsletter

• a company to partner with who also has a base of customers subscribing to their newsletter

For this to be effective you’ll want to pair with a company whose customer demographic is similar to your own, but a product line that isn’t the same as your’s. For example, a company selling baby clothing might want to partner with a company that sells diaper bags. Both companies sell to parents with babies or small children, but they aren’t selling the same thing. These companies can agree to mention a coupon code for one another’s online shops when they send out their next newsletter. This gets the apparel vendor’s name in front of the diaper bag company’s customers and vice versa. Ideally, companies who cross-promote this way will want to have similarly-sized newsletter subscriber bases. It’s not really fair for a company with 100 newsletter readers to engage in this type of trade with a company with 1000 readers.

2. Business Blog Cross-Promotion
If you blog regularly for your business, all you need to find is another business owner who does the same and has a customer demographic similar to your own. You and your cross-promotion partner can agree to write a review of each other’s online stores in your blogs. This will get your company name in front of their blog readers and vice versa. It’s important to find a business blogger who has a blog readership similarly-sized to your own so the exchange is a fair one.

3. Promo or Sample Swaps
If you regularly mail out products to your customers, find another company with a similar customer demographic who mails out a similar amount of orders regularly. You and your partner can exchange promotional postcards, product brochures, product samples or other collateral to slip into your orders.

If you’re going to promote this way, it is best if you can provide your cross-promotion partner with something their customers are less likely to throw away, like a pen with your company name and web address on it, or a magnet. Some printed promotional materials are pricier than others, but there are lots of places online with pretty extensive catalogs and a variety of prices for items like this.

If you’re really on a budget, you can make your own promotional goodies that are a little more memorable than a flyer. For example, you could buy a large bag of candy and make stickers with your logo and web address and adhere your stickers to the candy wrappers. This sneaky form of building brand awareness gets your company name noticed in a way that makes it harder for the consumer to tune out.

4. Co-Sponsor A Product Giveaway
Product giveaways are a terrific way to build up your newsletter subscriber base. You can bring even more consumer eyeballs to check out your product giveaway and register for your newsletter by organizing a product giveaway with a partner. Here’s an example of how this might work:

Say you’re a spa goods retailer. Your customers are probably women interested in luxury items. You decide to partner up with a jewelry maker because she has a similar audience. Your partner sends you a pair of earrings and a necklace and you send her a bottle of shower gel and a bottle of moisturizer. Now you’ve got some jewelry and your own spa goods with which to put together a gift basket for your newsletter sweepstakes. Your partner has your spa goods and her own jewelry for her gift basket.

After you and your partner put together your gift baskets, take photos of them and put up a sweepstakes page on your websites inviting customers to sign up for your newsletter and automatically be entered in a drawing to win free gifts from you and your jewelry designing cross-promotion partner. You can mention to your visitors that they can double their changes of winning by visiting your partner’s website and joining her mailing list too.

At the end of the day you and your cross-promotion partner have brought your customers’ attention to each other’s brands and you’ve both increased your newsletter subscriber base. You both now have a built-in audience to send out news about discounts, sales and new products.

5. Exchange Coupon Codes
We’re all familiar with the idea of link exchanges; sometimes you’ll visit a business website and see they have a page of links. The thinking here is that this contributes to search engine optimization and maybe attracts a few human visitors along the way. What’s more likely to draw human visitors are coupons. This is similar to having a links page and doing a link exchange, but instead of just giving your visitors a long boring list of links, you’re pointing them towards savings with shops they might enjoy.

To do this type of promotion, you’ll need to set up a coupons page on your own website. After that, you’ll have to select some partner(s) with product lines that would appeal to your own customers. You’ll need your partner(s) to set up coupon pages on their sites too. Once you’ve got your pages set up, you and your partner(s) can provide each other with coupon codes to your online stores. Customers coming to shop with your partner(s) will find their coupon pages and that’s how they’ll find you. You’ve also given them a little push to actually make a purchase, since they have a coupon code in hand.

If all this seems overwhelming, don’t get discouraged. It takes time to increase brand awareness, but doing a little every day will go a long way in the end. In the mean time, we invite you to create a Brand Torrent profile so companies looking for a cross-promotion partner like you will be able to find you.

If you think cross-promotion is only for small business, think again. Some of the biggest corporations out there are leveraging the power this marketing style. Case in point, the product-touting ad campaigns promoting the new Will Ferrell movie Jackie Moon. Ferrell has appeared in character promoting both Old Spice deodorant and Bud Light beer, along with his new movie.

This type of TV advertisement is becoming more common all the time. Alicia Keys appeared in commercials promoting both her own new album and mega retailer Target. Advertisers can use these commercials not only to share advertising commercials but also to establish a positive affiliation between their brands.

You need not be a multi-million dollar corporation to put this type of marketing to work for you, whether your budget is $0 or a few thousand there are lots of ways for the creative marketing to harness the power of cross-promotion to grow a brand.