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.