Guide: How Cross-Promotional Merch Can Help You Grow

A lot of the time in business, we tend to think of our own companies as singular entities in our industries, geographical locations, or niches. So often, similar businesses are labeled competitors, a force to be watched, fought off, and out-maneuvered. That's fine for actual competitors, but some business owners take it a little too far and view everyone in the same light.

The truth is, commerce isn't quite the zero-sum game it's made out to be. Instead of treating other businesses with skepticism, you can find opportunities.

One of the more common strategies seen amongst synergistic brands is cross-promotion. When Disney allows their characters to be used to promote products, both those products and Disney come out ahead. When local businesses form partnerships and offer coupons or bundle packages, they both benefit. Cross-promotion can bring with it many benefits to the businesses willing to pool their interested customers, such as:

• "Free" advertising from your partner (and free advertising for them from you.)
• A surge in business interest.
• Growth in awareness for you and/or your partner amongst interested audiences.

With tangible benefits and relatively low risk, until you're fairly deep into the process, cross-promotions can be an excellent option to grow a brand.

While it's easy to put a couple of logos on a set of printed coupons, cross-promotions can go a lot deeper into the realm of cross-promotional merchandise. The question is, how do you go about making that kind of merchandise and making it work for you and your partners? Let's talk about it!

Identify Potential Promotional Partners

Generally speaking, cross-promotional offers aren't likely to suddenly fall into your lap. Instead, they'll be something you develop, pitch, and workshop with interested parties. Sometimes, cross-promotions fall through. Other times, they work out and even turn into recurring events. Often, they're one-time events, often for the launch of a product or other special occasion.

The first step of the process, then, is to think about what businesses you might want to work with for a cross-promotion. There are a bunch of different directions you can take the concept, and a lot depends on what you want to get out of it, but we'll dig deeper into that in the next section.

Where should you start looking?

• Consider businesses that have products or services that are complementary to your own. A company selling lawn care equipment can cross-promote with equipment maintenance firms. A data analytics firm can cross-promote with a data storage app. A golf club manufacturer can partner with a company that gives golf lessons.
• Consider businesses that are locally relevant to your brand. This is best for small businesses; local mom-and-pop shops need to stick together in the face of the Walmarts and Amazons of the world and can garner more local interest through cross-promotion.
• Consider businesses that have similar audiences. A music store and a craft store might not have any direct cross-over, but they can come together to help sponsor and manage an arts and crafts fair that attracts the kinds of creative people most likely to be customers of both.
• Consider something off the wall. Nonsensical cross-promotions can gain traction simply because they're absurd and don't make sense, though they can't work every time.

It's also a good idea to build up a list of potential businesses to partner with rather than just a couple of options. After all, the business on the other end might not be receptive to a partnership at all or might not want to partner with you specifically, and you don't want your plans entirely derailed if they don't bite. Having a list with backup options is ideal.

Determine Useful Collaborative Goals

Before digging too deep into building up cross-promotion ideas, think about what your goals are going to be for the promotion.

Different cross-promotions will have different goals, though the list of possible goals generally aligns with various business objectives. As such, you might:

• Create co-branded products to help both brands boost sales.
• Use co-branding to promote a new product launch.
• Cross-promote a smaller brand to bring them to a larger audience.
• Leverage a partnership with a synergistic brand to sell more of your product.

Don't just limit yourself to thinking about the goals and benefits for you; consider what the goals and benefits of your partner might be.

The reason you do this before you start to pitch promotion ideas to other businesses is so that you can demonstrate having some thought put into the idea – as opposed to just walking up and saying, "Hey, we should work together" with no basis – to show you're serious. It's also a way to help convince your potential partner that they should participate; if you can show that you've put thought into how they'll benefit, they can evaluate whether or not that goal will be worth it for them.

Of course, in the process of planning your partnership, one or both of you may decide that other goals or other ideas may be better or more effective. There's nothing wrong with changing the plan down the line; the goal here is to develop a pitch that a potential partner can find compelling enough to bite.

Pitch Your Partnership

You have goals, you have ideas of value, and you have ideas of what you can do and with who; now, you need to pitch them. There's not necessarily a defined process for this. It often depends on the businesses involved. Some business owners are very hands-on and will be more than willing to chat when you ask them for a bit of their time. Others won't be terribly interested, and you'll have to follow up with compelling nuggets of information and hooks to try to catch them.

In a sense, this is just another B2B sales call, just without the direct sales. You need to be charismatic, compelling, and interesting; otherwise, you won't get the time of day. The goal of the preparation above is largely to help demonstrate that you're serious and to have some of that information you can use as a hook.

Nevertheless, some brands won't bite no matter what you have for an idea. That's why you also need to know when you should cut your losses and start looking at the next name on your list. Ideally, you prioritize your list based on how much value the partnership would bring to you, but you might also organize them by how likely they are to accept.

Choose Compelling Crossover Merchandise Ideas

Not all business partnerships and cross-promotions have merchandise as the core of their strategy, and some don't use merchandise at all. In our view, merchandise is what takes that kind of partnership to the next level.

Your first goal, then, is to pick what kind of merchandise works best for your efforts. Sometimes, that means applying the branding of one to the products of the other, like how video game consoles often have promotional customized versions with wraps or "skins" that suit the brand, or how certain brands of ice cream are making cross-over flavors, or how seemingly every brand is making a cereal or lending their branding to a cereal these days.

Other times, the two of you come together to make a product unique to both of you. This can be something truly unique, or it can just be as simple as a custom, limited-time graphic design that you print on apparel and accessories. Even something as basic as co-branded and cross-promotional canvas totes, t-shirts, or stationary.

The "cheaper" the cross-promotional items, the more you need to bundle together, or the more they need to be representative of something else. A tote with some stationary and a pen or water bottle in it isn't exactly that compelling on its own, but if it's a limited-time set of items that can only be obtained from attending a special event like a trade show or local art fair, it can have some greater inherent value to the people most interested in having it.

Find Suppliers for Cross-Promotional Merchandise

You and your cross-promotional partner need to agree on things like graphic design, which can be a whole process in and of itself. Maybe you each have teams of graphic designers working on it. Maybe one of you handles it and just asks for the approval of the other. Maybe you hire a freelancer to do it for you. Sometimes, you can find a service that makes merchandise that will also do the design work for you, like we do.

Once you have an idea of what you want to make in your design, it's time to look for someone who can make the product for you. This is, again, somewhat dependent on the product itself. A customized version of your product just needs to be run through the same supply lines you normally use. Meanwhile, if you're doing something simple like a t-shirt or canvas tote, you can use a company like ours.

In fact, we highly recommend our own merchandise for one specific reason: we take great pains to ensure that our products are as ethically produced as possible. That means sustainable farming for the fabrics used to make the apparel, ethical use of labor, local suppliers, and as minimal shipping as possible. Some of you won't mind and will be happy to order nonsense from China, but we believe that domestic production is better whenever possible.

To say nothing about incoming potential tariffs, of course, which can make it dramatically more expensive to order your products from overseas, thus limiting the potential value they have and the benefits you can get out of them.

If you have any questions about our merchandise, feel free to reach out and ask. We love talking about it – maybe a little too much sometimes – and we'll happily pull the receipts, metaphorically and literally.

Once you pick a supplier, make sure to do your due diligence. That means getting test versions of the item, double-checking that it maintains the quality standards you demand, and that you and your partner both approve of it before making your final order.

Promote Your Promotion

One of the keys to a good cross-promotion is, well, promotion. Your partner expects you to pull your weight, just as you expect them to pull theirs. You both have opportunities to reach out to your audiences, promote your cross-promotional event or product tie-in, and get people interested. There are any number of marketing strategies you can use for this, from newsletters and social media to event sponsorships and trade show attendance.

Cross-promotions will also naturally have some kind of duration. Sometimes, it's as short as a single day's event. Sometimes, it's just a limited number of a given product, after which there's no more left, and it's all over. Sometimes, it's longer-term; some brands do cross-promotions that last years. Eventually, though, the promotion ends.

Evaluate Successes and Failures

When a cross-promotional event is over, you have to analyze how it went. Did sales jump during the event? If so, did it work for both of you or just one of you? Were customers receptive to the promotion, or did they have concerns? Were there concerns about the brand you partnered with? Was your marketing engaging? Did people like your products?

All of these are questions you need to answer, both so that you can do a post-mortem on the event with your partner and so you have the information to take to your next attempt. After all, you can't stop at just one cross-over, right? Brand deals, partnerships, and cross-promotion are how many modern businesses succeed these days, so each one is a learning experience as well as the groundwork for another one.

Don't forget to aggregate the information you learn from it to refine your pitch for the next one and produce a case study you can use as proof or leverage for the next pitch.

If you have any questions about anything we went over in this article, be sure to let us know! We'd be more than happy to help!