Modish Biz Tips

Double Your Marketing Impact With Cross-Promotion

The following is a guest post by Meredith Keller

{photo by Pochaco} 

Imagine you have a company newsletter with 300 subscribers. Your website gets 3000 visitors each month and you've managed to amass 100 fans on Facebook. You're using these channels to promote special sales and discount codes and seeing a trickle of a response from customers. Now imagine you could let two or three times as many people know about your current promotions without spending a dime. How is such a thing possible? With cross-promotion!

Cross-promotion is marketing activity that is mutually beneficial for two or more businesses. You may already engage in some of this now by having a friend in business insert your promotional flyers into orders she ships to customers. Big businesses do this type of marketing too. You've probably seen the Geico commercials featuring Mrs. Butterworth syrup, for example. There are lots of ways to engage in cross-promotional activities but before we explore some examples, first you need to know how to pick the right partner.

Picking a Cross-Promotion Partner
There are two elements to consider when selecting a cross-promotion partner and they're both very important:

Monthly Goal Meetup- October

I'm much more than a day late and a dollar short, but I think it's time for the October Monthly Goal Meet-up, hmm?

I wasn't going to continue with the meetup because I had no idea, really no idea that it was actually helping people stay on track! I don't know why I thought that, but I'm really hopeful and inspired to hear that it has been helping many of you. So, thank you to everyone who emailed and commented about how you would miss the meetup- you changed my mind. I'm going to continue on with it and can see BIZtips remaining the meetup space for us each month, whether or not I make it a more active blog again in the new year.

So, for those of you who would like to continue to participate, if you haven't added BIZtips to your feed reader yet, that may be a great way to stay on top of when new posts come up, since they'll be infrequent. There's an option to sign up to receive posts via email, which may work well.

Other than that, let's get on with the goals, shall we? 

Incorporate Charitable Work into your Brand Indentity

The following is a guest post by Meredith Keller

{photo by raceytay}

The key to brand building is telling a story. Anyone can sell handbags or earrings, part of what makes your products stand out is the personality behind the business. There are lots of great ways to show a bit of yourself to your customers: create a Flickr account, maintain a blog. Share your process, share your workspace, share a bit of you. One valuable way to share with your customers is through your charitable activities. We all like to do business with socially responsible companies, so if you're involved with a good cause make this part of your brand's story.

1. Be Authentic

If you're not currently involved in a charitable organization, your first task is to select one. When doing this, make sure it's a charity you really care about. For one thing, it will come across as more genuine when you tell the story and for another, it will help you stay engaged with your charity. Some good examples include running a marathon for breast cancer, teaching art classes to underprivileged youth, or volunteering for a conservation organization.

Ideally, you'd want to pick something that fits with your brand. If you're an illustrator, teaching art classes might be a natural fit. If you make products from recycled goods the conservation organization might make more sense. At Ex-Boyfriend, we are very involved with local animal rescues. Our whole company is run by animal lovers and a lot of our illustrations feature some of our favorite critters. Our customers are likely to be animals lovers and interested in our work with animal rescues, so it makes sense to share our experiences with them.

2. Tell the story

Finding my way & the future of BIZtips

As you may recall, I've been in a major funk lately. I was depressed and uninspired for a couple months, totally distracted from work with no real interest to get back into the swing of things, honestly. So, after I wrote the post here about how I've been feeling (thanks for all your wonderful, encouraging words by the way!) it opened up the path for me to really start thinking about what was causing my funkiness. And I realized that it hasn't been anything I'm doing that's the problem, really. It's what I haven't been doing. 

I haven't been taking pictures like I used to, which is one of my favorite things to do. I haven't been getting out of the house hardly at all- and I mean, at all! I haven't been feeling creatively engaged or artistic. I haven't been staying motivated. I haven't been exercising or taking care of myself. And most importantly, I haven't been having any fun!

In the 4-Hour-Workweek, author Tim Ferris talks about how we should be chasing excitement in our lives and careers. He says when someone talks about "following their passion" or "doing what they love", that's just another way to say they're doing what excites them. And I'd have to agree.

So that got me to thinking about what excites me? What do I really want to do with my days? I decided to open up a new little shop (coming soon, very soon!), just for fun and so far, in getting everything prepared, it's been just what the doctor ordered to lift my spirits! I'm also taking Susannah's Unravelling class right now and it's opening up some creative paths for me and allowing me to take time for myself, which is something I need to do much more often.

I'm feeling encouraged and excited with thoughts of something new. But, as we all know, with new endeavors comes the inevitable lack of time to be able to do everything. Which means I need to make some changes, let go of some things and re-define my priorities. 

In my most unsure moments, I'm reminded by my boyfriend how lucky I am to be young and have this awesome opportunity to try out different things. To be in a position where I can pursue all my different interests to see what really suits me best is quite a gift, and I feel I should take advantage of it.

So, I'm trying something new. I desperately need to get out from behind the laptop more often and add more fun to my days. And no matter how scary it seems and even though I'm really worried about disappointing all of you...I'm afraid I need to put BIZtips on a bit of a hiatus.

I have a couple more guest posts from the ever-so-knowledgeable Meredith that I'll post tomorrow and Thursday, and then on Friday I'll put together a reference post that points to some favorite articles so you can navigate through all that BIZtips has to offer more easily.

In January, I plan on re-assessing and either making this blog active again with the help of frequent guest contributors (if ya'll would like to help??) or just keeping it as a resource for everyone. We'll see what seems most feasible at that time.

I think it's time now for me to take my own advice and practice what I preach here, so to speak. I want to create a career that I'm truly in love with and even though I'm still feeling around and am not entirely sure what that means for me yet, I do know that I deserve to give myself the time and space I need to figure it out.

So this will be the last week of BIZtips for a bit until I check back in in January. In the meantime, I'll be over at Modish daily, so join me there!

I thank you all for reading, commenting, emailing, participating, encouraging and sharing as much as you have here! It's amazing, really. You readers are the awesomest of the awesomest people I've ever "met" online. Good luck with everything and I hope we can still find happiness in our creative careers together!

With love,

Jena