Cross marketing has been more frequently used in news related to Internet websites. It shows us that cross marketing, especially the wide application of cross network marketing in large enterprises, makes it necessary for me to systematically describe cross network marketing.

Application of cross marketing

In September 2001, Microsoft's MSN.com portal and Disney's ESPN.com sports website signed a cross marketing agreement (http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/w/2001-09-08/83867.shtml). The main content of the agreement is that MSN's free mail Hotmail, search engine, chat and shopping will be on the top of ESPN home page. MSN will exclusively use ESPN content in sports channel and provide priority position on its website, so as to achieve mutual promotion.

Also in September, IBM and eBay also reached a cooperation agreement: IBM plans to expand its sales through eBay, eBay will become another new channel for IBM to sell to users and small and medium enterprises, while online retailer eBay will make a 88 * 31 pixel LOGO link for IBM website on the first page of its website, and eBay will also choose the application platform of IBM to upgrade its technology.

The foundation of the cooperation is that eBay has 34 million registered users, providing about 6000000 kinds of products and services at any time, with a huge amount of online trading volume, and 70% of users on eBay are new users of IBM.

In addition, in the news released by Sina and sun culture, the emphasis of future integration is cross marketing, cross selling, cross use of content, and one-stop service for advertisers.

The essence of cross marketing

As can be seen from the above examples, cross marketing has become an important part of enterprise cooperation, and even the basis of mergers and acquisitions.

Cross marketing is not only applicable to large enterprises. As long as there are certain conditions, enterprises of all sizes can carry out cross marketing within a certain scope.

In order to fully understand the value and operation method of cross marketing, we need to understand the essence of cross marketing first.

A concept closely related to cross marketing is "cross selling". Cross selling (Cross-selling) is usually the discovery of a variety of needs of an existing customer, and the marketing of a variety of related services or products by satisfying their needs.

Various strategies and methods to facilitate cross selling are cross marketing.

Cross selling is most obvious in the traditional banking and insurance industries, because consumers must submit real personal data when purchasing these products or services. These data can be used to further analyze customer needs (data mining in CRM is one of the typical applications), as the basis of market research, so as to provide customers with more and better services. On the other hand, they can also develop mutual marketing between these user resources and other complementary enterprises under the premise of protecting users' privacy.

It can be seen that the essence of cross marketing is a means of promotion to customers or partners of customers under the condition of having certain marketing resources. The biggest feature of this marketing method is to make full use of the existing resources and cross marketing among two enterprises with the characteristics of users' needs, so that the number of potential users will increase significantly without additional marketing costs. At the same time, the establishment of good cooperative relationship based on cross marketing will have more strategic significance for the development of two or more enterprises.

Cross network marketing

Cross network marketing refers to the application of cross marketing in network marketing.

Because of the natural advantages of network marketing, developing cross marketing has greater room for development, because the website itself is an effective marketing tool, and the registered user information of the website is also a valuable marketing resource.

Cross marketing between two companies / websites can take many forms, usually based on different levels of website cooperation, such as website exchange advertising, exchange links, content sharing, and promoting each other's registered user data.

In the network company, there is usually a BD (Business Development) department. It also shows that the network companies attach importance to cooperation and promotion. However, due to the particularity of the network companies, they often fail to give full play to the value of BD in the absence of profit and financing, and often try to sell their products / services to partners in the name of cooperation, or even search for their own acquisition opportunities. Therefore, many Internet companies have not made full use of the cross network marketing based on cooperation.

The premise of cross network marketing is to have certain marketing resources. Under normal circumstances, these marketing resources can be expressed as certain website visits, registered users' data, certain professional and unique content resources, etc. in addition, some free services such as free mailboxes, forums, e-books can also be used as cross network marketing resources.

Many small websites are often unable to rely on a large number of advertising promotion because they lack sufficient marketing budgets, and they should make full use of cross network marketing tools.

However, what makes some small websites or new websites headache is that they do not have enough available resources to make use of them, making cross network marketing subject to certain restrictions, and even think that this method is not suitable for themselves. In fact, in this case, we can first use partners' resources to popularize, for example, according to the user characteristics of partners, we will make a valuable e-book for partners to download or send through the mailing list.

Of course, the choice of partners requires a certain effort. First, the two websites should have similar or complementary user needs rather than direct competitors. At the same time, we need to have a certain understanding of potential partners' user resources.