Cross-marketing or cross-promotion is one of the most beneficial marketing tactics in many industries, publishing included.
Cross-promotion is a form of marketing promotion where customers of one product or service are targeted with the promotion of another product. In the publishing industry, this can take the form of your magazines being made available in hotels or cafes. For digital magazines, the possibilities for cross-promotion has increased with all industries trying to take advantage of the benefits of digital transformation.
A key guiding principle in cross-marketing is to create a win-win situation where both parties benefit from an expanded reach. Through this tactic, it’s not unusual to see rival brands come together if they see enough benefit in it.
We’ve rounded up some successful cross-marketing cases in the publishing (and digital publishing) industry to give you some ideas on how other magazine publishers are implementing cross-promotion for their own publications and are engaging new audiences.
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Keypr and Scribd
Keypr is a guest experience and management platform for cloud-based hotels, casinos and luxury residences. Keypr and digital reading subscription service Scribd have announced a partnership where Scribd’s library of more than one million magazines, ebooks and audiobooks will be offered to hotel rooms across the world.
According to the company, the partnership opens up opportunities for Scribd to reach new readers and offers an enriching alternative to other in-room entertainment options like TV and radio.Through the partnership, the Scribd app will be preloaded onto in-room tablets.
Upon signing up for the service, guests will have instant access to bestselling and award-winning books and audiobooks as well as leading magazines like Bloomberg Businessweek, Time and People.
Vanity Fair and GQ
Vanity Fair and GQ are both some of the world’s most recognizable fashion magazine brands, albeit with a slightly different audience. However, they are both known to promote each other’s content in their own magazines.
Of course, being both Condé Nast magazines, it helps to already have an existing relationship, in this case, as sister brands under the same umbrella. Cross-promotion between your magazines, if you have multiple magazine brands, can be beneficial and easy to carry out.
Condé Nast and Vodafone
Vodafone in Italy has partnered with Vogue Italia to delight its mobile subscribers. Through its Happy Friday promotion, Vodafone customers can take advantage of a free two-year subscription to Vogue Italia.
The promotion provides the customers with a Free Pass code. The customers are then instructed to download the Vogue Italia digital magazine app, submit the code and take advantage of their free subscription for two years.
The partnership allows Condé Nast to increase its reach to Vodafone subscribers which number is at 26 million mobile customers.
SPH Magazines and Wi-Fi Library
Seeing the large potential of free and gated Wi-Fi access in various public venues such as malls, stores, banks and cafes, SPH magazines grouped their magazine brands into a newsstand app which provides a free digital library featuring its issues. This digital library service is then offered to local businesses that provide free Wi-Fi to their customers.
Partner venues with Wi-Fi access for its customers can then automatically direct new connections to SPH Magazines’ Wi-Fi Library. It became a win-win solution for both the magazine publisher and the partner venues as it allows SPH Magazines to secure a wider audience for their magazines while the venues then provide a new service to their clients.
Nature and Reddit
While a seemingly unlikely alliance, international science magazine, Nature, and news aggregator and online forum Reddit, entered into a partnership in 2013 after noticing that one of Reddit’s subreddit topics, r/science, frequently features their articles with people commenting, upvoting and sharing their content.
Nature magazine then entered into a partnership with Reddit where their magazine editors and journalists would be given a special marker beside their usernames in the site and could interact with other redditors, answering questions about their articles, providing clarification or perhaps sharing more content.
The collaboration provided more visibility for Nature as it became more prominent in the r/science subreddit, thereby reinforcing their brand and reputation in the field of scientific journalism.
