Cross Promote Your Social Media and Email Marketing

Cross promotion is about expanding the marketing reach of your product or service. It’s like one train line extending to various train networks. Every business both B2B and B2C on the globe should invest in cross promotion.

But you need to know how to do it right. Read our guide on how to cross-promote your social media and email marketing so your content and brand engages as many people as possible.

A Quick Note on Social Media and Email Marketing

In the digital age it’s important to understand just how vital social media and email marketing is to your business. The data worldwide shows that both social media marketing and email marketing are important forms of marketing for gaining new prospects and even retaining them.

These two forms of marketing have been highly tested, and time and time again have proven to yield impressive results for businesses when done right of course. To do them right is to:

Identify your target audience (study the demographics and psychographics)
Understand what your audience’s pain points are
Address your audience’s needs and wants not yours
Engage and follow up on your audience’s comments, questions, concerns, etc
Actively engage with them through consistently reaching out
Consistently create content that genuinely adds value to them (solve a problem)
Win their trust and loyalty with your brand’s values, content production and overall business structure and model

The ABCs of Cross Promotion

Below we give you some best practices (7 in total) which are essentially strategies of how you can successfully cross-promote your social media with your email marketing to help get you a high ROI.

1. Don’t Do Cross Posting

Please keep in mind that cross-promotions doesn’t mean cross-posting. The latter is publishing content on all your social media platforms simultaneously. Many businesses do this with their social media using social media management platforms to publish content simultaneously.

But putting out the same post across multiple channels isn’t an effective strategy. It doesn’t take into account the specifics of each social media platform.

Remember each social media platform caters to a different audience so remember the old saying “Different strokes for different people.” When you put out the same post across all of your social media platforms you can come across as lazy and even insincere as a brand which you want to avoid at all costs. So, to avoid this do the following:

Take the time to tailor your message so its relevant to each particular audience on the different social platforms.
Ensure your brand’s message and personality is consistent across all platforms (the logo, colours, fonts, values, tone, etc)
Repurpose content from either your social media channels or other mediums. For instance, create a Facebook post from a blog, use video content for a post, etc.
Stay on top of changes happening on social media platforms. Inform your audience, if necessary, of these changes.
Keep a strict content schedule to be consistent across all your social media channels. Consistency is the key to success on social media.

2.Invest in User-Generated Content for Cross- Promotions

This is one of the best if not the top way to bring your social media marketing and email marketing strategies together through user-generated content. When it comes to getting new prospects for your brand, having user-generated content on both your social media and in your emails marketing messaging will do wonders for your brand and ultimately ROI. Consumers crave social proof and so they will choose a product or service based on the reviews and testimonials of fellow consumers. So best practices are:

Get customer reviews and testimonials on your social media channels.
Ensure these reviews and testimonials actually show the value you give and are not simply just about what a nice person you are or how great your brand is.
Share these with your email subscriber’s list to help promote your brand.
Don’t sound ‘salesy’ in your messaging to consumers. People don’t like being sold to. Brands need to be subtle and highly creative when getting their message across.

3. Sync Your Social Media Channels and Email Calendar

To be able to cross-promote your social channels with your email marketing in a way that saves time and resources you should sync your email marketing calendar with your social media calendar. Often these are separate for brands and so much time is wasted going back and forth. Sometimes you find in companies teams end up doing the same work twice simply because they aren’t aware of what the other team is doing. What a terrible waste of time! Avoid this at all cost. Best practices are:

Integrate both your social media and email marketing calendars so they work side by side.
For large companies ensure that all teams are on the same page and are aware of each other’s campaigns.
Use a calendar tool to help with planning. For project management consider Trello, Asana, or Monday.com
For editorial calendars consider CoSchedule, Percolate, and Kapost.
For Gmail calendars consider Google Sheets or Google Calendar.
For Microsoft consider Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Outlook.

4. Promote Your Social Channels in Emails for Cross Promotion

Your email marketing can help increase consumer engagement on social media through reminding your subscribers that your brand is active on social media. Just about every brand on earth can benefit from building an active social media presence which ideally should be a community. It’s a highly viable digital strategy. It not only helps increase engagement on social media, but also gives your subscriber’s value and can assist in keeping them even more connected to your brand. Best practices are:

Encourage your subscribers to sign up in a fun and interactive way.
Remember to get your message across without sounding ‘salesy’.
Consider running a contest or promotion for your audience when they follow your brand on social media.
Focus on just one social network especially at the start of your brand’s journey to make it easier for subscribers to decide what action to take eg: following your brand on Facebook.

5. Promote Your Emails on Social Channels for Cross Promotion

Just like you can promote your social channels in emails you can also promote your email marketing on your social media. A great way to do this is to encourage your social media followers to sign up for your mailing list. One of the most effective ways to do this is through the use of Twitter Cards, which allow subscribers to sign up for an email list without leaving the social media platform. Other best practices are:

Add a subscribe form to your Facebook page.
Encourage subscribers to join your email list by offering them incentives.
Set up exclusive offers and even giveaways for joining.
Create great and engaging content on your social channels- video, infographics, memes, etc.

6. Upload Your Email Subscriber List to Social Networks

Upload your subscriber list to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media channels. It’s a fantastic way of integrating your email and social media marketing strategies and a highly effective way of cross promoting your social media marketing with your email marketing.

Through uploading your subscriber lists you get better insights into your customers. You’ll know what they are listening to, what interests them, what they are sharing and even what trends they are following. Having this information helps you know your subscribers more which can help you craft better emails as well as better social media posts. Best practices are:

Use these uploaded subscriber lists to follow subscribers on social media.
Run promoted and targeted social media campaigns to customers who are already interested in your brand.
Create a customer list. Facebook’s custom audience feature is particularly good for this and is used as a tool to increase brand success using paid reach.

7. Retarget Ads on Relevant Platforms to Interested Email Subscribers

Let’s be honest- ads are expensive, so you want to be clear and targeted about where you spend your money. For instance, cost per click is much cheaper on Facebook and Twitter compared to LinkedIn at least currently.

But LinkedIn is generally the better platform for B2B. The main thing is knowing exactly where your target audience is. When you know this, you can retarget to people who are already interested (your email subscribers) in what you have to offer. This leads to better conversion rates and brand loyalty. It eliminates having to send out irrelevant ads which waste your money and time. Best practices are:

Set up a retargeting campaign for interested email subscribers. You’ll need to install a tracking code on your website.
If you send an email to subscribers that leads to your site, you can then target ads to just the people who clicked to that page.
Build a specific segment of your audience even faster by using Rebrandly URL shortener.
Retarget people who are interested in your social media content but haven’t yet visited your website with URL shorteners.

So, there you have it – 7 Best practices for cross-promoting your social channels and your email marketing effectively. To learn more about other great practices to grow your brand empire Book a Time With WORD EMPIRE ®, the experts at building business empires.