Cross-promotions are a valuable and highly focused marketing tool to drive additional sales. By promoting products to a customer who has purchased a related product, you help ensure that your marketing dollars are spent on a highly targeted audience that is more likely to be receptive to your marketing message. However, creating highly relevant cross-promotions can be an issue for a small company with a limited product offering, but still provides an opportunity to compete with larger competitors.

Life Technologies, a biotech behemoth among laboratory products companies, has no such problems. If they sell a customer a piece of equipment, for example, they more than likely have all sorts of reagents, kits, and even related equipment to promote based on the customers initial purchase. Knowing a customer’s prior purchases allows them to predict their needs, and cross-promotions ensure that they deliver a marketing message relevant to those needs. A small company, however, may sell the kits or reagents but not the related equipment. Cross-promotion is like a puzzle and you can only successfully execute it if you have all the pieces. The pieces, however, can be obtained through “outside” cross-promotions.

Small life science companies can form marketing partnerships to execute outside cross-promotion strategies. For example, if your company sells thermal cyclers but not PCR primers you can partner with another small company that sells PCR primers but doesn’t compete in the thermal cycler space and jointly promote each other’s products. You then gain the benefits of each others marketing efforts – every time your partner gets a sale or a new customer, you get a highly targeted lead, and vice versa. This is not only a great way to drive sales and product / brand awareness, but is also an effective way to develop highly positive long-term relationships with companies in markets closely related to your own.