Growing Audience Through Cross-Promotion and Partnerships

This post originally appeared on A Media Operator.

—

When I was a young teenager, I saw Field of Dreams for the first time. The main character played by Kevin Costner is walking through his corn field when he hears a mysterious voice say, “if you build it, he will come,” regarding building a baseball diamond to get his deceased father to come back.

Spoiler alert: if you build it, nobody is coming. At least not quickly…

In my piece about your newsroom being your biggest asset (versus a liability), I wrote:

Hire great reporters, give them the resources they need to succeed, and then have them report the hell out of that industry.

That is absolutely step one to building a great media business and it’s a strong indicator of a media company succeeding. If you’re doing really great, deep, investigative work, it’ll hopefully get picked up and audience will come to your publication.

While the editorial team is doing this, there are ways that audience development teams can work with partners to collaboratively grow readership in a sustainable and, hopefully, lucrative way.

These tactics can work for both consumer and b2b media brands, but I’m going to focus on the b2b side.

Related, but not identical competitors

Before we can do anything, we need to find publishers that have audiences that might share an interest in our publication.

For example, let’s say you run a trucking/shipping publication and the other publication is about supply chain. It’s possible that some of your overall audience is also interested in supply chain and vice versa.

The value of this exercise is you can find a list of publications that are, to some extent, competitors, but are also different enough that both your audiences might appreciate both publications. Although the overlap audience is not a majority, looking across multiple publications and their overlaps is a good way to grow.

But once you actually figure out the list of publications, what do you do next to get that overlap audience to become your audience? Here are a few ideas ranked from lowest to highest lift.