No business owner wants their brand languishing in obscurity. If you want potential customers to know about your brand and come looking for it, you need a business promotion strategy. If you’ve never heard of a business promotion strategy, here’s everything to know, including how to execute strategies that boost your brand awareness and competitiveness.
What is a Promotion Strategy?
An enterprise business promotion strategy is a plan for attracting target customers to your brand and convincing them to purchase your products or services. The plan must specify your target audience and how to reach them.
Older promotion strategies relied solely on print media, radio, billboards, and television to promote brands. Modern strategies use these traditional mediums alongside digital marketing tactics, which cost less and are more accurate. Some of these digital promotion tactics include social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and more.
Even if you spend a million dollars on a promotion strategy, you have no guarantees of getting desired results unless you have set goals. Your goal may be to:
- Build Awareness: Bring your brand and product to the attention of your target audience.
- Trigger Interest: Make your target customers curious about what your brand has to offer. To accomplish this, you must identify your target audience and their needs.
- Differentiate from Competitors: In a highly competitive industry, the right promotion strategy must convey what sets you apart from your competitors.
- Generate Demand: Successful promotions make potential customers desire your products and services over those of your competitors.
- Persuade Prospects to Take Action: Do you want potential customers to buy, register, schedule a consultation, or take other actions? Adding a compelling call to action to your promotional content can convert prospects into paying customers.
Once you have your goals, you can tailor your large or small business promotion strategy to achieve them and measure your success. Let’s look at some effective promotion tactics.
Types of Business Promotion Strategy
The right type of promotion strategy for your brand depends on your target audience and other factors. For instance, a mid-market business promotion might not work for a well-established and large organization. Below are promotion methods used by businesses in various industries:
- Word-of-Mouth Marketing: It’s the oldest form of marketing, but it still works. Thanks to social media and online reviews, you can take word-of-mouth marketing a step further by having customers tell their millions of online friends how much they love your brand.
- Personal (Face-to-Face) Selling: Another ancient form of marketing that still works. It takes time and patience but has the upside of building lasting relationships with customers. Besides meeting prospects in person, you can perform personal selling via telemarketing.
- Traditional Advertising: This involves promoting a product via print media, television, radio, and other forms of traditional paid advertising. The tactic is typically expensive and the barrier to entry low, making it better suited for large companies.
- Direct Marketing: This targets specific audiences and sends them promotions via email marketing, direct mails, and digital ads.
- Promotional Offers: Generate enthusiasm about your brand and its offerings with limited-time promotional offers, such as discounts. This leads to increased traffic for a short time and encourages conversions.
- Public Relations: An excellent way to bolster your brand’s image and authority while generating awareness. Effective public relations channels include social media, podcasts, content marketing, and seminars.
- Customer Loyalty Programs: Show your customers you appreciate their patronage by awarding them with discounts and merchandise. Other customers who want the perks of your loyalty program will feel motivated to make more purchases.
Business Promotion Strategies that Deliver Results
Whether you are looking to offer more value to your customers or influence customer decision making, try these cost-effective promotion strategies:
Every Communication Should Promote Your Brand
Every correspondence that comes from your company should in some way promote your brand. A simple way of doing this is by attaching your business name, logo, and website to every email you send. The same goes for physical correspondence.
You can also customize your email signature to promote your brand. All you need to do is add your business information, social media, and a promotional tagline alongside your signature.
If communicating with customers via social media, use consistent and appropriate hashtags when advertising your brand or product. Implementing this strategy will turn every communication from your business into a promotional opportunity.
Leverage Social Media to Promote Your Business
Billions of users visit Facebook and YouTube daily. That’s not counting other popular social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. Through social media marketing, you can target specific audiences anywhere in the world with advertisements.
The social media promotion strategy yields an impressive return on investment when done correctly and it’s suitable for businesses of all sizes. You can also control how much you spend on social media marketing. For example, if you are running paid ads on Facebook, you can set a budget.
You can also run free promotions by posting your latest offers on all your social media pages and engaging with other users. Social media promotions are more successful when your posted content is entertaining or adds value to the viewer’s life. The more engaging your content is, the more people will share your posts to increase your brand’s visibility.
Convert Your Company Vehicles into Mobile Billboards
Turn every vehicle you own into an advertisement for your brand, products, or upcoming events. A vehicle wrap is the easiest way to accomplish this because you can take off the wrap once the promotion ends.
Every time the vehicle hits the streets, hundreds or even thousands of people (depending on your location) will see your advertisement. Convert these potential customers by displaying contact information on your vehicle.
Besides vehicle wraps and stickers, you can install a digital billboard on the roof of your vehicles. Installing the billboard is pricey, but changing the displayed information is convenient and inexpensive.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most powerful business promotion strategies available. When properly executed, it establishes you as an authority within your industry and a trusted supplier of your products or services.
Content marketing involves writing articles that answer the questions of your target audience. It also offers solutions to their pain points. Most content marketers promote brands and products via blogs on their site or guest posts on authoritative websites.
Other online content marketing techniques include posting press releases that inform prospects about new products and promotional offers. If you prefer, you can perform content marketing via print media, such as newspapers and magazines.
Just remember that content marketing only works when it targets the right audience and offers valuable information.
Promote Your Business on a Talk Show
People didn’t know about Dr. Phil until he started appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. You can get the same type of publicity for your business by appearing on TV and radio shows, podcasts, or web series. The larger the audience of the show, the more potential customers you can reach.
Alternatively, create a podcast, YouTube channel, or web series and gradually grow your following. Over 144 million Americans listen to podcasts. If your show offers something enjoyable, you can garner a large and engaged audience for your brand or product promotions.
Joint Venture Advertising
You can partner with a complementary business to run a marketing campaign. For example, a beauty spa and cosmetics store benefit mutually by partnering to promote their businesses. The partnership helps both businesses reach audiences they formerly couldn’t reach while increasing their marketing power and reducing the financial burden of running a marketing campaign.
Launch Promotional Offers
Increase traffic to your website and brick-and-mortar store by giving away freebies. People love freebies, and creating a sense of urgency with limited-time offers can trigger a buying frenzy. Other promotional offers that generate traffic and lead to sales include:
- Discounts
- Free shipping
- Flash sales
- Automatic raffle entries for customers who buy specific products
However, such time-limited offers typically drive traffic only for as long as they last.
Host or Sponsor an Event
Hosting or sponsoring an event that caters to your target market can get lots of attention for your brand. The event can be educational, such as a seminar or presentation, or informal and fun, like a neighborhood barbecue or competition.
Publicizing the event on your brand’s social media will generate even more publicity for your company. As people start associating the event with your brand, you should start to see more traffic and leads.
How to Ensure a Successful Business Promotion Strategy
Before executing any of the promotion strategies we discussed, make sure to do the following:
Set Your Promotional Goals
We already mentioned this, but it’s worth repeating because, without laid-out promotional goals, you can’t measure your advertising campaign’s success. Clearly defined goals also give you a sense of direction and prevent deviations from the master plan.
Your promotional goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART). Also, make sure you align your goals with your promotion strategy. Otherwise, you could end up using a strategy that’s inefficient or unable to make your goal a reality.
Have a Budget
Thanks to digital marketing, you don’t have to spend millions to run a successful promotional campaign. Once you have your budget, pick the strategy that best fits it. For instance, content marketing is a cost-effective promotion strategy, while social media is free as long as you are not using influencers or paid ads.
Define Your Target Market
Your target market consists of people who are most likely to buy your product. If you target the wrong audience, your entire promotional campaign will be a waste. Also, by identifying your target audience before launching a campaign, you can tailor your promotions to best resonate with them.
If running paid ads on Google or Facebook, use geotargeting to ensure only your target demographics in specific locations see your ads. Highly accurate targeting reduces the likelihood of wasted clicks that don’t convert.
Perform SWOT Analysis
Identify your competitive advantages and weaknesses through a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. This will help you make better-informed marketing decisions regarding the best way to promote your brand with minimal risk.
Identify Your Competitors
Your SWOT analysis will also reveal how competitors market similar products or services to the same target audience. Identifying your competitors and their marketing tactics provides useful insights for creating a superior promotion strategy. For instance, by analyzing your competitor’s website and social media, you can create more compelling pages for your content marketing.
Develop Your Marketing Messages
After picking your business promotion strategy, create a marketing message that is most likely to resonate with your target customers and win them over. Marketing messages work best when they use compelling language and provide solutions to the target audience’s pain points.
At the end of your message, use a call to action to guide your prospects toward the action you want them to take. The call to action could be to buy now, call for a quote, schedule a consultation, or anything else that converts the prospect into a client.
Besides showing your competitive advantages and how your products solve the prospect’s problems, provide evidence that your product works. Do this by providing reviews, testimonials, or other social proof from your past customers.
Measure Your Promotion Efforts
After launching your promotion, keep an eye on it to ensure it’s delivering the desired results. Accomplish this by using monitoring metrics related to your goals and how your promotion affects those metrics. Monitoring your performance allows you to modify your strategy to deliver optimal results and avoid waste.
Boost Brand Awareness and Get More Sales with Business Promotion
Running a brand and handling marketing is a lot for one person. Lessen your workload by letting a professional handle business promotion on your behalf. Besides letting you focus on other parts of running your business, hiring an expert promotion strategist eliminates waste by delivering desired results quickly and cost-effectively.
At Gold Promotion, we handle digital advertising for businesses in various industries. Contact us today for a consultation and discover how we can help you generate more leads and sales.
We built a performance marketing system for small business owners. Cutting-edge technology and tactics power revenue-focused digital marketing
programs for local, b2b, and e-commerce.
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