As one of the four Ps of the marketing mix, promotion is a crucial step in creating a conversation with your prospects so that you can promote brand awareness. Following this, a carefully crafted promotion should guide potential customers through gaining interest and realizing the demand for your product or service before you induce them to take action.
To ensure that your promotion contributes to all levels of the buying process, you need to develop a promotional marketing strategy that clearly defines your goals and the actions your business needs to take to achieve them. Our online marketing experts will help you understand why different types of promotional strategies are effective and find the best promotions for your marketing plans.
Importance of Creating a Promotion Marketing Strategy
Your company’s promotion strategy is the plan to create a means of communicating with potential customers that will generate leads and improve brand awareness. It combines the methods needed to promote customer engagement with information about the target audience and the details of when and where to put the plan into action.
Creating a promotion marketing strategy will focus efforts toward leading customers from awareness into action to improve results and cut unnecessary costs. Your promotion should introduce the company to an audience that you can convince to follow your call to action without wasting time or resources on people outside your target demographic.
When following a well-made strategy, you will convert the increased traffic to your online content by engaging with customers to show the value your company provides over competitors. Doing so converts your qualified leads and improves your sales. The benefits of following a promotional strategy are significant compared to marketing without one or not promoting at all.
Types of Promotional Strategies
Choosing the appropriate promotional strategy to reach your desired demographic is an important step in creating a profitable marketing campaign. The following are examples of promotion strategies showcasing some of the advantages and shortcomings that apply to each type of promotion.
General Advertising
Paid advertisements on traditional media channels such as billboards, television, and radio have the potential to reach wide audiences and improve short-term sales. These promotional strategies are useful to increase brand awareness, but usually have lower returns on investment due to plentiful competition and lack of demographic targeting.
Personal Selling
Personal selling differentiates itself from other promotion strategies by emphasizing long-term customer relationships. Your salespeople interact with clients in person, on the phone, or by email and persuade them to purchase your product or service. This personal service is effective because it allows you to customize your approach based on the customer and adapt according to their needs, but it is also labor-intensive and expensive.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing is also highly targeted but uses mail or email as a cost-effective means of communication. Direct marketing campaigns are quick and easy to carry out, and they let you customize promotions based on demographic. Strategies using direct marketing have a better chance of quick feedback and customer retention than more generalized promotions but can end up hindering customer conversion if the advertisements are viewed as “junk mail.”
Publicity
By providing information in the form of press conferences, media interviews, and industry events, your company can build its professional image through non-paid media presented by journalists and newspapers. Public relations promotions also let you connect with your customer base by appropriately responding to positive or negative feedback. Sponsorships of local events or sports teams serve to establish a positive public image in a new demographic with proven loyalty.
Sales
Sales promotion strategies excel at improving short-term revenue by using deals that only last for a limited time. These attract the attention of new customers, remind existing customers about products they might need, and incentivize immediate or impulse purchases. Frequent sales do not perform well in terms of long-term return on investment because they are not sustainable and influence customer price sensitivity.
Online Marketing Strategy
Creating a digital marketing strategy is the most cost-effective way to create promotions that consistently reach your target demographic. Online promotions engage the audience by encouraging interaction through informative content.
Benefits of Online Promotion Strategies
One of the biggest advantages online marketing provides over offline strategies is that it gives you real-time data to analyze its efficacy. At any given moment, you can determine how many people have seen an advertisement, how many engaged with it, and the demographic information of anyone who clicked on the ad.
Digital campaigns are also easily customizable and can be optimized to maximize your return on investment based on which elements are performing well for your target audience. As a result, online promotion strategies tend to be less costly and have a higher conversion rate than traditional advertisements. Online advertising campaigns also let your company create promotions for mobile devices, which account for over 40% of all online transactions.
Search Engine Optimization
To ensure that your target prospects find your content in the first place, you need to make effective use of search engine optimization (SEO) practices. These improve brand awareness and website traffic by increasing your content’s ranking in popular search engine algorithms, making it more likely to appear at the top of natural search results.
The most prevalent SEO technique is to include keywords that your target demographic is likely to use when searching for related businesses and services. Short, commonly used words are more likely to appear in client searches, but their prevalence means that your website will face more competition. “Long-tail” phrases made with more specific words are usually better to make your content more visible to qualified leads.
On-page SEO for your website includes these keywords in headings, the URL, the content itself, and the title tags and meta descriptions that appear in search results. Other factors that affect your search ranking include backlinks from authoritative domains as well as website optimization such as responsiveness and mobile compatibility. Companies with limited budgets can find several free SEO tools online, but hiring a dedicated online marketing service is the best way to appear in organic searches.
Examples of Digital Promotion Strategies
Even when narrowing down your plan of action to include only online advertising, there are several types of promotional strategies your company can use. Your business’s online promotion could include one or a combination of the following:
- Display ads are general advertisements on third-party websites and applications that target specific demographics.
- Search advertising appears at the top of search results for an audience that uses specific words or phrases.
- Social media advertising draws the attention of users with specific interests, geographic locations, or connections by creating engaging and shareable content.
- Email campaigns use opt-in email lists to engage with users who have shown interest in a business. This option is cost-effective and performs well.
- Video advertising appears in video content websites or games and carries large amounts of information even in short videos.
- Mobile marketing takes advantage of the overwhelming presence of mobile traffic in online searches and transactions. This strategy can also utilize location-based services to reach the audience of a target geographic area.
Offline Marketing Strategy
Offline promotion marketing usually falls under the category of outbound or push marketing, which is more aggressive and driven by sales. These strategies seek to improve product awareness through traditional media advertisement, direct selling, free trials, or other similar tactics. Targeting new customers in this way may bring instant results, but it usually has a lower overall return on investment.
For better results, you should combine outbound marketing strategies with inbound marketing campaigns that create more organic leads. These are more common in online marketing, but your company should still use offline promotions such as public relations campaigns and word-of-mouth referrals to create the brand loyalty needed for returning customers.
Creating the Best Promotions Strategy
After realizing that a promotion marketing strategy is necessary, the next step for your business is creating a successful promotional campaign. Working through these next phases of planning your promotion will guide you toward bringing your promotions strategy to fruition.
Start with Clear Goals
Setting goals at the beginning of your promotional strategy will give your campaign a sense of direction, allowing you to work efficiently toward your desired results. Create specific goals that align with your overall marketing strategies and create actionable plans to achieve them.
While high goals are not necessarily bad, it is more useful to break them down into smaller benchmarks that you can focus on completing in steps. Having goals you work to meet quarterly, monthly, or even daily helps establish actionable plans that feel achievable and give you motivation. Deadlines can drive progress by instilling a proper sense of urgency, encouraging timely project completion.
Avoiding goals that are too lofty will help you avoid wasting time and money, and a plan that lets you measure your progress keeps you on track and able to see the direct results of improvements. You also want to create a call to action for your customers so that you can build your promotion around convincing your audience to act on it.
After determining your goals, find what metrics will be the best indicators for success. Improved engagement can be measured by page views, interactions, and comments, for example.
Plan Your Budget
Online promotion strategies tend to cost little, but you will still need to create a budget that lets you save money, especially if you have limited resources. Prioritize taking actions that make definite progress toward an established goal before spending your budget on additional elements.
Setting specific timing to limit your digital promotion schedule will help conserve your budget. Restrict your promotion so that it only runs when your target audience is likely to see and interact with it. Likewise, you can use geo-targeting to efficiently deliver content to the demographic with the highest buying intent, especially if you are promoting a local business.
Pay careful attention to the conditions attached to each online advertising service. Some online services charge your company whenever a visitor clicks on your advertisement, a setup known as “pay-per-click” advertising, while others only require you to pay when a prospect converts.
Define Your Demographic
In addition to reducing spending, deciding on a specific target audience will help your promotional strategy generate leads that are more likely to convert. Advertising to an audience with no buying intent or power will only waste time and money.
Look at your business and decide what its competitive advantages and weaknesses are when compared to competitors. Build your plan based on your company’s strengths and how they allow you to fill a specific niche that your customers need. Then, study your competition’s promotional strategies to see whether you can develop a unique selling point based on what you can do better.
If you have an existing customer base, you can also use analytics tools to learn as many demographic details as possible, including location, income level, and interests. Surveys and direct questions will help you understand their preferences and pain points to create an effective call to action.
Choose the Types of Promotional Strategies
One of the last steps to take before fully planning your promotion is to decide what types of promotion will reach your target audience most efficiently. For example, a contractor with a defined service area may want to focus on local search engine optimization and Google Maps advertisements for nearby businesses.
Choose a promotional method that will achieve your goals while fitting your time and budget constraints. If your budget allows for it, you can combine different types of promotional strategies, but you will also need extra human resources to effectively manage them.
Create a Message
The core of your campaign delivered by your chosen promotional channel is the marketing message. Look at the pain points you found when researching your target audience and create a message that explains how your business is the best choice for a solution.
Focus on the benefits your company provides over what it does, especially if you have any advantage over your competition. You can incorporate reviews and testimonials as proof that your service or product works.
When choosing your message, consider how you plan to incorporate it into content creation as well. Your campaign needs to present enough information to convince your audience and meet your goals without unnecessary sales pressure. This is the perfect point to start researching keywords that your potential customers use to search for businesses in your industry, making your content visible to a relevant demographic.
Your message should be short, simple, and communicate these main ideas behind your promotion. If your communication channels of choice have restrictions or factors that influence your promotion’s visibility, create a message that meets these requirements.
Perfect Your Promotional Marketing Strategy
When you have determined your target audience and are ready to deliver your company’s message, the final step is to make a plan to build awareness and meet your promotional goals. Visualizing the progress made toward your goal will help you focus your plans and coordinate the efforts of your team.
To budget your time and work appropriately, create deadlines for your promotion. Establish a timeline for completing certain tasks and decide how much attention each step will need to complete the project on time. While planning a time frame, budget some extra time for errors or other unforeseen circumstances to ensure that your promotion meets its deadlines.
Your promotional strategy will perform better if it instills a sense of urgency in prospective customers. Promotions that run for a limited time or with products in a limited quantity can make undecided customers anxious about missing a great deal, which may be the push they need to overcome hesitation about buying your product.
Interactivity is another aspect of a successful promotional strategy. You will reach a larger portion of your desired demographic if you encourage buyers to share information with friends and family or leave reviews. If your industry has influencers with dedicated followings, you could also reach out to them to promote your content.
Gauging the Success of Your Promotion Strategies
After putting your plans into motion, it is vital to monitor your promotion efforts to ensure that they continue to perform well. Judging data from a short period is difficult, but by monitoring the growth rate of different elements in your promotion strategy, you can further develop factors that improve performance and correct parts that work poorly.
Depending on your promotional goals, you may need to analyze different metrics to determine success. For example, content marketing strategies work best when you adjust your efforts based on SEO performance, consumption statistics, engagement, and lead generation and conversion. You can also improve your return on advertising spend for digital promotions by maximizing how much you pay per click, conversion, or acquisition.
Digital promotions take considerable time and resources to run effectively, so making adjustments and fixing errors early is beneficial. Use performance metrics and your promotional goals to regularly make changes that optimize your campaign’s performance.
Gold Promotion will help your business develop performance-based sales promotion strategies to increase traffic and generate leads. Contact us to start working on a personalized campaign for company growth today.
We built a performance marketing system for small business owners. Cutting-edge technology and tactics power revenue-focused digital marketing
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