If you are launching a new product or service, you can experience all the jitters. Besides making sure that your promotional message reaches a greater audience and understands your message well, you would want them to take the desired course of action. Your business might be familiar with the concept of promotional marketing – a process that engages with existing and potential customers, boosting awareness of your upcoming product. It can include a series of campaigns, adverts, and giveaways with the sole purpose of amplifying the reach of your business. Here are some amazing benefits that you can experience by running a sales promotion:
- Attract customers – Whether you aim to expand your current customer base or reach an entirely new audience’s demography, you can draw enough attention from them and initiate communications.
- Increase Sales – The subtle purpose behind every move your business makes is driving sales and earning money. That can be easily achieved with a well-thought promotional strategy.
- Enhance Brand Image – What you portray about your business will determine how your customers relate. So, when you plan properly, you can improve your business’s image in your consumers’ minds.
- Compete with Other Brands – To sustain in the market and go ahead of your competitors, you have to be at par with the latest trends in the market. With promotional marketing strategies in place, you can meet the audience’s needs sooner and beat your counterparts easily.
A successful promotion can provide in-depth knowledge about the market and help you improve your sales. However, there are several important steps that you have to follow to achieve it:
Step 1: Determine your Objectives
This step may sound too familiar to you, but defining your objectives gives you an initial kickstart in your journey. They should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-oriented. Any vague, heavily generalized goal that cannot be expressed in numbers wastes time. You should set key performance indicators and a targeted ROI to evaluate how much you gained in a specific period.
Step 2: Plan your Promotion Mix
This step requires you to allocate resources to various tools, including advertising, public relations, personal selling, and promotional giveaways to make your target audience aware of your brand and influence them to reach out to you and make a purchase. Your choice of promotion mix would majorly depend on the kind of product or service you deal in, the market you cater to, and the communication channel that is most feasible to use.
Step 3: Think About your Promotional Message
The motive behind your promotional campaigns is all about communicating the message to your potential audience. And for that, you have to sit down with your team and develop attention-grabbing content. That may sound a bit challenging, but once you understand your audience well enough, especially the people interested in your products or services, you can create appeal, structure, format, and source of the message.
Step 4: Ascertain your Promotion Budget
You cannot execute any campaign without the desired amount of money. Every single aspect of marketing involves expenses, and you cannot expect free lunches. Therefore, you must assess your current financial position and determine a reasonable budget range accordingly. You have to break down all the figures beforehand to avoid losing your hard-earned money later.
Step 5: Discuss the Results
After every campaign, you and your team should sit together and determine the effectiveness of the decisions you took and the planning you did. That way, you can identify all the hits and misses to turn things around for better future campaigns.
