Let’s say you’ve been working on a new product for the last few months. It will be a revolutionary new item on the market, potentially changing how consumers thought about and used similar products before. Fast forward to launch day, and you anticipate a vast army of consumers banging at your company’s store to get the new product, but nothing happens. Why?
Could it be that your team completely forgot about promotional marketing? How can you build consumer anticipation if they don’t know what they should be excited about? In this article, we ask our experts how to effectively promote your products and services.
Table of Contents
What Is Promotional Marketing?
Promotional marketing represents the process of spreading information and knowledge about a (potentially new) product, service, or even brand via several marketing channels to boost awareness. It is one of the 4Ps of marketing, alongside place, price, and product.
Often, business owners use the phrases promotion and marketing interchangeably. Both involve reading awareness but marketing experts are always eager to point out specific aspects that differentiate these two terms.
Marketing consists of several activities that also include promotion, while the latter is only a single marketing component. Marketing addresses the goals, challenges, needs, and desires of a brand’s target market, while promotion only focuses on the success of a product or brand.
The Benefits of Promotional Marketing
Using promotional marketing can benefit your business in various ways, including:
- It can help you raise awareness if you want to launch new services or products alongside existing ones
- It aids in developing positive brand equity
- It keeps your customers constantly engaged and informed about your brand
- It helps foster brand loyalty
- It boosts lead generation efforts
- It differentiates your brand from your competition
- It can potentially help you drive more sales
- It inspires interested prospects to reach out to your brand
- It converts leads into customers
Types of Promotional Marketing
You can use promotional marketing to raise awareness in several ways. To harness the full potential of these promotions, it’s essential to familiarize yourself with all of them and select the approach that’s most beneficial for your business.
- Personal selling: This type relies on one-to-one communication with potential customers.
- Direct marketing: This approach involves direct customer distribution or communication, via different channels, such as email, social media, text, or traditional mail.
- Public relations: This method helps improve brand image by striving to create positive associations with consumers.
- Sales promotions: This can include different promotional initiatives that stimulate purchases, such as free shipping, discounts, and cashbacks.
Strategies for Promotional Marketing
If your goal is to promote your brand, product, or service in the form of a campaign, you should review some of the most prevalent strategies so that you can implement tactics that will yield the best results for your business. Below are only a few promotional strategies you can implement.
1. Social Media Marketing
Data suggests that 44% of local brands use social media for brand awareness and 41% of them rely on social channels to drive revenue. As such, social media channels can be excellent platforms to promote your brand, services, or products.
You can incorporate promotional posts in your content calendar that highlight the benefits of specific services or products you offer, and you can also reuse blog posts and other content from your site that can drive traffic directly to your products.
Lastly, you can also use hashtags with promotional keywords such as #newproduct, #giveaway, #holidaysale, or anything else that can be used to highlight your promotion and engage with your audience.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the backbone of every successful SEO strategy but also plays a crucial role in success in social media marketing, and every other marketing venue. Your articles, podcasts, videos, infographics, and other pieces of content can effectively communicate the benefits associated with your brand, services, or products.
Content, especially video, can help you with awareness, recognition, and retention. On that note, around 54% of viewers watch videos all the way through. If the clip is shorter than 60 minutes, retention increases to 62%.
Creating various pieces of content and exploring different formats enables you to promote your brand, and to educate your audiences about the benefits of your services and products.
3. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing can also help you promote your values, mission, products, or services. Influencers are public figures or well-known social media users who have a considerable and dedicated following that regularly engages with their content.
Brands often collaborate with influencers to increase their reach by endorsing these people with their products or services (or offering monetary compensation) to promote and to review their products.
According to agency data, nearly 78% of surveyed marketers said that they find influencer marketing effective for raising brand awareness. This statistic alone can make a case for considering influencer marketing in your promotional strategies. Connecting with influencers who have a similar following to your target audience can help you reach more potential leads and generate more promotional content.
4. Email Marketing
With an average ROI (return on investment) of 4,200%, email marketing can be a highly promising approach to promote your products cost-effectively. It involves sending emails to your subscriber list to advertise your products, brand, services, values, mission, or even brand events.
Email also enables you to run email-specific promotions and loyalty programs that can boost brand advocacy and loyalty, in addition to serving as an excellent promotional platform for those already involved with your brand.
Promotional Marketing: How To Forge a Plan?
After examining the different types of promotional marketing, let’s turn our attention to the basics of creating a promotional plan for your business with the help of our experts.
Here are the key steps involved:
- Create a budget
- Determine your promotional goals
- Examine your buyer personas
- Choose your tactics
- Promote and analyze
Create a Budget
The size of your budget will often influence the scope of promotional activities you will be able to cover. Consider taking inventory of the resources you can allocate for promotion and ensure that there will be enough money for vital company activities such as product development, payroll, and other expenses.
If you are new to promotions, consider allocating a smaller budget, gradually increasing it if they prove fruitful.
Marketing experts agree that you don’t need a huge budget to get the most out of promotional activities. David Ispiryian, CEO of Effeect, says that knowing what you want to achieve is paramount for success. Couple that with compelling content, and the odds of creating a good promotion can increase considerably.
Somnath Roy, Founder of Content Spotlight, also says that knowing your objectives is as essential as marketing to the right people and measuring the right KPIs (key performance indicators).
Rachel Dines, Founder and Director at Shake It Up Creative, says that successful promotions are less about the size of the budget and more about creativity.
“Promotional marketing can be creative whatever the budget, but the important part is the offer and how it is communicated. Tactical activities like clean pavement ads, collaborations, and digital direct marketing are low-budget. Within all marketing, the message and the design can be eye-catching and exciting. Don't make promotional marketing at any budget level complicated; potential customers won't take more than 1-2 steps to enter a competition or claim a discount for example”.
Jesse James Brede, Founder of Lion’s Share Digital, also says that brands should focus more on creatives and delivering the right message rather than working on high-cost initiatives.
Determine Your Promotional Goals
Once you know your budget, you need to identify the objectives you want to achieve with the promotion. It’s essential to pinpoint specific and achievable goals that can be measured during or after the campaign.
For instance, your goal may be to gain 100 new followers on Instagram every month or convert a specific percentage of your event attendees into customers. Or increase the size of your email subscribers by 20% by the end of the next quarter.
Examine Your Buyer Personas
Take a close look at your target audience, your ideal customer, and your existing customers. Try to get specific about the kind of people you’d like to reach with your promotion. What are the needs or desires your products or services can fulfill for them? Can your services or products address something specific? What’s the type of content that may attract new prospects and reengage existing customers?
Combining solid knowledge of your audience with the right type of content is paramount in running a successful campaign.
Choose Your Tactics
When you have your budget, goals, and target audience all honed in, it’s time to create an action plan. Which channels will you be using to reach your customers and prospects? How would you like to conduct the promotion? Will you exclusively focus on your digital channels or opt for direct selling?
Dines says it’s all about patience, creativity, and covering as much ground as possible.
“From our experience, the most effective campaigns have a clear strategy behind them and present themselves through a variety of mediums — on and offline. We've seen success with brand and public sector campaigns where the messages and the call-to-action are as simple and clear as possible, but also when there has been repetition of the message. A campaign often won't be heard on the first encounter or even the third, so keep putting it out there!”
Promote and Analyze
Put your strategy into action. After passing certain milestones, such as three or six months, you can analyze the results and compare them to your goals. Did you exceed your expectations? What were the weakest points of your campaign? Better yet, how can you ensure that you maximize the potential of your upcoming promotions based on the insights you’ve gathered now?
Brede advises tracking the entire sales funnel: “We track the success of promotions by tracking the entire digital funnel. All steps are tagged and measured to see where users are falling off or getting stuck so we can go in and make adjustments.”
Dines also shares this philosophy and specifies why: “All marketing activity should have tracking and insights in place wherever possible, not just promotions. We often forget that the 'where did you hear about us?' types of responses can be skewed because we have marketing messages coming at us from a vast range of sources these days, so do what you can to get as close to the real answer as possible. Utilize UTMs, trackable QR codes, and customer surveys, but ask the right questions when needed.”
Mastering Promotional Marketing
Promoting your brand, services, or products should be a vital part of your entire marketing approach. Promotions focus more on highlighting the benefits your customers gain when they do business or buy from you. However, that doesn’t mean that active selling and scattered sales pitches are the only way you can drive more revenue.
As our experts have also pointed out, all marketing channels and approaches can bring in more customers. It’s always wiser to focus on the bigger picture and not get caught up in nooks and crannies.
For expert assistance with your efforts, partnering with a promotional marketing agency is always a wise choice.
Promotional Marketing FAQs
Should you promote your products regularly?
It’s never a bad idea to run promotions constantly, however, ensure that you always have a solid reason for promoting your services or products. Always address the specific problems your offerings can solve for your customers and highlight any additional benefits they get from doing business with you.
What’s the best way to promote your products?
Covering as much ground with your promotion as possible is the best idea to get the most out of your campaigns. From covering offline and online platforms to using email marketing and social media, there are different tactics for success for every brand.
How can you ensure success in promotional marketing?
Be clever about your campaigns and always analyze the results of your previous and ongoing efforts. By regularly measuring the success of your current campaigns, you can create more effective strategies and messaging for your upcoming ones.
