Target Audience Saturation
Have you ever tried to do promotion marketing as part of your sales process? If so, you'll know that it's difficult because your target audience is saturated with random, unfocused marketing messages. So what do you do?
Get 10 Promotional Marketing Best Practices to enhance your Multi Channel Marketing (Internet Marketing) results using analytics and other techniques.
Definition of Promotion Marketing
While there are many marketing strategies, all with unique characteristics, when we talk about promotional marketing strategies, we are primarily talking about promotional strategies and tactics that happen close to the transaction, most often, in a retail environment, but sometimes, field service people and any number of other places where a transaction might take place.
Some Promotional Marketing Tactics & Examples
While it took me a long time to wrap my hand around the concept of using Inbound Marketing for SAP Consulting Services, it wasn't until I worked several SAP Implementations for SAP IS Retail Implementations that I started to get a clearer picture of some of the typical promotional marketing strategies used within the world of promotional marketing:
- Promo Codes
- Social Media
- Free Samples
- Public Relations
- Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Direct Marketing
- New Product Giveaways
- Sales Promotions
The Aim of Promotional Marketing
The aim of promotional marketing is to create brand loyalty and to drive long term sales results. To achieve this, a company needs to employ all four p's of the marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion) into the campaign or material they're creating.
What Other Forms Does Promotional Marketing Take?
Let's Take a Closer Look
Digitally, promotional marketing mix can take the form of social media ads, PPC ads, and emails. Offline, it's tangible items like billboards, mailers, business cards, signs, or logo coffee mugs.
What's the Best Way to Introduce a New Product?
The best way to introduce a new product or service is to create a promotional marketing campaign around it using all of your marketing channels. This helps build brand awareness: Make your name, visual image, products, and services are instantly recognizable on the market so that your customers associate the relevant product categories with your brand.
Awaken Dormant Customers
Sometimes, a discount promo code is a great way to wake up a dormant. customer. These are called re-engagement (win-back)campaigns.
Sometimes you may need to incentivize dormant customers, and there is no better way to do it than with a fun re-engagement campaign. If your customers didn't use your app or haven't made an order in quite some time, send them a promo code for a new product line to give them an extra push. You can also use this kind of promotion with shoppers you haven't converted yet.
Loyalty Programs Can Also Drive Brand Awareness
All great loyalty programs consider the individual customers' needs and provide an incentive for them to fulfill those needs from those brands who have built up the best customer relationship. For example, Frequent Flyer programs have proven to be irreplaceable drivers of sales.
Don't Ignore Social Media Marketing
You can't ignore such powerful channels as Facebook and Instagram. Users search for reviews from the brand's customers, look for high-quality photos of products, and contact the brand's representatives to find out more information. Encourage your clients to leave feedback about your product. Even better, have them do unboxing videos or even videos of them using the product.
The Power of Public relations
This type of promotional strategy enables an organization to influence its target audience by publishing articles, press releases, and interviews. This way, you can create a favorable and positive image for the brand.
Lobbying
Lobbying can be used to influence public opinion. While the word itself tends carry a somewhat negative connotation, in reality, it works, will continue to work, and depending on your product or service, may be the ideal form of promotional marketing for you.
Merchandising Remains a Key Form Of Promotion
Merchandising is influencing the customer's behavior through the appropriate presentation of the store and the offered products in order to increase sales. There is a great deal of science that goes into planning out exactly how a brand's product is to be displayed on the retail floor. There is an entire army of people who dedicate themselves to working with Retailers to ensure the products are placed as planned, priced as planned and promoted as agreed upon. It is very software dependent and generates a flood of customer behavioral data, suitable for uptake by systems like SAP.
Online Retailers Have Special Promotional Marketing Tools
Of all the challenges online retailers (ecommerce), face, shipping has to be at or near the top of the list. That's why free shipping promotions are so popular, as are memberships that include free shipping. Free shipping is one of the most popular (and profitable) promotional tactics for online retailers. By offering free shipping, you might get your customers to pay more than both of you expect. Keep in mind to use free shipping in conjunction with a minimum purchase requirement to increase your average order value. Also, go hard or go home – make customers hear about your free shipping campaign. That means make sure the free shipping offer is clear all over your website and as well, in all of your ecommerce emails.
Create Amazing Promotional Materials
What do Coca-Cola , Nutella, Amazon, Victoria's Secret, Netflix…have in common? These brands have die-hard fans who swear by their products and/or services. You can create the same legion of followers by investing in amazing promotional materials!
Why Amazing is the Minimum?
Recent data from the Promotional Products Association found that 76% of people who own promotional materials remember details about the promotion itself, the company it promoted, and even special contact info like phone numbers and email addresses tied to the promotional campaign.
All Tactics Require Knowing Your Target Audience
Before you set your global marketing goals, you must first thoroughly define your ideal customer profile and then identify your target audience. Once you know these two pieces of key information, you and your team can set about setting short-term objectives that define the steps your your team should take to reach them.
To have a clear picture, consider breaking your annual goal into 6-month, quarterly, and monthly goals.
This way, you can easily manage the entire process and take action on the go. The goal is to find out where your audience is, which problems and needs they have, what your potential clients have in common, and analyze the ways to reach them. With this profile, you can segment your base and decide upon which of the many available promotional tactics to employ when.
Then you need to dial in your marketing analytics.
Go Multi-Channel With Your Promotional Campaigns
Many people have found promotional marketing success by using multi channel focused marketing analytics. But there are a few things you should know before you buy and implement a promotion marketing system to ensure positive marketing ROI.
An Analytical Driven Promotion Marketing Strategy
This post will tell you what you need to know to make sure you select an analytical approach and promotion marketing strategy that will let you successfully get the right message to the right target market.
If you're looking for a promotion marketing strategy that works, the best method to ensure you end up with something that lets you succeed by knowing more is by looking for these things:
- Make sure your promotion marketing system lets you perform multi-dimensional analytics. If it doesn't, you'll have trouble teasing out what works from the noise.
- Ensure your promotion marketing analytical system has a datawarehouse so you can analyze and react to the data in real time.
- Any good promotion marketing analytical solution should let you drill into any marketing channel in real time. This is important because you should be looking at the 3 key aspects of promotion marketing-Recency, Frequency and Relevance.
While not necessary, some great bonus features of an effective promotion marketing strategy and analytical framework are:
- Real Time Alerting
- Dynamic Alert level setting based on the PDCA loop
- Multi-Dimensional Analysis Capability
- Multi Channel Marketing Aware
- Predictive analytics capable
- Image analysis capabilities
- Scenario based planning and analysis capabilities
- Dashboarding capabilities with slice and dice capabilities specific to management level requirements
- Ability to incorporate learning from past campaigns to the present campaigns
- A/B testing enhanced via statistical analysis and integration back to the ERP system.
Now that you know a bit about the requirements for an effective promotion marketing analytical system and a promotional marketing strategy, you're ready to step up your marketing game.
Remember, be the Tip of the Spear.
Want to improve your marketing? We have prepared a series of marketing guides and experience based best practices to get you started.
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