Promotion Strategy Fundamentals

No wonder that promotion strategy is one of the most important processes in marketing.

In fact, it supports your marketing voices to reach your target audience, creates interest, and helps you to engage with them. If you want more traffic and conversion, then developing promotion strategies is critical.

Promotion is the first marketing communication with customers. There are too many companies talking about their products and services, so you must create a well-crafted road map for your promotion to reach out to the right audience and convert them into your customers.

In this short article, you’re going to learn the basics of a promotion strategy and why it is so important for your marketing success.

What is a promotion strategy?

Many marketers spend more on promoting their business each year, but they receive less. There are too many options and marketing voices, so you have to make sure that your messages are really reaching the people you want to approach when you promote your business.

What’s more, it is very difficult to convert people into customers without resonating marketing voices to create emotional connections and arouse interests and demands to your offers.

A promotion strategy is an actionable game plan for your promotion to influence people about your business, generate more leads and boost customer engagement. It visualizes how to perform your marketing communication approaches, what marketing messages to deliver, who to target as your audience, and where and when to execute the plan.

Role of promotions

When it comes to a promotion, it is one of the 4 P’s of marketing mix. It is a part of marketing communication which reaches your target market to gain awareness and foster conversation with prospects and customers.

Promotion helps you to draw the attention of your target, create interest in your products and services, generate demands, and encourage them to purchase from you.

The following are the four main roles of promotion:

1. Build awareness – Making your target audience aware of your products and services. You must identify your target audience, your marketing messages, and your outreach strategies.
2. Foster interests – Gaining their interests in your business. It requires a well-designed content marketing strategy to provide enough information for lead nurturing, and show uniqueness for differentiation from competitors.
3. Generate demand – Making your products and services desirable. You can share great features and benefits, and create an emotional connection with your prospect.
4. Induce prospects to take action – Placing a call-to-action for your target to easily engage and find the next steps. Anywhere you can position to drive conversions, such as your website, digital advertising, and social media.

As you can see, these are following the A.I.D.A. marketing models. It means that promotion can contribute to all the consumers buying processes.

Besides, it will help you to establish a stronger relationship and cultivate the repeated customer to stay longer with you.

Types of promotion

There are many marketing approaches where you can attract your prospects and customers and draw people into the A.I.D.A. process. From traditional promotions like face-to-face selling to digital advertising and the customer loyalty program.

The key promotion types are:

1. Personal (face-to-face) selling – Salespeople from a company give you a sales presentation in person to persuade their offer. Unlike the other approaches, it is easier to build relationships with you.

i.e.) Sales meeting, sampling, telemarketing, etc.

1. Traditional advertising – You can use any paid advertisements to reach a bigger audience, and prompt short-term engagement and sales. It is one-to-one marketing and its costs are based on the bidding.

i.e.) Print ads, billboards, TV, radio, etc.

1. Direct marketing – It is direct communication with a highly-targeted audience through marketing channels. It has more chances to get quick feedback and retain customer relationships.

i.e.) Emails, direct mail, digital ads, etc.

1. Sales promotion – Performing a short-term marketing campaign to gain attention and encourage conversion or purchase. You can get immediate responses and interactive, but it’s not good for developing a long-term relationship.

i.e.) Contests, coupons, sweepstakes, etc.

1. Public relations – To build a good corporate image and cultivate a stronger customer relationship, you can provide appropriate information and handle both positive and negative voices from consumers.

i.e.) Newspaper/magazine articles, seminars, speeches, etc.

1. B2B promotions – a B2B company offers materials and services that other businesses need to work and get benefits. It focuses on how people will benefit from using your offers.

i.e.) Trade shows, case studies, online courses, etc.

1. Word-of-mouth marketing – It is the process to motivate people to share information about your products and services with others. Since people trust words more from close people than from a company, it will bring qualified leads.

i.e.) Referral program, customer reviews, influencer marketing, etc.

1. Customer loyalty program – a Customer loyalty program induces your current customers to make frequent purchases and retain them which brings you great profits in the long run.

i.e.) Reward programs, referral incentives, etc.

You’ve got what a promotion strategy is and what you can do. Before we go any further, let me explain why it is critical for your business.

Why is a promotion strategy so important?

Promotion is one of the most critical processes in marketing. It focuses on how to attract the right audience to your business, introduce your product and service effectively, and convince people to buy it.

Back to what I was saying, with a great promotion strategy you can drive prospects from the awareness stage into the action stage if you do it right. It allows you to create strong brand awareness, generate leads and build a long-term relationship with your target audience.

Besides, developing a promotion strategy helps you to cut unnecessary promotion costs. Because you target the right audience instead of marketing anyone out there, and they will start recognizing you more and choose you over the competition.

With creating a good corporate image in promotions, you can also build a better reputation that brings much more benefits for your business, like word-of-mouth.

Benefits of a promotion strategy

A promotion strategy will be a compass for your promotion and will have a great impact on the consumer decision-making process.

These are the key benefits of a promotion strategy:

• Target the right audience
• Gain brand awareness
• Attract prospects and customers
• Publish your promotion at the best time
• Increase qualified customer traffic
• Show differentiation from competitors
• Offer more value to your customers
• Engage with your target audience
• Drive customer decision making
• Find potential partnerships
• Create customer relationships
• Build your reputation
• Improve word-of-mouth opportunities
• Stay ahead of the competition on market share
• Grow sales and profits

Thus, the potential benefits you’ll get from a promotion strategy are huge and you don’t want to miss them! That’s why you need to craft a well-designed promotion strategy and ensure your success.

So, how do you create one for your promotion success?

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This is just an overview and an introduction to Promotion Strategy. More is comming soon, meanwhile you can read our "Promotion Strategy: The Ultimate Guide to Advertise Your Business in 2019"