If your growth strategy is to get more new customers to show up and buy, you either invest in marketing promotions, pay for referrals, or hire a sales force to go out and find new customers.
The size of your promotion investment comes down to whether you are trying to get potential customers to come to you or you to them. Either way, much money gets wasted on promotions when you violate any of the 7-Ps for Owning a GREAT Business.
Overview
The goal of your business and product promotions is to keep your target audience inquiring until they become prospects. You have this goal because an inquiring mind is open to buying. The minute customers think they have all the information needed to make a determination of value; they will stop inquiring and move to make a “buy or pass” purchase decision.
Getting people to “buy” comes down to communicating with them in a way that meets their information needs, not your promotion objectives. When people “pass,” they have either tuned your message out or changed the channel on you. Either way, they don’t see the value in what you are selling, and they have made the decision to keep their hard-earned money from becoming yours.
Promotion is defined as the advancement of a product or service through publicity (earned media) and advertising (paid media) to promote the sale of a commercial product or service. To communicate a clear, concise, and compelling promotional message, you must be able to answer the following questions:
- What do you have to say = message
- Who needs to hear it = audience
- Where are you going to say it = medium
- How are you going to say it = execution
Advertising and publicity campaigns fail because businesses communicate the wrong message, communicate it to the wrong audience, use the wrong medium, or combine the words and graphics of the message in a way that entertains, engages, and informs.
The best way to get your message right and communicate it in a way that it gets picked up on is to know who is the best target for your message. When will your target customer most likely be open to your message, and where is the most effective way to communicate your information? Lastly, you need to identify why your target customer should be interested in your message.
The success of your promotional investments is powered by how well your messaging represents what is most important for your target customer to learn about your business. If you fail to communicate how you can help your target customer solve a problem, they aren’t likely to read your message or retain the information. If they don’t retain your message, the only sales you will make will be “impulse sales,” because your promotions will have no staying power.
By itself, promotion is not very useful. It must be directly related to what the target customer most values. It’s best to base your promotions on what is new or different about your business. It has to be significant enough for you to spend money communicating a focused message to your customers, or you should redirect the money you spend on promoting your business because you have nothing compelling to say.
Your promotional mix represents the unique combination of promotional methods you incorporate to communicate your message to your target audience. It may include the promotional mediums of personal selling, print or broadcast advertising, direct marketing, signage, and merchandising.
The biggest obstacle to overcome with promoting your business is tied to the costs associated with business and product promotion. The costs to generate new sales can be high. There is often a long lag between putting out the money to promote your business and generating new sales from the promotion. This is why knowing the who, what, when, where, and why of your business is a never-ending pursuit.
You can make your promotional investments work more effectively for you when you think in terms of which element in the marketing mix represents the best marketing lever to promote your product or service.