What are the steps in promotion planning?

1. Career development
2. 7 Steps for Developing a Promotional Marketing Strategy

By Indeed Editorial Team

Published May 3, 2021

A marketing campaign is an important process that helps a company achieve sales goals and establish its brand. Promotional marketing introduces new products, shows their unique qualities to consumers, builds a brand and increases sales for a company. If your goal is to reach potential customers who are unfamiliar with your brand, you may consider promotional marketing for your marketing strategy. In this article, we explain what promotional marketing is, share its benefits and provide steps to develop a promotional marketing strategy for your business.

What is promotional marketing?

Promotional marketing includes the techniques a company uses to present its products or services. The goal of promoting is to share your product with customers, highlight how it differs from other products on the market and generate interest from consumers.

There are five types of promotional marketing, and a company may consider using more than one or combining types of promotional marketing for greater chances of success. Here are the five types of promotional marketing:

Advertising

A business may use advertising to create and share messages across a variety of mediums to reach consumers. This can include television commercials, banners on webpages, images in print media and radio commercials. The primary goal of advertising is to reach a brand's target audience, as well as potential customers.

Direct marketing

Direct marketing targets a specific audience. A business shares ads of direct marketing on social media, through email and through text messaging. Direct marketing is highly effective because it targets people who are familiar with the brand and have showed an interest in the company's products or services in the past.

Sales promotion

Sales promotions are discounts and special offers that encourage purchases. A business markets sales promotions toward a large audience in an attempt to reach potential and current customers. Examples of sales promotions include buy one, get one deals, where customers can buy a product and get another for free or at a discounted price.

Other forms of sales promotions include:

• Product samples: Samples are smaller versions of a product that consumers can test.

• Coupons: These may offer a certain percentage off of a product's price.

• Lifestyle discounts: This form of sales promotion may include discounts for teachers, veterans and other public service members.

• Flash sales: These last for a limited amount of time and encourage consumers to act quickly and make a purchase.

• Loyalty programs: Often, companies offer a promotion when customers sign up for loyalty programs, which offer discounts and special rewards to encourage customers to continue buying from their store.

• Free trials: Companies offer free trials for their services so customers can have more confidence in their purchase before committing.

• Contests: Companies may host a contest to help promote a new product or service. Contests encourage customer participation and can increase interest in a product or service.

Public relations

Public relations includes determining how consumers feel about a brand. This form of promotional marketing helps a company develop and maintain its brand through customer surveys, articles in magazines or blogs to inform people of the company and generate interest around the launch of a product. A company may also monitor its social media pages to see how consumers react to certain products.

Personal selling

Personal selling includes conducting transactions directly with customers. By communicating individually with consumers, a company can persuade people to buy their product or service through personal interaction.

What are the benefits of promotional marketing?

Promotional marketing is a useful tool a company can use for its marketing strategy. Here are some benefits of using promotional marketing:

• Cost-effective: Companies typically build their promotional marketing campaigns around a budget, and it often produces a high return on a business's investment.

• Generates sales: Promotional marketing influences consumers and reaches a larger audience to help generate sales leads.

• Increases revenue: With different types of promotional marketing, a business can increase the number of sales they make with a product.

• Creates brand development: Good public relations can help inform consumers about a brand, therefore increasing a brand's visibility.

How to develop a promotional marketing strategy

Developing an effective promotional marketing strategy is important to help a company reach its goals. Follow these steps to develop your promotional marketing strategy:

1. Research your target audience

Your target audience is a group of people you want to sell your product or service to. It is important to know and understand what motivates this group of people so you can design content and a strategy that may interest them. There are several tools available to research your target audience and their behavior, such as social media listening tools that show you what consumers are saying about your brand and share their buying habits. You may also use surveys to learn more about consumers.

Read more: How To Find Your Target Audience

2. Analyze the market

Analyzing the market includes researching what products similar to yours are already available. It also includes learning about your competitors and the offers they create for consumers.

When conducting a market analysis, focus on:

• Market size: This is the total number of potential buyers for your product or service.

• Consumer habits: This includes the shopping habits of consumers in relation to your company and your product.

• Industry: This facet of market analysis includes the economic outlook for the industry in which your company operates.

• Trends: Analyzing trends in product releases and consumer behavior helps develop a unique strategy and details what consumers want and are most likely to purchase.

• Competition: The performance of competitors can help determine how you should structure your marketing strategy.

Related: Understanding Consumer Demand (With Examples and FAQs)

3. Consider advertising mediums

There are many mediums available in which to advertise. Knowing your market and target audience can help you decide which advertising mediums are best suited for your budget, brand and product.

Here are mediums to consider.

• Television: This medium provides an expansive reach to consumers of many demographics.

• Radio: These advertisements provide a larger reach to potential local customers.

• Newspaper: Print media, such as a newspaper, is great for local advertising and for reaching older demographics.

• Magazine: These advertisements can help you narrow your target audience, depending on the magazine in which you advertise, and give a longer lifespan to your advertisement than a television or radio advertisement would, for example.

• Social media: Advertising through social media is cost-effective and targets your audience efficiently.

• Billboards: This medium provides great visibility and attracts attention.

• Direct mail: Companies target direct mail to an audience, creating a personal connection that can help generate sales.

• Mobile apps: This form of advertising often manifests as video content, which has a high return on investment.

Related: Advertising Spots: Definitions and Uses

4. Choose your form of promotional marketing

You can choose personal selling, advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion or public relations to help market your product or service. Many companies employ two or more of these methods of promotional marketing in their campaign to increase its probability of success. Depending on your target audience and goals, one type of promotion may be more useful than another. For example, if your goal is to develop your company's brand and increase sales, public relations and direct marketing may be the best choices. If you are attempting to expand your reach and influence potential buyers, you may choose advertising to reach a larger audience.

5. Plan your campaign

Plan your marketing campaign by determining your target audience, market, advertising medium and type of promotional marketing. This can help create content that is suited for a specific audience and medium. Set marketing goals for your campaign and be sure to establish metrics to measure the success of your campaign strategy.

6. Conduct the strategy

After choosing your marketing strategy, conduct your strategy and manage your advertising closely. It may be useful to monitor the reaction consumers have to both your product and campaign. Monitoring reactions allows you to make proper adjustments as needed.

Read more: 16 Promotional Strategies To Effectively Market Your Business

7. Review your marketing strategy

Use marketing analytics to determine whether your strategy met your marketing goals. It is important to review what methods worked and to identify where your strategy could have been more effective so you can learn and improve your marketing strategy for your next campaign.