It’s all well and good that you have a decent business model or product, but if you don’t know how to effectively market it to your target consumers, you’re not going anywhere. Here we take a look at 3 promotional models that are proven to work. Not all will be the perfect fit for your particular business, but the principles that underlie each can be adapted to many circumstances. Take a look and see if there’s anything you’re not doing, or could be improving, by comparing your promotional strategy against these 3 classic techniques.
Marketing & Advertising
Bringing public awareness to your brand is a big deal and can make or break your burgeoning business. Now that the majority of commerce takes place online, brands are faced with fresh challenges and competition. Discoverability can be much harder online as most people congregate and spend their time in only a couple of digital storefronts. To make the most of this, focus your marketing budget on social media targeted adverts. Organisations like Facebook make the majority of their revenue from selling these adverts, and benefit from building ever increasingly more accurate consumer profiles on their 2.8 billion active users.
Utilising these services can give you a real edge, especially if you’re a niche product or service. Facebook-owned Instagram places adverts to products and services relevant to its users directly in their newsfeed, ensuring they will see them. If you have a clear idea of what demographic you’re aiming to target with your products, you can input this data into these social networks and have them do the legwork of connecting you with relevant users for a small fee. In the long run, this will pay dividends.
Sales & Promotional Offers
Sales are one of the oldest consumer strategies in the book, with recognised sales holidays, such as post-Christmas & Black Friday, being among the most lucrative times of year for public facing organisations. Sales work well for stockists of products as it enables them to encourage customers to buy last season’s products at a discount, clearing the way for new seasonal lines. Sales are also a great way of increasing brand awareness and exposure. If you’re running a discount sale on your product or service, it makes customers more likely to try you out, increasing the chance they will become a repeat buyer at full cost in the future.
This model is also frequently employed in the iGaming sector with gaming platforms hosting special offers to encourage new and returning players to engage with their content. What all of these examples have in common is that they’re creating a call to action for a prospective customer by presenting them with a time, or condition specific offer in order to increase the incentive to invest or patronise the service in question. Consider the ways you can apply this to your business. Is there an optimal window for you to promote a sale on your product or service? Or is there a means by which you can host your own special offers to encourage customers to return to you?
Crafting your Brand Identity
Creating a memorable brand is at the very heart of advertising and promotion. If you don’t know who you are, and what you stand for as a company, you cannot expect your customers to either. This can take the form, for example, of deciding on and presenting an aesthetic that adheres to the product or service experience you’re hoping to evoke. If you’re a wellness brand, promotional materials that evoke aggression and edginess, with discordant colors and confrontational copy, are going to be a bad fit for your brand and its aim of promoting tranquility and purity.
Considering these things is incredibly important, especially in the social media space. As consumers become increasingly aware, they know to look for where you stand on various ethical concerns. If you’re an environmentally conscious brand, show that by affiliating yourself with charitable concerns that promote conservation, for example. Consumers want to do business with people that walk their talk.
