What is promotional marketing?

It requires understanding the following two differences.

Marketing – refers to the process of delivering a product or service to an intended audience. This process includes creating, validating, pricing, and distributing products to meet consumer needs against competitive offerings.

Promotion – exists within the four “Ps” of marketing. It involves the planning and execution of techniques that describe a product or service to an intended audience. The main objective is to introduce a product, drive demand, and differentiate it. Simply put, promotion is a fundamental element of marketing – but it is an essential one.

Facilitates the introduction of new products or services

Promotional marketing offers brands a position within their respective niche. It provides an opportunity for brands to introduce new products or services to the marketplace and differentiate them against current offerings.

Strengthens brand image and awareness

By leveraging a wide range of promotional marketing channels and tools, businesses can position themselves well for developing a new or strengthened brand image. For example, if asked to think of an athletic apparel brand, Nike or Adidas comes to mind for many individuals. Brands of this stature have leveraged promotional marketing tactics effectively and have positioned themselves as household names. Focusing on these tactics tends to create or restore brand images for many organizations – leading to greater recognition for product associations.

Informs customers about a brand

Promotional marketing is a vital tactic for announcing, explaining, and responding to changes in brand policies or products. Explaining the features and details of new offerings is another essential item involved in promotional items. Businesses can use different promotions to build curiosity and excitement around an item before they release statements. This tactic is prevalent in the technology and software markets, where brands hint at new products months before their release.

Positioning brands above their competitors

Nearly all businesses leverage promotional marketing in the modern era, so to remain competitive in this landscape, brands must establish long-term strategies. Staying competitive requires creativity, dedication, and reinvestment into promotional marketing items.

Converting new leads into valid customers

Leveraging promotional marketing channels like personal advertisements and sales stimulates the demand for new product offerings. Remaining close to a brand’s current market share while drawing in new customers is one of the most significant aspects of promotional marketing.

Promotional marketing is performed through many different channels and varies from brand to brand, but five types encompass these efforts:

Direct Marketing

Typically executed utilizing test message/SMS marketing, social media, or email, direct marketing strengthens online community engagement and heightens brand trust with new and existing customers.

Personal Selling

Often the most expensive form of promotional marketing, personal selling involves one-on-one communication with potential customers. Despite its association with high personnel costs, it is often the most effective because it enables brands to form good relationships with potential customers.

Public Relations

This style enables brands to strengthen brand image and raise awareness towards company values. When audiences respond to a brand, marketers perform analyses to assess any positive or negative associated with their organization. These marketers then work to reconstruct a brand’s image to realign them with their target consumer.

Sales Promotions

This promotional style stimulates purchasing behaviors from potential customers through discounted items, free memberships, gift items, and more. Sweepstakes and giveaways are prime examples of sales promotions – often incorporating a call to action for customers to buy in exchange for a chance to win.

Advertisements

Brand recognition plays a vital role in the success of any business. No matter the marketing channel a company chooses, great promotions leverage accurate, calculated messaging focused on new and existing customers.

How is the success tracked?

A brand lacking a strategic process for promoting its products is always at risk of losing money. Companies must remain proactive in identifying their best promotional strategies to place products in front of the right audience. Organizations use a few metrics to understand the effectiveness of their techniques, but these will vary by marketing channel.

• Revenue Attribution – Brands can use this technique to avoid unnecessary spend on marketing efforts that are not generating revenue. This metric involves analyzing all marketing efforts to determine which of them are driving revenue and not. Revenue attribution is a great way to show individual teams or campaign groups the value of their actions.
• Organic Traffic and SERP Tracking – In many digital marketing efforts, one very prominent goal is to drive most website traffic from organic search results. Focusing on organic traffic means that SEO content and other promotional tools replace paid advertisements. Tracking organic traffic and rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) will give a brand clear insight into how powerful their standalone messaging is.
• Lead-to-Customer Ratio – A valuable metric for any brand. Understanding the ratio of potential leads to new or existing customers will indicate how well a brand converts individuals interested in. products into actual buyers.
• Cost of Customer Acquisition – Determining the breakdown of sales generated by marketing efforts on a per-customer-basis will enable brands to effectively analyze their marketing efforts and understand whether they drive enough value to remain profitable.
  Traffic to Lead Ratio – As brand awareness grows, organizations should keep a close eye on the ratio between their website and social media traffic and the number of individuals who exist as leads. The higher number of leads a company holds versus overall traffic will tell an organization just how effective its promotional tactics are.
• Social Media Traffic & Conversion Rate – Tracking social media growth and conversion rates are reasonably simple metrics for digital marketing. Analyzing social media traffic and the number of individuals who make a purchase can give an organization some insight into how well their social media engagement is converting people from leads into customers.
• Lifetime Customer Value – Companies can track this critical metric by understanding the average sale price per customer, how many times they purchase in a set timeframe, and how long their average customer retention rate lasts. Over time, this can be a fair estimate to understand customer lifetime value and make business decisions around estimated revenue.

Through the services we provide at SIS Global Marketing, brands can expect much more than a transaction.

We pride ourselves on forming long-lasting relationships with our clients to boost their efforts and help them reach their goals. Our team of experts dedicates themselves to our client’s long-term success, from brand awareness to conversion rates. If your organization needs help with promotional marketing, we offer a comprehensive list of solutions to assist:

• Promotional Email Campaigns
• Social Media Promo Development
• Content Marketing and Curation
• Influencer Promotions
• Referral Marketing Development
• Brand Awareness Tracking and Improvement
• Creative Promotional Design
• KPI and Other Campaign Metric Analysis & Tracking
• End-to-end Promotional Marketing Execution

Wherever you lie in your efforts, or if you haven’t even begun, we are here to help. Contact us today to schedule a consultation with one of our experts and see how SIS Global Marketing can put your brand on the fast track to success.