How to effectively use promotion and marketing strategies

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Most business owners constantly worry about the best marketing strategies they can apply in their businesses. Yet many don’t know the difference between “promotion” and “marketing”.

In this article you will learn the difference between the two and also about the following:

• Types of promotional strategies
• Ways to promote your business and product effectively

What is the difference between Promotion and Marketing?

Many people confuse promotion with marketing, and some even use them interchangeably. But ‘promotion’ is an aspect of marketing that entails adopting advertising methods to attract and convert prospects into active product or service users. On the other hand, marketing involves everything it takes to introduce a product or service to the market— including ‘promotion’.

A comprehensive marketing plan focuses on these four core areas:

• Product
• Price
• Placement
• Promotion

Together these can be referred to as the 4Ps of the marketing mix. As you can see, a promotion is a subset of all the marketing efforts.

Marketing doesn’t start with a promotion; it begins with an initial idea for a product or service. After that research is conducted to identify potential customers and understand the market to ascertain the level of interest in it.

Promotion is an important marketing function that attracts, informs, persuades, and influences a prospective target audience toward a purchase..

What are the promotional strategies in marketing

Promotional strategies are marketing strategies to promote a product to a targeted audience. They focus on communication channels or methods adopted to attract and educate prospective customers into buying a product or service.

These are some promotional strategies for businesses:

• Advertising
• Sales promotion
• Special offers like discounts or gifts
• Personal selling
• Word of mouth

Examples of promotion and marketing strategies

Promotion is not just an element in the marketing mix but a strategy. Some practical promotion strategies in marketing for businesses to reach and engage with their target audience include:

1. Advertising:

Advertising focuses on creating awareness for your product or service and attracting customers to your business. There are various types of media you can use for this, including traditional print, or electronic media, such as online ads and social media platforms.

2. Sales Promotions:

These include all promotional strategies like discounts or coupons that stimulate sales and encourage customer loyalty. Some sales promotions you can employ in your business include:

• BOGO (Buy One Get One) deals - one free or one at 50% off etc
• Discounts and coupon offerings
• Free samples
• Contests

3. Public Relations (PR):

Public Relations (PR) is a promotional strategy not to joke about in business. It involves managing your company’s image and reputation through press releases, sponsorships, events, and media relations. That way, you build trust and credibility for your business.

4. Social Media Marketing:

Social media marketing is a great promotional idea for small businesses because of the low cost and high reach. It involves a business owner taking advantage of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn in to carry out the following activities:

• Building brand awareness
• Engaging with customers and prospects
• Driving traffic to company's website or stores
• Offering coupons or bogo deals

5. Word-of-mouth Marketing:

As one of the most profound promotional strategies for small businesses, word-of-mouth helps to build trust and credibility. That’s because satisfied customers do the work for a business. They spread positive word-of-mouth through referrals, testimonials, or user-generated content.

6. Affiliate Marketing:

Through this promotional strategy in marketing, you partner with individuals or businesses to promote products or services in exchange for a commission. As affiliates, they earn a commission for every sale they generate or make through their referral links or codes.

7. Loyalty Programs:

A Loyalty program is a promotional idea you can employ as an owner of a business to foster loyalty and encourage repeat business from your existing customers. You can do this by rewarding repeat customers with discounts, exclusive offers, or points redeemable for future purchases.

8. Event Marketing:

Event marketing is a good way of promoting and marketing your business using events. Of course, you could organize or sponsor events such as trade shows, conferences, workshops, or product launches to showcase products. Ultimately, events like these allow you to interact with customers and generate quality leads for your business.

Effective strategies to promote and market your business (in 7 steps)

Marketing your business shouldn’t be as hard as many online marketing “gurus” paint it, especially if you know how to use the promotional strategies in marketing we've considered above. Here are some excellent steps you can take to execute promotional ideas for your small business when marketing your product or service:

1. Understand your business and audience

You want to start by defining what your business goals and objectives are. Since promotion entails attracting, engaging, and converting prospects to paying and loyal clients, you need to understand these individuals– preferably more than your competitors.

As you conduct market research about your audience, you should create a buyer persona for the business. This involves profiling your ideal customers based on demographics, interests, and pain points.

2. Set clear and measurable objectives

Once you've defined your business goals and target audience, the next thing to do to promote and market your business is to set specific, achievable, and time-bound marketing goals.

That could be increasing your brand awareness by 20% within six months, or as the case may be. Also, this involves aligning these goals with your business objectives of driving growth. A typical example of these business objectives could be boosting sales by 15% in the next fiscal year.

Furthermore, determining what key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to track progress with your goals is vital. These metrics include website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and social media engagement.

3. Choose the right promotional and marketing channels

After you've set clear marketing goals for your business, it's time to select the right promotion strategies to promote and market your business effectively.

Doing this would require you to assess the different methods or platforms to find the one that best suits your business and audience. This selection becomes less cumbersome with a solid understanding of your target audience's preference and behavior in choosing traditional vs. electronic channels.

For instance, if your audience is senior and reads more, then you can focus on print ads. Or if the audience engages more with Instagram, it’s better to focus more on this electronic channel than another platform like Facebook. You can always develop a multichannel strategy to widen your brand reach and impact.

4.Craft compelling messaging and content

Effective business promotions depend on compelling messaging and content. That's because content is priceless in promoting and marketing your product or service.

That's the same reason why crafting a unique value proposition (UVP) that strikes a chord with your audience is essential. Meanwhile, you hardly can do that without a good understanding of the various stages of your buyer's journey.

In other words, developing suitable, engaging, and valuable content for your target audience across various platforms depends on what they need to achieve. You may have to ask yourself questions like:

• Are they hearing about your business/product for the first time?
• What problem or need could they be trying to solve to find your business?
• What information could they be seeking out to engage with your brand?
• Which sources of information do they trust the most when evaluating your business?
• What factors could influence their decision to choose your product/service?
• What type of competition is out there facing your business, and how strong is the competition?
• How is the competition reaching out to the same audience, if so?

For instance, let's say you run a fitness brand. You may offer workout guides for beginners, intermediate, and advanced levels to cater to their diverse customer needs while stimulating loyalty to your brand and finding ways to differentiate it from competition.

5.Execute promotion and marketing campaigns

The success of any promotional campaign depends on factors, including planning, campaign scheduling, and how you effectively allocate your budget across various channels and tactics.

For example, if you are a fashion retailer you may decide to run a seasonal promotion targeting a specific demographic through social media ads. In doing this, you may allocate more budget to platforms showing higher engagement rates based on your assessment of the tactics and process. Over time and after observation, you may also decide to adjust your ad content based on audience response for better results.

Now that you know the significance of crafting compelling content, you want to use it in implementing promotional and marketing campaigns that include a digital presence . That's because these campaigns are essential for promoting your business in a digital age.

6. Build relationships and engage with your audience

Beyond your content, an effective way to promote your brand is by creating and sustaining a solid relationship with your audience. Use social media and community engagement to interact directly with customers. Through this, you foster a sense of connection and loyalty.

Not only that, you encourage feedback and reviews from your customers as your brand demonstrates its commitment to meeting their needs. It even gets more personal when you develop personalized communication strategies, such as targeted email campaigns or personalized offers.

7. Measure success and refine your strategy

Do you remember those key metrics you spelled out while you were setting goals for your business? At this point, you want to evaluate the effectiveness of your promotional strategies while identifying possible areas for improvement.

To do this, you might have to track website traffic and conversion rates while considering customer feedback. This way, you can refine product offerings, adjust advertising strategies, and improve user experience to ensure sustained growth and maximum customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Now that you have read about the difference between 'promotion' and 'marketing' as concepts in business, it should be clear that marketing isn’t complete without promotional efforts. There are many promotional and marketing strategies for businesses, but you've got to find the one that best suits your business.