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Sales promotion strategy is an important subject, but it is often poorly understood. This article will show you how to formulate and implement a sales promotion plan that will work for your business and bring you more sales.
Sales promotion strategies are critical to your business because they drive more traffic, increase foot traffic, and increase brand awareness.
But in order to develop a promotion plan that really works, you need numbers. You need to know how many people you can reach with them, what the costs will be and how much profit they’ll bring in.
Are you struggling with sales? Is your marketing campaign unsuccessful? Did you know that there are ways to make 2021 the best-selling year of your business? Sales promotional strategy is a must in today’s highly competitive market.
What are the best sales promotional strategies? Sales promotions help increase sales and boost revenue. There are numerous promotional strategies for a business to employ. Some may be effective at boosting sales, so it’s important to consider new promotional ideas or strategies every few months in order to generate new revenue.
Sales promotion is designed to be used as a short-term tactic to boost sales it is rarely suitable as a method of building long-term customer loyalty. Some sales promotions are aimed at consumers. Sales promotion ideas can come from anywhere.
Additionally, you will see sales promotion examples, sales promotion types, sales promotion techniques, and sales promotion methods.
How well do you do? Have you researched your archetypes and developed your customer journey maps?
This details will explain sales promotion and will highlight several methods available for use in marketing programs. Businesses will often use promotion activities in conjunction with advertising and personal selling.
Define your purpose
Most campaigns begin with a clear sense of purpose, and a sales promotion is no different. A sales promotion should support your sales strategy, so spell out your objectives in the clearest possible terms. Sales promotions are done for different reasons, so you just might find your team fine-tuning an idea once it’s “out there” for debate. For example, if your goal is to “get people talking” in your community, your sales promotion would most likely be different from a sales promotion designed to invigorate weekend sales.
Identify your audience
Few sales promotions are targeted to everyone on a business’ radar, and yours probably isn’t, either. In fact, the narrower your targeted audience, the more effective your sales promotion may be. For example, think of the difference between a sales promotion targeted to females in general vs. one targeted to females under the age of 30. In this case, your promotion could break out with “millennial fever” that could make it a hit on social media platforms.
Select the promotion
For most people, this is the “funnest” part: combing through a treasure trove of promotional ideas, which might include more traditional sales promotions like buy-more-save-more offers, coupons, discounts, product giveaways, refer-a-friend deals and two-for-one offers. But just give them time and watch flash sales and exclusive, invitation-only events catch up to this crowd.
Either way, it may be tempting to fall back on the sales promotion that produced results last year. But try to experiment with a new idea; it can get people talking, even if they don’t participate. And word-of-mouth is valuable to your business, too.
Set your budget
As if you needed more proof that storing information pays off: It can be a real time-saver as the process of running a sales promotion proceeds to the budgetary phase. Reviewing a sales promotion through the prism of volume, cost and projected payback has a way of adding a sense of urgency to a campaign, too.
Compile a checklist
Before you wade deeply in the process of running a sales promotion, compile a checklist of every task that must be done before launch day. Then watch that list grow, as it should, as the campaign takes shape. For starters, copy must be written and approved, photography must be submitted and reviewed and employees must be trained to run the sales promotion. You can write a simple checklist or, for a more complex promotion, expand it to include deadlines, responsible parties and “next steps.”
This way, even a quick glance at your checklist ought to be enlightening – and provide some peace of mind. Be sure to factor in some “fudge time” for problems and unforeseen delays; they’re bound to occur, and bracing for them now will make them less likely to throw you off-balance later.
Choose your medium
The media people on your team will probably say that this is the “funnest” part of running a sales program: deciding which media you’re going to use to promote it. Your website will probably play a role. After this, it’s smart to review step 2 for clues. In other words, where is your target audience most likely to see and hear of your sales promotion? Timing plays a role in this step, too, and it can be tricky. Publicize a promotion too early and people may forget about it; publicize it too late and they may miss it. If you can’t aim in the middle, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.
Plan a supportive communications strategy
Here’s the step that time-pressed people may be tempted to skip but shouldn’t. It’s true that you may not have time to go “all out” on a communications plan that augments and supports your sales promotion. But you shouldn’t ignore it completely, either. For example, you may not have time to place ads in key publications.
But you should have more than enough time to send an email blast, hang posters, post social media messages or conduct some good, old-fashioned field marketing. And don’t forget the strategic alliances you’ve forged with other small businesses. They can help tout your sales promotion, maybe in exchange for you doing the same when they need your help.
Identify the challenges now
It’s called being proactive. Or maybe you call it being preemptive. Either way, it’s smart to troubleshoot potential challenges and problems so you can head them off at the pass. Here’s where the the last step in the process of planning a sales promotion – the evaluation step – can pay huge dividends.
In other words, look back at records of previous sales promotions and see what challenges took you by surprise. For example, if a competitor got wind of your sales promotion and stole your thunder with one of his own, take steps now to keep this promotion under wraps.
Double-check the creative
At this point, you’ve been so busy orchestrating the campaign that it’s probably been a while since you took a good, long look at the promotion itself. That’s good. With a fresh pair of eyes, you should be able to assess whether the promotion is interesting, engaging and easily understood. If it passes these three criterion, your campaign should be ready to roll.
If you have second thoughts, though, run it by someone who is representative of your target customer. Once you’re this deep in the marketing mix, you should feel comfortable running a focus group of one.
Evaluate your sales promotion campaign
As soon as possible after your sales promotion is over, take the time to evaluate it. Time is of the essence because your thoughts and experiences will be fresh, and the lessons you learned should still be resonating with you. As important as it is to chronicle all the good moves you made, be sure to elaborate on what you would have done differently. When you learn from your sales promotions, you virtually guarantee that they’ll only get better in time.
Sales promotions can be a great way to boost sales in the short term, but you probably know you don’t want to overdo a good thing. As much as customers may love “freebies,” discounts and other deals, they can also become leery of a company that gives away too much, too often. It’s called “brand dilution,” and it’s one of the last things you want for your small business.
Going through the steps of planning a sales promotion also should minimize this risk; the strategic nature of planning demands that you think through every step – well before you issue another call to put all hands on deck.
