Benefits of running a well-planned sales promotion.

When some marketing managers spoke about promotion, they were most likely using the word as a verb.  When I (Akor) speak of promotions, I mean it as a noun.  It’s a planned and coordinated event meant to sell a specific product or service for a limited time and that meets a seasonally relevant consumer need.

Promotions, when properly done, are an effective way for you to market your business or products and services.  I’m not talking about promotions where you drop the prices on your existing products significantly, or when you have a blowout sale to move stale inventory.  Instead I mean a well-planned, seasonally relevant focus on themes or solutions wrapped around your products that your customers will take note of and value, and that prospects will be enticed to try for the first time.

With that in mind, here are somebenefits of running a well-planned sales promotion:

·         Creates differentiation: When you launch a new product or ask customers to engage with your business in a new way, this sets you apart from your competition.  Promotion planning compels you to identify something new or different that offers value to your customers;

·         Creates new content and communication opportunities: One of the easiest way to create new content for your customers is to create news.  Promotions are news.  News is content;

·         Creates upsell and cross sell opportunities:   When you package or bundle products around a theme or solution, you can often generate sales of multiple items rather than a single item.  When you focus on creating added value to your regular assortment, you can charge premium prices;

·         Drives customer decision making: Limited availability offers can create a sense of scarcity in your customers that get them to act.  When combined with new content that helps customers clearly see the benefits of what you are promoting, you can create compelling reasons to buy now.  If you can add sampling of your promotional item to the mix, you'll create a lot of reasons for customers to buy;

• Creates word-of-mouth opportunities: If you operate a retail store, your regular customers are almost always in a routine to buy from you.  Promotions can often get your regular customers a new reason to be surprised and delighted by your business which gets them to talk about you  to their friends;
• Creates training opportunities for your staff: Like regular customers, your retail sales staff (or any employees who have direct contact with customers), can fall into a routine and lose the enthusiasm in their voice.  Promotions gives you a chance to to train, prepare and reengage them in what’s new in your business;
  
  
  
  
  
• Creates company focus on marketing: Developing a promotion calendar forces you to plan for new marketing programs focused at specific times of year.  If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team doing this for you already, creating a promotions mentality will get you marketing with more frequency and give you more experience to build on;
• Creates testing opportunities: Maybe you have ideas that you think customers will like but you are unsure of the outcome.  Promotions give you a limited time window to test new ideas and new products and to measure them.  This will help you figure out whether they warrant additional investment of time and money to make them permanent products or services;
• Grows revenue: This is the lifeblood of your business.  Sales promotions are a great way to build year-over-year and month-over-month revenue growth.

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Components Of The Best Social Media Campaigns.

Components Of The Best Social MediaCampaigns.

If your company is considering a social media campaign, incorporate the following components to achieve your desired results and boost the impact to your bottom line.

In any realistic marketing campaign, the first step is to plan. Carefully developed a plan.

The best social media campaigns start with a carefully developed plan. The plan must be specific to your campaign, but it should also fit into your overall social media strategy. Meaning that your goals should not conflict, and the campaign should be a good continuation of your brand’s existing social voice and style.

To develop your plan, begin with research. Do a thorough analysis of your existing social followers across your networks and identify areas for improvement versus your competition.

Note that different social networks exist for different purposes, so choose which social networks best fit your needs.

Once you decide what kind of campaign you to run on the social networks you choose, it’s important to allocate your budget and resources. Include in your budget whether your campaign requires any paid social efforts or if you to rely on organic tactics and owned media.

The final part of your social media campaign plan should be to identify the metrics you will use to measure the success and ROI of your campaign. This is only possible when the campaign’s goals is clearly define.

Define your campaign goals:   Before starting any realistic marketing campaign, your goals must be crystal clear define. Deciding on what you want to achieve at the beginning of the campaign makes it easy and simple to measure and analyze your results.

Remember, each goal you select should be personalized for business needs. Here are a few commons ones most campaigns addresses.

·         Increase awareness or amplify your brand

·         Drive more traffic to the website

·         Find prospects

·         Reach a new audience

·         Or establish yourself as a voice of authority

Choose your channels:  it was said earlier that different social networks exist for different purposes, therefore choose which social networks best fit your needs. Now, once you choose your channels, the next thing is to set up a profile in each of these channels you want use.

·         Ensure your brand is represented in each of the channels

·         Use social networking functions in platform

·         Connect your channels.

Schedule your updates:  if you are planning a campaign, you need to keep your content schedule and to also keep your audience engage. You can schedule your update to be published over the duration of the campaign.

Activate and engage:   Here is about the story you are to tell your audience in the different channels. Bearing in mind social media is about people not about technology. Its about real people having real conversation, so treat your audience like you are in the real world and also interact with them in a human manner.

For you to activate and engage you have to monitor and listen, curate or create your content, send it to the platform, position it on networks, engage your audience and involve them throughout the campaign.

How do I involve the audience throughout the campaign?

You can involve the audience by;

·         Interacting

·         Asking questions

·         Commenting and conversing etc.

Thorough Analysis:   So how did your campaign performed? Was your social media program successful in reaching the goals you set out to achieve?

When it comes to analyzing the success of your campaign, you will be thankful you identified the key metrics associated with your goals ahead of time. It’s easy to benchmark your progress against your initial starting point.

Was your achievements beyond your goals, are they any “downstream” metrics you have seen improve? In your given time period, evaluate whether or not you saw a difference in account logins, customer lifetime value or other engagement metrics specific to your business.

Perhaps the revenue from those customers acquired through your social media campaign is higher than revenue from those acquired through your search acquisition campaigns.

Great

social media campaign should affect more than your followers count.

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Best Ways For Market Penetration Strategy.

Generally, market penetration strategy comes in the picture when you are marketing and selling current products in the current market. Market penetration strategy is needed when you are looking at the product

market expansion grid. Thus, the current market might already be saturated, or it may have high competition or your current product has low turnaround time. In such case, what can be your strategy to increase market penetration? Market penetration could be an uphill task, but it’s possible. Let’s try the following;

Price penetration – The oldest trick in the book is to drop the price of the product thereby possible increasing the attractiveness of the product and taking on the challenge of the competitor. However, the implications of price drop are manifold. If you drop the price, than your margins will drop. Otherwise, you have to do some modifications in the product so that the price is less and you don’t suffer in margins. If these modifications are done, is the product still good? Thus, price penetration is not so easy and requires a lot of thinking before the strategy is implemented. Price penetration will also affect the Brand and positioning.

Increase promotions – Another tactic for market penetration strategy is to increase the promotions for the product and thereby increase the pull strategy for the product. However, just plain old promotions might not work at times. You will have to give offers and schemes to the customer to rope them in. By giving trade discounts, sales promotion discounts, and any such additional benefits to the customers along with promotions will ensure that you penetrate the market better.

Increase reach – If your product is Channel driven, than increasing the reach of your product is the best market penetration strategy to sell better than the competition. The way to do this is to find more channel Dealers and channel partners. The trick here is to keep the channel partner motivated at all times to do business with you. By increasing the reach, and having your products everywhere through channel dealers and retailers, you ensure that the customer does not miss out on your product and is sure to get your product wherever he goes, which is another sure shot way for market penetration.

Increase usage – By increasing the usage of a product, you can increase its consumption thereby penetrating the market even further. Thus, if people start eating a packet of chips more often because these chips are marketed heavily in the area, the higher consumption will increase the market penetration.

Attract competition customers and dealers– The cola wars are the best example of attracting competition customers. By dropping the price in a given area for the distributor or targeting the existing dealers of competition products, you can increase your market penetration by decreasing the quantity of competition products sold.

Non users to start the product – Encouraging non users to start using the product is a tough task and this is where the marketing department steps in. Smaller refrigerators or mini bars in bedrooms where not the norm. But by product placement strategies and by increasing awareness, many people have started keeping mini bars in their bed rooms thereby making non users as “users” of the product mini bar.

Thus, there are numerous market penetration strategies and tactics. However, these tactics will implement best when you use multiple tactics together. Like increasing the reach of the product should like be accompanied with increasing the promotions. By increasing the promotions, you are increasing the usage and also attracting competition customers.

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