Promotion: an Advertising Key
Promotion is a key to your marketing activity. The term is actually all – inclusive that involves personal selling, advertising and sales promotion. It will be a mistake to treat the three as separate activity but rather an integrated whole that increases your sales and produces your profits.
Although the three are, as mentioned integrated, the distinction is basically that
o Advertising is promotion of ideas usually done through paid advertising agencies (although many sites and digital mediums can also be tapped for free advertisement).
o Personal selling are presentations made by the individual to prospective clients, customers and purchasers so that a sale may be concluded.
o Sales promotion are neither an advertisement nor personal selling although it aims also to induce purchases and stimulate your customers to be drawn to your product. Examples of promotional materials that are more popularly used are;
o T-shirts that speaks of your company, logo, catchwords, products, your domain name, expertise and other persuaders.
o Premiums and samples
o Trading stamps
o Point of sale materials
o Discounts and incentives
o Brief communicators
From these basic promotional choices your job is narrowed down to which promotion or promotional mix to apply and based on what you aim to accomplish.
When aiming to apply a promotional activity, there are no fixed rules that will offer an ideal solution. More often than not, you play it by the ear. However factors that could help you in evaluating for a good promotion will include:
• The characteristic of the market you are targeting
Determining the characteristic of your targeted market will provide you with a clearer direction in selecting the right promotional activity that considers your type of customer, geographic market and market concentration.
• Style of communication.
Once you have determined the type of customers that you have or wish to attract, your communication style can now be tapered and adjusted. Communication varies drastically from industrial buyers, wholesale buyer individual buyer family consumers, and sales agents. Effective communication with these groups is where the success of your promotion hinges.
More of personal selling is possible for example if you are targeting bulk buyers. This cannot be possible when you are covering a large geographical market or the nature of your product is such that it has to cater to multiple individual customers.
You apply a different approach as your customer varies. There are different problems of communication with customers on a local market against a geographically wider market. For the first one, personal selling may be effective but for the second type of market, more of advertising has to be applied.
• The budget that will finance your promotion.
It is often better to experiment with combinations of mediums that are to be used. There is no one best promotional mix. Often businesses with similar products apply different mixes and it works for them. In conducting promotions however, financial realism is required.
The trend towards the application of the digital medium continues to be the popular vehicle. It is also not as expensive. Low cost and sometimes free advertisements can be utilized in the web.
It is always best to experiment with different promotional methods until the most applicable grouping is found.
• The Product
The nature of your product requires different treatment. A technical product may need more information to it, while many other regularly consumable products will not. Some may require heavier personal selling, others require more information communication while some may need more advertisement.
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