Sales promotion campaigns are among the most effective ways to build and retain your customers. However, they are often not as easy to create and execute as they look. For promotions to be truly productive for your business, they need to be carefully designed for success. Simply knocking 10% off the sales price might yield some immediate results, but it will not create as enduring and robust an impact as a more intentional and focused sales promotion campaign.
At Fryed Egg Productions, we can help you develop sales promotions with a purpose – and with meaningful, sustainable benefits for your brand.
Why are you doing this?
Any promotional campaign should start with a clear reason. That means before you develop your promotional campaign you should develop goals for it so that you are clear what a successful campaign will look like. This will provide crucial guidance in developing the campaign, giving you a target you can aim toward, and it will allow you to effectively evaluate the campaign on an ongoing basis and once it is finished. It also will help you avoid misguided or aimless promotional campaigns, which will be ineffective – and perhaps were never needed in the first place.
Who are you doing this for?
Too many promotional campaigns lack a target audience. They simply hope to attract customers in general. This lack of focus will hamstring the campaign. When a promotion is focused on a specific audience, it will have a much better chance of success. The promotion can be tailored to them and their preferences and behaviors. Take time to identify your audience, and it will strengthen your results.
What is your budget?
You will need to decide upfront how much money you are willing to invest in a sales promotion. That means addressing your budget on two fronts – how much money you can commit to marketing the promotion and how much you are willing to discount or give away as part of the promotion. These calculations are critical. If you do not have the budget for a promotion, then you should not proceed with it.
What’s the promotion?
This is where you decide what your promotion will actually be. Designing a sales promotion can take on many forms – percentage discounts, marking a set amount off the list price, free shipping, free items with the purchase of others, conditional promotions and giveaways, among other possibilities. The specific promotion should make sense for the products or services being discounted. The timing of a promotion is often important, such as tying it to a popular holiday for sales or an anniversary unique to your brand. The design of your sales promotion will result from considering your goals, your audience and your budget and creatively considering how best to implement a promotion that will get you the best bang for your buck. Sales promotions should be aligned with your brand at all times, ensuring that they not only lead to short-term sales but to long-term benefits for your brand in terms of awareness and affinity.
How will people know about it?
If you are going to effectively spread the word about your sales promotion, you will need to market it. Sometimes, this might mean a full-blown integrated marketing campaign planned months – or even longer – in advance, and sometimes this might mean something lower scale and turned around quickly. It could be limited to certain mediums, such as in-store promotion or sales limited to subscribers to your newsletter. No matter the approach, you will want to make sure your sales and marketing teams are aligned on the effort to maximize the impact and success of the promotion.
At Fryed Egg, we help organizations build brands that resonate and lead to meaningful results. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your marketing needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.