Marketing promotion increases brand awareness, sales, and brand loyalty. In this article, we’ll describe the most popular types of promotion in marketing.
What is promotion in marketing
What does promotion mean in marketing? It is outbound communication activities that are used to inform customers about the product in order to create awareness, increase demand, and drive sales. Promotion is a critical business activity as it is directly related to making a profit.
Sometimes people confuse the definition of promotion with the definition of marketing in general. It is important to understand the difference between these terms to create an effective strategy to promote your product.
Promotion is what creates a good attitude to your company or product. Through promotion, you can gain widespread recognition as a company, as well as make your product famous. In fact, we can say that promotion is delivering an idea to potential customers and creating a desire to purchase a product or service.
Marketing is about making a product easy to obtain, easy to acquire, and easy to ship. The design of the packaging and the selection of the correct placement are also relevant. In fact, marketing is responsible for getting the product or service into the hands of the public. Marketing is the process of continuous communication with potential buyers, during which the organization is training and informing them, thus building long-term relationships.
So here is what you need to remember about the difference between marketing and promotion:
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marketing can exist without promotion, but promotion cannot exist independently;
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the focus of marketing is the satisfaction of customer needs. The focus of promotion is advertising a product or service.
What promotional channels and promotional tools are there in marketing?
Promotional channels definition is usually stated as a bunch of tools that allow you to convey information about the product to the consumer.
All the promotional tools in marketing can be divided into strategic and tactic ones.
Strategic promotional tools:
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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — a comprehensive development and promotion of a website for its entry into the first positions in the results of search engines (SERPs) for selected queries in order to increase traffic and generate income;
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content marketing — is designed to establish contact with a website visitor and gradually form their need for a promoted product or service. Properly presented content with professional advice helps to grab attention, develop an interest in the product, and build trust to the seller;
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SMM (Social Media Marketing) — promotion on social media. The work is carried out in two directions: improving the company's reputation and increasing sales. SMM is a two-way communication, so you get the opportunity to receive feedback on your product and grow a loyal community.
Tactic promotional tools:
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PPC (Pay-per-click) — an advertising model that lets advertisers place ads on an advertisement platform and pay the host of the platform when their ad is clicked;
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email marketing — promotion through sending emails to the target audience;
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targeted advertising — refers to advertising aimed at reaching a clearly defined target audience.
Without effective promotion, product awareness may remain low in the market. That’s why you need to know all the possible channels and tools for your promo activities and combine all of them in the marketing strategy.
Types of promotion in marketing
Every promotional strategy is formed as a unique mix of a few basic types of promotion:
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Personal selling. Face-to-face selling where a salesman tries to convince the customer to buy a product.
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Advertising. This marketing tactic involves paying for space to promote your business. The goal of promotional advertising is to reach people most likely to be willing to buy.
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Direct marketing. Addressing your audience without involving intermediaries. For example, you can do direct marketing promo using emails, flyers, or phone text messaging.
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Sales promotions. A marketing strategy where a business uses short-term campaigns to spark interest and create demand for a product, service, or other offers.
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Public relations. The variety of activities conducted by a company to promote and protect the image of the company, its products, and policies in the eyes of the public.
Promotion marketing examples
Every business requires a unique mix of tools and methods in its marketing strategy to succeed. Let’s take a look at two businesses with two different long-term goals and analyze what promotional marketing campaigns can help them.
Example 1
The first company sells equipment for the installation of autonomous heating systems. The equipment is quite expensive, which means that buyers need time to develop the need and make a decision. That’s why this company decided to combine content marketing and PPC campaigns. Their website contains articles on the design of private houses with advice on heat conservation. Potential clients are smoothly led to consultations on the choice of heating equipment, and at a certain stage, they will be warmed up enough to place an order. If not, PPC promotional programs will remind them about the heating systems and the company.
Example 2
The second company is an online magazine that shares a lot of news about the tech industry every day. To engage the audience and keep in contact with readers they decided to launch email campaigns with personalized collections of news on the topics that are the most interesting for the receiver. While subscribing, the user picks his interests. Later, the algorithm chooses what to send to the reader using the tags on the website articles chosen by writers. This helps to increase website traffic and get more profit from business through showing promo materials to the website visitors.
Wrap up
As we see, different purposes need different promotional tools. Sometimes, the promotion channels need to be changed at different stages of company development. Don’t forget to review your promotion strategy every year to keep it aligned with business goals.
