What is a promotional mix?
A promotional mix is your company’s strategy for marketing your business to a target audience. It is the combination of all marketing tools and methods you want to use to promote your products, drive return customers and disseminate information about the company and brand. Each business’ promotional mix should be different depending on their branding strategy, ideal customer persona and access to resources. A promotional mix is an essential part of a company’s overall marketing plan alongside the product presentation, price point and location.
Related:What Is the Definition of Promotion in Business?
Benefits of a strong promotional mix
Using a promotional mix is a key part of business strategy and allows you to be mindful of how you distribute resources and invest in marketing. Spreading awareness of your products, brand and events through a promotional mix comes with several key benefits:
Educating your customer
The most effective promotional strategies educate your subscribers and target market about the products and services you want to sell. A well-designed promotional mix informs your customer base of the most beneficial aspects of doing business with your company and positions you as an industry expert.
More effective marketing
Your promotional mix is what spreads awareness of your various creative marketing campaigns, emphasizing different company initiatives to various audiences based on their preferences and buying behavior. The right combination of promotional strategies enables you to reach a specific type of customer at the right stage in the buying process to drive purchases. The promotional mix ensures that all of your marketing efforts are working together toward a shared goal, preventing you from wasting time or resources.
Related:Creating a Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business
Targeted messaging
The promotional mix identifies different segments within your target market so you can customize advertisements, emails and other messaging. It creates a feedback loop that helps you learn about your customers and provide them with personalized promotional materials that can maintain their interest in your products and make them want to continue interacting with your brand’s content.
Building trust through communication
A good promotional mix allows you to seek out leads through the most appropriate channels, enabling interested customers to communicate with your business. The promotional mix is an important tool in nurturing relationships with sales leads and an existing audience base. Automated responses to audience interactions, scheduled follow-ups and other strategies in your promotional mix build trust and consistency by facilitating communication with your audience.
Differentiating from competitors
Your promotional mix allows you to be strategic about how you approach customers so your marketing efforts aren’t lost in a crowd of other competitor advertisements. Customers can interact with your promotion mix and immediately see the value your company offers compared to competitors. A good promotional mix also keeps your products at the top of a customer’s mind through strategic interactions and reminders, making interacting with your business part of their regular buying habits.
Elements of a promotional mix
Your business’ promotional mix is comprised of all of the tools and strategies involved with communicating information to a target audience with the goal of increasing profits and engaging your customer base. The strategies you use in your promotional mix can be divided into four key categories:
Advertising
Advertising refers to all of your company’s paid messaging that promotes your brand name or products to customers. Advertising campaigns can use many different channels for outreach, such as social media, search engine results, magazines, newspapers, radio, television and billboards. Advertising is the most general part of the promotional mix because it isn’t highly personalized and aims to target a wide market of people through the media they consume going about their day.
Direct sales
Direct selling encompasses all of the one-on-one interactions between your company’ssales representatives and target customers. Unlike advertising, which uses general exposure to convince people to do business with your company, direct sales involves tracking down qualified sales leads who might be interested in making a purchase and delivering a pitch explaining how a product or service can benefit that specific customer. Talented, persuasive salespeople can increase your profits using the direct selling method by going door-to-door, cold calling or working at a table, booth, kiosk or store location to upsell visitors and finalize purchases.
Sales promotions
Sakes promotions are limited-time deals and incentives designed to boost traffic and sales for a short period of time. Holiday sales, limited-time discounts, contests, sweepstakes, free samples and coupons are all examples of sales promotions. Companies use other marketing channels to spread awareness of sales promotions with the hope that short-term deals can convince people to try the product or service, then consider making additional purchases at full price after the promotion ends. Businesses also use sales promotions to move large amounts of products or improve cash flow during slow periods.
Public relations
A company’s public relations is another critical part of the marketing mix, especially for businesses that are serious about creating a cohesive brand and spreading awareness of their company’s mission in addition to their products and services. Public relations can include media attention, community partnerships and interactions with consumers on social media. The goal of public relations tools is to create excitement about product launches and company initiatives. Another role of public relations is to handle any negative feedback and carefully curate the company’s response to issues in a way that satisfies public opinion.
How to establish your business’ promotional mix
Every business has different needs when it comes to their promotional strategies. Use these steps as a guide to build an efficient and useful promotional mix at your business:
1. Select a target audience
Choose a target customer base and perform market research to learn about what influences them to do business with a company. Understanding what media channels your ideal audience uses will help you select the most high-yield methods for communicating with paying customers.
2. Decide on a budget
Some elements of the promotional mix are much more expensive than others, so make sure you have a clear budget before you begin planning various marketing ideas. When setting your marketing budget, calculate how much business you expect to generate from each element of the promotional mix so that you can determine if your tactics have a high enough return on your investment to be worthwhile.
3. Set a timeline
Determine whether you have short-term profit goals you need to meet or want to work on long-term brand awareness. Setting a timeline for different promotional goals will help you determine what kinds of campaigns would work best in your promotional mix.
4. Measure your effectiveness
Record consumer data and measure the impact of various promotional tools on your overall sales. Regularly analyzing your sales data and customer behavior can help you identify the most influential promotional strategies and eliminate parts of the promotional mix that aren’t generating the expected impact.
