Marketing Promotional Activities
- You can sell the best widget in the world for the best price, but if your customers aren't aware that you and your widget exist, it doesn't matter. Marketing promotional activities that build brand awareness let your potential customers know that you exist. One of the most common brand awareness promotions is the giveaway. Promoted correctly, giveaways not only inform customers of your brand's existence, they also get potential customers excited about your product and have the potential of becoming viral as customers pass information about the giveaway along to their network of contacts.
- Once your potential customer is aware of your brand, the next step in your marketing strategy might be to create a promotional activity that inspires your customer to actually purchase your product or service. Common promotions meant to incite customers to purchase include coupons, limited time offers, and special sales. The timing of these types of promotional marketing activities is important. If you send out coupons or have sales too regularly, it can sometimes discourage immediate purchases, because your customer begins to believe that if they don't have to act immediately to garner the benefit since they will receive another chance in a short period of time.
- Once a potential customer has been converted to a true customer, it's important to build activities into your marketing strategy that are meant to retain customers. One way to do this is to create a customer appreciation or customer loyalty program. These programs reward customers for their continual support in a variety of ways. Grocery stores, for example, often have customer reward programs offering discounts on certain products if the customer signs up for the membership program. The key to success with these activities is to make sure that the "rewards" are received in a reasonable amount of time. If it takes too long for the customer to receive their reward, the program loses its ability to encourage repeat business.
- The biggest obstacle to moving a person from the potential customer category to the purchasing customer category is trust. People won't spend their money until they've developed a certain amount of trust in your product or service. The fastest way to build trust is through referrals. When someone your potential customer trusts refers your products to them, your product becomes trusted through association. Referral programs are a type of marketing promotional activity that turns your existing customers into product or service evangelists who do the selling for you. Online affiliate programs are an example of a referral program.