Marketing Mix Promotion

Marketing mix promotion is one of the 4 Ps of Marketing (place - the forgotten P, product, price, and promotion). Promotion for your products must include raising awareness, understanding of the features and benefits, acceptance of your brand's identity, and from acceptance, encouraging action.

The end goal of marketing mix promotion is to help you sell (business to business selling and business to consumer selling).

Promotion is also called sales promotion or marketing promotions. It includes:

• Personal selling, such as face to face (sales person) or voice to voice (sales by phone);
• Advertising, such as internet, newspapers, trade and consumer magazines, radio, television, posters, billboards, even advertising on cars, buses, trucks, hockey ice, football stadiums and more;
• Consumer promotions such as trial or sample packages, coupons, prizes, cash refund offers, point of purchase displays,and more;
• Public relations, which includes press releases, building corporate and brand identity in the community and the marketplace;
• Direct marketing (also know as one-to-one marketing), which includes variable printing, direct mail, email marketing and more;
• Business to business promotions, such as trade shows, conventions, sponsorships, contests, give-aways such as pens, notepads, hats, etc (all imprinted with the company's identity on it);
• Print communications, such as brochures, catalogues, flyers, single sheet promotions, etc.

One of the most common forms of marketing mix promotion is retail or consumer promotions. This type of marketing is focused on product incentive promotion tactics, such as offers of free trials, discount coupons, and cash refunds.

Business to business marketing is typically focused on promoting the company's identity, along with the product. Business to business marketing is about trying to build longer term relationships with customers; consumer marketing recognizes the short attention span of its market and tries to draw consumers in with incentives.

Most small businesses do not have the promotion budget to do all, most or even three or four of the above tactics. So get creative.

• Print small flyers and brochures and insert them into folders or packages with your business card and direct mail (on a personal one-to-one basis), with a letter (on your business letterhead) hand-signed by you, the owner.

  
  

  Mail your first 100 pieces to your top 100 prospects and within two weeks of the mail out - follow up with each prospect. If you don't do the follow-up, you are wasting cost; the most effective sales promotions need to have follow-up and follow-through on contacts to help customers continue down the decision making path.

• Instead of television advertising, which can cost thousands of dollars for a few minutes of advertising (not including the cost to produce the ad) to a large audience, consider creating your own video. Hire a videographer to create 4 minutes of film and post it on your website and/or on YouTube.
• Consider social media, such as facebook and twitter to communicate with your market. Consider developing your own blog - but only do this if you can produce (or hire someone to produce) relevant and interesting content.
• Putting up a website is a lot less challenging than it used to be. Consider putting your business online but keep it fresh, current, professional and full of valuable information.

But with most of these promotion strategies (except for the mail-outs), remember that you still need to drive traffic to your website, to your blog, to your YouTube video. Think carefully about your customers and how you can best reach, and attract, them.

Another element of marketing mix promotion is understanding whether you plan to create a push or a pull strategy to gain sales.

A push strategy requires personal selling and is typically used in business to business marketing. For example, if you sell your products to a distributor who in turn sells to end users, you would likely wish to use a push strategy. Push strategies will help you convince your distributor to carry your product and sell it in store.

A pull strategy is often used in consumer markets where demand for the product (by using a great marketing mix promotion program), will encourage distributors to carry it. Think of the toy store industry at Christmas time, there are always certain products that fly off the shelves - those products are able to use pull strategies which require less personal selling (although order takers are still required) and more advertising efforts.

Promotional strategies also need to be developed with the product life cycle stages in mind:

• in the introduction stage, advertising and public relations efforts need to be high to build awareness and recognition of the product;
• in the growth stage, demand is high and less needs to be spent on promotion;
• in the mature stage, promotion efforts will need to be ramped up, along with some new production differentiation strategies if possible (to extend the product's life);
• and in the declining stage, a more focused, less all encompassing approach should be taken (for example, move your top sales people onto the new products, keep your maintenance sales people on the declining products).

Your promotional efforts need to be aligned with your business strategy, strategy, your sales efforts, your sales plan and your overall small business plan.

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