What Is Promotional Marketing? (+6 Ways to Use It)

You've come up with a fresh business idea, created a new product, or rebranded an old one.

Great, you’re on the right track. However, for people to know about your brand, you have to take the next step: spread the word about your products or services to reach a wider audience and build brand awareness.

That’s where promotional marketing comes into play. You may have heard about it many times, but what is it exactly?

Promotional marketing
Promotional marketing is designed to spread knowledge about a brand, product, or service to a wide audience with the aim of increasing brand awareness and sales. Its purpose is to inspire a potential customer to take action.

Promotional marketing is part of the famous marketing mix that refers to a group of tactics that a company chooses to take a product or service to market.

The-Marketing-Mix-1Source: Lumen Learning

So, all activities that involve communicating with prospects and customers about your product, its benefits, and features, are promotional marketing. Mostly, it’s about raising awareness through different marketing and sales channels to increase sales, as well as create and foster brand loyalty.

Let’s take a closer look at the main goals of promotional marketing.

Promotional marketing goals
Promotes a new product or service
Builds brand awareness
Informs your audience
Shows your uniqueness
Drives sales leads
Goals of promotional marketing
Promotes a new product or service: The best way to introduce a new product or service is to create a promotional marketing campaign around it using all of your marketing channels.
Builds brand awareness: Make your name, visual image, products, and services recognizable on the market so that your customers associate the relevant product categories with your brand.
Informs your audience: Tell your audience about the new features, improvements, and changes in your products and services in a friendly and engaging way.
Shows your uniqueness: Stay competitive and focus on the features, functionalities, or benefits that you’re offering and what you do the best.
Drives sales leads: Promotional campaigns can also aim at generating leads directly and converting them into customers.
6 ways to use promotional marketing
When you’ve defined the goals you want to achieve with your promotional marketing, it’s high time to come up with a good strategy. Follow these six steps to help develop your strategy.

1. Define your target audience
   You may know your target audience as well as yourself, or you may just be getting acquainted with it. In any case, the first step to creating a promotional strategy is to sit and think about the people you will be promoting your products and services to.

Who are you selling to and what are their needs and interests? Once you figure it out, your promotional campaign can be really useful and helpful to your audience – and successful for your business.

1. Determine your budget
   Decide how much of your resources you’re willing to invest. The scope of your marketing activities will depend on your set budget.

2. Be where your audience is
   Research where your audience works and entertains itself: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, niche forums, and websites. Don’t waste your marketing efforts on all the channels; go where your potential and current clients are. They will be glad to see you there.

3. Create the marketing mix for your promotional campaign
   Promotional marketing can’t go alone; it’s always part of the bigger marketing mix. Develop your four marketing pillars, which refer to product, price, place, and promotion; you’ll have everything you need for your successful marketing campaign.

4. Choose what types of promotional marketing suit you
   Personal selling: It involves one-on-one communication between buyers and customers (prospects or existing customers). Even though it is considered to be one of the most expensive forms of promotion, it’s also among the most successful because it helps establish a direct connection between you and your customers, and builds trust and loyalty.
   Advertising: One of the key factors in the promotional strategy, which contributes to brand building, is advertising. It helps you reach a wider audience and tell the market about your brand. Good advertising can build a solid brand for the company.
   Direct marketing: While advertising targets a mass-audience, direct marketing targets prospects and customers. Social media marketing, email marketing, and Google and Facebook ads are all types of direct marketing. Brands are competing for the audience that lives, entertains itself, and shops online.
   Sales promotions: The main purpose of sales promotions is to stimulate purchasing and increase sales. You can also use this type of promotion if you want to inform prospects about new products on the market or recapture old or lost customers.
   Public relations: This type of promotional strategy enables an organization to influence its target audience by publishing articles, press releases, and interviews. This way, you can create a favorable and positive image for the brand.

5. Analyze the results
   After you’ve implemented your promotional marketing strategy, don’t forget to gather and measure the results of your campaign. It will help you know exactly what works and what doesn’t, so you can make the necessary adjustments to achieve even better results.

Ideas for promotional marketing campaigns
To get you started, here are a few ideas to help boost your next promotional marketing campaign's success.

Run contests to promote your brand
Contests are often used as a promotional strategy – you can run them yourself or become a sponsor. Many contests don't even require a purchase. The main idea is to promote your brand and put your logo and name out there rather than make money. Obviously, all of your clients will enjoy your company giveaways and contests.

Use content marketing to drive more traffic
Content marketing is one of the most famous marketing strategies out there; it can be a great foundation for your promotional marketing activities.

With a little effort, any company can make mobile-friendly and great-looking digital ebooks, brochures, or newsletters. What’s more, they can brand them by adding their logos, custom backgrounds, and color palettes.

Such content is a great way to create brand awareness, tell audiences about a company’s values and goals, and inform them about new services and products.

IllustrationSource: FlippingBook

Explore social media to skyrocket engagement
Social media helps you connect with your audience on a personal level in a more relaxed environment. This is direct marketing at its best because social networks connect you with a world of potential and existing customers and allow you to start loyal and friendly communication.

Use free samples, sales coupons, and product giveaways
Product giveaways, samples, and demos are methods often used by companies to introduce new products. In our digital era, engaging newsletters and holiday-themed email campaigns offering free coupons and bonuses can make your promotional campaigns very successful as well.

Create upsell campaigns
Upselling is encouraging the purchase of anything additional that would make the primary purchase more expensive with an upgrade or premium.

You can create special email campaigns where you offer upgrades and more advanced products for the people who show interest in your business.

Get out there and promote your business.
Now you're equipped with essential knowledge about promotional marketing and how to do it right. Remember, the most successful promotions are those that are truly beneficial to both you and your prospects and clients.

Why is that? Because if your audience feels that you are offering products and services that can help them achieve their goals and solve their problems, they will be happy to act on your offer. So, if you want to raise your brand awareness and increase sales, then promotional marketing is the right path forward.