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Best Promotional Online Marketing To Boost Your Business

promotional online marketingHaving a hard time understanding the various types of promotional online marketing? If so, grab my branding and online marketing tools – which have helped me gather over 1.5 million online fans.

Are you looking for an in-depth guide on the best types of promotional marketing? Look no further. I’ve been in the branding business for a few decades – and worked at the top agencies in NYC.

In this guide, we’ll talk in-depth about the various types of promotional online marketing. We’ll also talk about some of the best promotional marketing strategies for each type.

To make these ideas crystal clear, we’ll include some solid examples.

Types of Promotional Online Marketing To Boost Your Business

If you’re still left wondering about how each one can help or harm your business, don’t worry. We included the pros and cons of each type below. Plus you can hire me for 1-on-1 marketing consulting which I offer at Brand Honey Consulting.

1. Four Types to Consider

When we say promotional marketing, we’re talking about the set of activities used to share knowledge about a brand, product, or service. In promotional marketing, the goal is to increase sales and awareness of your brand.

The four types of promotional marketing include the following:

  • Advertising
  • Public Relations or Publicity
  • Personal Selling
  • Sales Promotion

You may already know of the subtypes of promotional marketing. These include influencer marketing, promotional discounts, and such. Each one of them falls under one of the four major types of promotional marketing.

Keep reading for a more detailed explanation of each type. We also included examples of a promotional strategy for each one.

2. Advertising

Advertising is the most popular of all promotion types. When we say advertising, we refer to any paid form of promotion for your brand of products. Another feature of advertising is there’s an identified company sponsoring the ad.

It’s also a non-personal presentation or promotion of ideas, goods, or services. This means there’s often no direct contact between the customer and the advertiser. An advertiser creates a monolog rather than a dialog.

Since there’s a demand for it, many promotional marketing companies focus on advertising. The goal of advertising is to pull customers in by appealing to them. Thus, advertising creates a lot of promotional marketing jobs.

Finally, another feature of it is that there are a time and space for advertisements. We see the various spaces for it in the different media used for advertising.

Promotional online marketing can greatly benefit businesses, and custom lanyards are an effective promotional item to consider. If you’re interested in learning how to make a custom lanyard, you can find a step-by-step guide and useful tips to help you create your own.

Advantages

Advertising reaches a large and often ubiquitous market. The various media where you can advertise reaches all corners of the country and the globe. If you want to go small-scale and advertise to a niche, you can as well.

Your choice of advertisement type doesn’t get limited as well. You can advertise in almost any form of media. You can advertise on the radio, TV, newspapers, social media, billboards, and more.

There’s also the fact that advertisements give your brand legitimacy. Customers believe brands won’t give false information about their products to the public. Thus, when you advertise, you give them a sense of comfort when they buy your product.

This comfort, in turn, enhances the confidence and satisfaction of customers. Their confidence in your brand grows deeper when you include their benefits.

Don’t forget that advertising is an easy way to express the function of the product. Depending on the medium, advertisers may use dance, music, drawings, photos, and more.

Disadvantages

Advertising won’t always work in your favor. A drawback of it is that it’s an impersonal form of communication. As we said, it creates a monolog rather than a dialog.

The best the marketer can do is to create an appealing ad and assume the target audience sees it. Also, since it’s impersonal, fewer people may pay attention to it. The customer won’t feel compelled to react or respond to it.

What if your clients want to start a two-way conversation? How do you collect their immediate and accurate feedback? How will you respond to inquiries about your product through advertisements?

Another disadvantage is that not all media will work for your brand, product, or services. If you chose the wrong media to advertise on, it’ll be difficult to make an impact. Remember, each medium for advertising also has its pros and cons.

Techniques and Examples of Advertising 

A decade ago, the biggest media for advertising was TV. A few decades before that, the main media for advertising was radio. Long before that, companies used newspapers and magazines to advertise on.

Yet, this doesn’t mean the old promotional marketing materials and media aren’t available for use today. Now, the most prominent media for advertising is digital advertising. This includes creating ads for social media like Facebook and Instagram.

However, the newest trend is video advertising. Video advertising is the key to success for small businesses. No matter the size of your business, it’s a good idea to invest in video advertising.

Think about New York Times Square if you want an example of a place where advertising is prevalent. Other effective examples of advertisements are dramatic Thai TV commercials.

3. Public Relations or Publicity

How does a business establish a good image to the public? The key is stirring good publicity or public relations. The goal of publicity is to provide positive and newsworthy information about a business.

Another goal is to reach the media, and thus, reach large audiences. This will build a favorable image for your company as well as goodwill. If the brand is already an established one, the goal is to maintain good public relations.

You also use public relations to express the policies of your organization.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Note that over 169 million American adults still read a newspaper in the US per month. This means that making activities that gain newspaper coverage is no small feat. It’s especially helpful to your company if you gain news coverage.

Do you have clients who are loud about their dissatisfaction with your products? Maintaining good public relations helps overcome complaints and dislikes for your brand. When more people see how humanitarian your company is, they’ll lean in favor of your brand.

Does your marketing strategy rely on printed or local newspapers? If the goal is marketing to the locals, then that’s fine. However, if you aim to reach a wider audience, you want to invest in bigger media.

Remember, there’s good and bad publicity.

You want to avoid the latter at all costs. The media and the press are powerful tools for building an image. Yet, they’re also powerful forces that can cause a business to sink.

Strategies and Examples of Public Relations

Some companies create policies or join public activities to get news coverage. Some companies use social issues to help people experiencing prejudice. For example, you can make a reservation of jobs for women or veterans.

A press release is the best example of public relations. You can also create balance sheets and annual reports to publish to the public. If you want a bigger impact, connect with charity shows, welfare programs, and more.

4. Personal Selling

Where advertising is an impersonal promotion type, personal selling is the opposite. It’s intimate, flexible, and often direct – and can be done via email, phone, Zoom or Skype.

Due to one-on-one contact, it improves the relation between a customer and a seller. It’s also a great way to establish two-way communication between the two parties. Thus, you learn how a buyer responds and adjust your strategies based on that response.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Personal selling is the most expensive form of promotional marketing. In a day, you can only sell to a few customers.

Compare this with an influencer who can reach thousands of people with a single post.

This disadvantage gets balanced by the design of personal selling. This type can complete sales once the salesman attracts the customer to the business. This is also why it’s one of the largest forms of promotion.

A difficult thing about personal selling is finding people to represent your brand. Not everyone has fine-tuned social skills and know-how to get a person to buy a product or service. You may have to provide training and seminars for new hires first.

Strategies and Examples of Personal Selling

Some businesses use retail personal selling. Their goal is to understand what a customer needs and present options they may prefer.

When looking for salesmen, one strategy is to find an ideal type. They must have a pleasing personality, good physical qualities, and technical know-how. Note that the most important quality of a salesman is that he can inspire trust.

5. Sales Promotion

What’s special about days like Black Friday, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day? Other than they’re special days we celebrate every year, they’re also days when big sales come out. Whether it’s on Amazon or local shopping centers, stores will always have a sale or special offer for such days.

Sales promotion is one of the most effective sales drivers. Eighty percent of consumers feel encouraged to buy from a brand that’s new to them if they get a discounted offer. Before we continue, let’s define promotion.

Sales promotion refers to the short-term use of incentives to get consumers to buy. It’s every other marketing activity that’s not personal selling, advertising, or publicity. No matter the business, marketers always invest in sales promotion techniques.

Advantages

What makes sales promotion so effective? One of the many advantages of sales promotion is that it’s short-term. That means it has an immediate effect on sales.

Let’s be honest about the fact that consumers love low price tags. A lot of them are always looking for the best deal, which includes items in the best quality at the lowest price. Placing a sale tag on products or services entices those people to you.

It’s easier to clear excess inventory with big promotional sales. Many retail stores hold clearance sales at the end of a season. This lets you meet near-term expense obligations and buy next season’s inventory.

Cross-selling and upselling is another big advantage of sales promotions. Upselling is where you convince a customer to buy a more expensive item. Cross-selling is selling an associated product of an item to a customer.

Disadvantages

The short-term motive of sales promotion can work against your goals in the long-term. The biggest problem is in the price perceptions of your customers. If you often offer price discounts on your products, customers will focus on their prices.

Once they get used to buying the discounted price of an item, it’s difficult to get them to pay the regular price. Also, the quality of an item becomes a second priority to them. To prevent this, be smart about when you hold sales and how much of a markdown you place on certain items.

The next problem is that it limits your revenue since the price cut narrows profit margins. Yes, they improve the sales volume and allow you to free up storage space. However, narrow margins also give you weak profits.

With narrow margins, to create strong profits, you’d have to sell a higher volume of goods.

If you sold an item worth $10 with a $2 discount, you missed $2 in revenue. What if, in the end, many customers bought the item even if it didn’t have a discount?

Techniques and Examples of Sales Promotion

Let’s point out common strategies and promotional marketing examples for sales promotion. The most common sales promotion strategies include rebates, discounts, and refunds. You can also offer free samples, hold contests, lucky draws, or usable benefits.

A strategy for cross-selling and upselling is to place items in bundles or packages. For example, you make a special offer for spa services. When a client gets an expensive full-body massage, they get a free herbal soap which they’d have to buy otherwise.

In a similar vein, you can also offer packaged premiums. This is when you include a freebie or gift within the packaging of an item. Examples are the toys in cereal boxes or a gold pendant included in soap.

Take Advantage of The Promotional Online Marketing Which Helped Me Gather 1.5 Million Online Fans

One of the core elements of business is online marketing. This is the primary driver of what brings your customers to you. Thus, you need to have deep learning about promotional online marketing.

Now you have a better understanding of the various promotional online marketing.

Feel free to check out my Brand Honey Consulting for 1-on-1 support!

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