Promotions

As a business owner you are probably well aware of the term promotion and how it can be used in your business to help increase sales or even to make your company more noticeable. With promotions there are basically two types of promotions. There are sales promotions and there are product promotions. Product promotions are simply a marketing technique that focuses on the actual product rather than on the company itself. Basically by using product promotions you are bringing attention to the actual product that you are selling, you are focusing solely on that product rather than other products that your company might have. With sales promotions you are actually focusing on the company itself rather than one a certain type of product or service. Most of the time with sale promotions you are bringing attention to the company itself to help increase your overall sales rather than just increasing the sales on a certain product or service.

Regardless of if you are going to be using product promotions or sales promotions there are some things that you are going to need to do if you plan on being successful with the promotions that you are using. Here are the steps that you are going to need to follow in order to have a successful promotion.

Step one:
You are going to need to create some type of organization filing system. This can be in file folders or it can even be in folders that are stored on your business computer. But what you are going to want to do is to create folders for the various types of promotions that your business has already used and some folders for ideas that you think will work that you have seen other companies try or ideas that you think might work for your business.

Step two:
After everything is organized you are going to want to go through each idea one at a time and evaluate each idea. When you are looking at the ideas you are going to want to think about what worked with each idea that brought business into your place of business and what didn't work and why it didn't work so that you don't make the same mistakes again. Keep in mind that sometimes the reasons why these ideas fail are because it was simply done at the wrong time. What this means is that sometimes it can still be a great idea even if it didn't work before it just needs some fine tuning.

Step three:
You are going to need to plan out your promotional events well in advance. It is actually recommended that you do at least 6 promotional events a year, but the more you do the better your chances. How many you can actually do in one year is going to depend on your business's budget. The best way to make sure that you get enough promotional events in place is to incorporate them into your strategic plan. And your main goal in the strategic plan should be to remind your customers to come back again and again to your store.

Step four:
Make sure that your entire company is involved with your promotional events. You can use them to help you think of new and creative ideas, but at the most you are going to want to discuss the activities that you have come up with. In these discussions you are going to want to talk to your staff about the various goals that you are going to be setting and you can also talk about any bonuses that you will be offering your employees for reaching that goal. The reason that this is so important is because you have to get your team involved in order for the entire event to go smoothly because if they believe in it they can effectively sell more to the customers.

Step five:
When planning out the event you want to look at the best promotional days and months for your type of business, every business has busier times of the year than others so play up to your busier times. What you are going to want to do is to choose the days and months that you will be able to get the most traffic into your store. But in planning this out you want to make sure that you also plan out the entire event, including all of the small details you don't want to leave anything out. The reason for this is that the better planned these events are the easier and more successful they will be.

Step six:
You want to ensure that your direct mail and advertising are planned out ahead of time so that you can begin advertising the event in a reasonable time frame. You want to build up excitement for the event and the best way to do that is to start advertising early. When you are advertising the event you are going to want to include the benefits of attending the event but also you want to make sure that you cover the What, Where, When, and Why.

Step seven:
If you plan on using the media to bring attention to your event, such as a charity event, you are going to want to make sure that you contact them ahead of time. This is a good idea because they can do a cover story about your event that will tell people about it early helping them to get excited. But you can also ask the media to attend so that they can do a human interest story on how your event is actually helping the community. This can bring in a ton of free advertising for months on end.

Step eight:
When sending out direct mail you are going to want to make sure that you create some kind of attention seeking mail. You are going to spend about half of your time coming up with a super headline that is benefit rich. Basically you want to make sure that your headline is going to grab their attention before they have the chance to throw the mail in the garbage. The other half of your time you are going to want to spend coming up with an offer or event that is so exciting that it is going to make your customer fear losing something if they don't attend, you want them to think that they will be missing out on something.

Step nine:
You want to make sure that when doing your promotions that you are going to stand out from your competitors. One of the best ways to ensure that you are doing something different from them is to base your promotions on a type of theme. You can hold your events around unique holidays or you can even do your promoting when your competitors are not doing theirs. The whole idea is to stand out and make things fun, you don't always have to have a sale going on. What you want to do is make sure that your customers have so much fun that they are going to give your business promotion through word of mouth advertising.

Step ten:
Make sure that you have enough inventory on hand for your promotional events. There is nothing that is worse than planning out a huge promotional event and getting to the day only to find out that you do not have enough inventory to go through with the promotion or not having enough for your customers to purchased what they desire. So what you need to do is increase your open to buy and invest in more inventory.

Now that you know how to carry out a successful promotion you might want to read about a few ideas to help get your started in brainstorming ideas for your own promotions. Here are some simple ideas to get you started:

• Send out a "free" sample of your product and include a special "two for one offer". This is a great thing to do because it allows your customers to try out your product first hand but it also makes them think they are getting a great value which maximizes your average transaction value.
• Joint promotions with other business. This works great if the other businesses sell something that works well with your product, but it can also be done just to get your names out there if they are willing to return the favor. But what you do is you offer their products as "free" gifts when they purchase items at your store and the other business does the same for you.
• Free gift with purchase or even buy one get one free. These are great because they don't really cost you a lot of money because you are advertising the retail value of the gift that you actually get for a fraction of the price. But when doing the free gift you want to make sure it is after they have spent so much money, such as a free shirt that is valued at $25 for every $50 purchase that you make.
• Free after sales service. This is where they can get free cleaning or maintenance of a product that they have purchased from you.