Goals and functions of promotion
The main goals of promotion are to strengthen the brand’s position in the market, increase demand for goods and services, as well as attract new customers. Only a well-thought-out marketing strategy allows you to build strong relationships with the target audience and maintain their interest. One has only to disappear from sight for a while and customers will go to competitors’ brand strategy consulting services.
Therefore, it is important to stand out from other companies, always be visible and provide a positive experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Promotion is the engine for any business. With its help, companies stimulate sales and motivate the target audience to choose a brand among hundreds and thousands of others. To better understand why this is happening, check out the basic promotion features.
- Building an image. Promotion helps to form the desired brand image in the minds of consumers. With the help of positioning, the company sets itself apart from competitors and wins the favor of the target audience.
- Delivering a message to potential buyers. Through promotion, the company talks about its advantages, advantageous product characteristics, promotional offers, loyalty program, and so on.
- Popularization of the company, its products, and services. Promotion motivates the audience to interact and stimulates word of mouth. The more a company advertises its products, the more buyers and potential customers say about them.
- Loyalty building. With the help of promotion, companies increase the level of trust, as well as increase customer retention and brand awareness.
- Dealing with objections. A well-thought-out strategy helps to overcome the doubts of potential buyers by raising awareness about the company and its products.
- Information support. Through promotion, companies tell potential customers about points of sale, answer frequently asked questions, inform them about sales, and much more.
To convince the target audience to buy the company’s goods and services, it is necessary to think over a communication strategy, choose communication channels and draw up a step-by-step action plan. Next, you will get acquainted with the tasks that the promotion solves.
Promotion tasks
Regardless of the size of your business or niche, there are three main three goals that you can achieve through promotion.
- Informing. Promotion helps to build communication with potential buyers, spread company news, deliver the right messages to the target audience and increase awareness.
- Belief. With the help of promotion, companies increase sales and convert leads into customers. To convince target audiences to choose a specific product or service, brands fight objections from potential buyers through content, social proof, and brand advocates.
- Reminder. Companies use different marketing tools to remind them of themselves and their products. Raising interest in a brand increases competitiveness and prevents the target audience from forgetting about it.
Now that you are familiar with the goals and objectives, it’s time to learn about the types and methods of promotion.
Types and methods of promotion
There are four types of promotion in total. Below we will go into more detail about each of them so that you can better understand how they work.
- Sales promotion. This type of promotion aims to increase demand through sales, promotions and other short-term offers. To stimulate sales, companies develop loyalty programs, hold contests and giveaways on social networks, send discounts via email or chat bots in instant messengers.
- Advertising. Companies use it to drive demand, attract new customers, boost subscribers, and more. To implement this type of promotion, brands use different ATL and BTL advertising tools. These can be billboards, newspapers, magazines, Facebook ads, and so on.
- Direct sales. This type of promotion involves personal communication between the company and the client and the use of direct marketing tools. For direct sales, companies use telemarketing, SMS, email, social media chatbots, and other tools. With their help, brands segment their audience, send relevant content, and send personalized discounts.
- Public relations. PR marketing is a type of promotion that aims to increase awareness, strengthen an emotional connection with a brand and create a positive image.
As you can see, there are many ways to promote and you can start using some of them for free today. To do this, define your target audience, choose communication channels, develop a strategy and draw up a marketing plan that will help you achieve your goals. However, before you get started, check out the examples below.
How do you track the growth of brand power?
A brand strategy should be based on specific data and metrics so that its effectiveness can be measured. For this purpose, you can use the following tools:
- Analytics counters. In the traffic source reports, you need to monitor the growth of direct visits – they are the ones that indicate visits for branded queries. Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica is the most popular counters and contain all the information you need.
- Keyword collection tools. The more the search engine knows the number of brand queries, the better.
However, at the stage of brand promotion, it is not the number of these requests itself that is important, but its positive dynamics every month. Yandex Wordstat and Google Keyword Planner to help.
Remember that brand promotion is a long and difficult journey, but the end result is definitely worth going through. In moments of doubt and uncertainty, remember your favorite popular brands and let their success inspire new interesting ideas.
Brand promotion strategy:
To promote a brand, it is not necessary to “reinvent the wheel”, you can turn to standard advertising channels, but use them not to increase sales, but to increase brand awareness.
CRO
- This service entered the digital marketing market in our country not so long ago, while Western companies have been successfully using it for a long time, in particular, for brand promotion. Among the main tools are working with the site and working with reviews.
- The site should have a unique, vivid, and memorable design, as well as work quickly on any device. All fonts, logo and colors should be in the same style and aimed at building only positive associations.
- Moreover, it is important to loyally respond to negative moments and thank users for the positive.
Contextual advertising
The use of this advertising traffic for brand promotion has a number of its own characteristics, among which the main ones are the following:
- The main task facing contextual advertising for brand promotion is to form positive associations with the company, increase awareness, consolidate trust and authority, which will remain with users in the subconscious. A person is always more likely to click and navigate to that ad that contains the name of a familiar brand.
- At the same time, such references should be worked out efficiently and not cause irritation. The image page of the company should be made in the corporate style, contain a logo, slogans, reflect the mission and essence of the brand.
- In an ad for any search network, there are multiple headlines in the ad.
- Therefore, you need to choose an appropriate ad campaign goal, select a bidding strategy and allocate a budget. You also need to monitor the reach of the audience.
- Next, write relevant advertisements that will describe the unique features of the brand and reinforce those very positive associations.
Remember that brand promotion is a long and difficult journey, but the end result is definitely worth going through. In moments of doubt and uncertainty, remember your favorite popular brands and let their success inspire new interesting ideas.
