Strategic selection of promotions

Promotions are anything you do to make your potential customers aware that you exist or that urges them to take action over a short time frame. There are many different promotional techniques, some of which are discussed on other articles. For the purpose of this article, we are focused on when to use each.

Strategic utility in promotions has to do with what you are using these promotions to get done. Generally, these can be identified as follows:

• Create awareness: The purpose is for the customer to realize that you exist or that you have an offering that exists and that they might be interested in. This might be a social concept or a specific product or brand awareness, and can be as broad or narrow as applies to your situation. There is an old saying that "no publicity is bad publicity", or the quip about bad publicity followed by the artist asking "did they spell my name right?" Name recognition is often disassociated with the actual information about the name after a a time.
• Develop attitude: The purpose is for the customer to take on or alter a viewpoint that will tend to support buying from you, or in the more general sense, supporting and going with the flow of others with similar attitudes. This is a sort of social influence activity. It is important to note that things like discounts on their own bring the attitude of cheapness, desperation, overstock, lack of business, etc. Of course this can be countered by content, for example as a discount for loyal customers, or a discount on volume purchases.
• Convey information: The purpose is to have the audience become specifically informed about something they were previously unaware of. One of the problems in misinformation (and disinformation in the more malicious form) is that people who don't know or are malicious convey information that is adopted as true when in fact it is false. Thus you have to fight against this information to educate the market in your information (a.k.a. version of the truth). This is where facts come into play, but that's too much of a drill-down for this article. In any new market or new offering, educating the market is necessary, ands thus information is critical.
• Give reassurance: Once customers have a general notional belief, reassurance helps alleviate fears, solidify decisions, get people over the action threshold, and so forth. It helps before and just after the sale as well as in the support and upsell process, and counters fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
• Remind: This is about keeping you on their mind and moving in the desired direction. It's particularly important for process continuation and retention of existing clients, and helps to keep brands relevant and in the hunt for future sales.

The next step in understanding is to understand the market maturity. Existing markets and existing offerings don't require education as much as new markets with new products.

• New offerings, New Markets: New offerings in new markets means that the market segment has to be differentiated, characterized, and educated and in that new market, the customers have to be educated to build the desire for the offering. It also means that there will be few if any existing channel partners and only early adopters are likely to buy things. This means you should appeal to the audience in those terms in order to have them self-select as bold innovators or some such thing.
• New offerings, Existing Markets: New offerings in existing markets are also early adopter oriented, but because the market already exists, there will be existing partners and channels, places, and so forth. This means you need to educate the markets to your offerings, and can leverage existing known characteristics and approaches. It also means that you will likely be in a race for market share, because as you educate the market, competitors will appear.
• Existing offerings, New Markets: Bringing existing products to new markets allows you to leverage the reputation and history of related markets (assuming this is a good thing) to move into new markets rather than having to boldly go where no competitor has gone before. It also means that you can position yourself as a conservative choice if that suits your customer base, and you should have less resistance and less effort for identifying price and related issues. This also becomes a race for market share, as your competitors from other markets will follow you as/if you become successful, or they may already be moving there.
• Existing offerings, Existing Markets: Existing offerings in existing markets either lead to fights over market share or, in markets that are not yet themselves mature but also not new, a race for share followed by a fight over share. Displacing happy customers from existing competitors is hard, while displacing unhappy customers from existing competitors is far easier.

Matching methods to situations

Different promotional methods tend to have more effect on different utilities. The table below identifies where each method tends to have more or less utility.

A call to action

The path to better marketing and sales goes through promotion, and the path you take depends on your situation. If you want us to evaluate your situation and help you find a better path, it all starts when you...

In summary

Awareness, attitude, information, reassurance, and reminders come in different forms, and should be used at different phases of the maturity of offerings in markets.