Campaigns to promote your business can often be expensive. Although there is not always any need to fork out large sums of money on a campaign, invariably they do necessitate a significant expenditure. This expense must be justified, and this is where the problems can creep in.
Promotional campaigns can represent a significant advantage,
particularly if delivered at the same time as a corporate branding drive or identity rebranding initiative. However, too many companies see promotional campaigns through rather rose tinted spectacles. Having woolly, meaningless goals when it comes to promoting your business can be disastrous.
Campaigns to promote your business can often be expensive. Although there is not always any need to fork out large sums of money on a campaign, invariably they do necessitate a significant expenditure. This expense must be justified, and this is where the problems can creep in.
Whenever a business sets out on an expensive plan of action, whether it is through identity branding, updating the corporate image or planning a campaign to promote the business or a particular product or service, invariably this is coordinated by a large number of people.
The word 'coordinate' there can often be synonymous with the phrase 'watered down'. In other words, if a large number of executives within a business pool their ideas and discuss the way forward, all too often the targets become meaningless as needs and ideas are averaged out.
Perhaps you have come across such targets yourself, with companies deciding that their promotional campaigns will endeavor to 'boost sales' or 'increase sales', 'increase profit margins' or 'reach more people'. The trouble is that, whilst these phrases sound fine, they mean nothing at all.
A successful promotional campaign needs to have a tight focus. It will be important to know precisely which product or service will be promoted. If your business has only one or two main services or products, then promoting the whole business may prove effective.
However, a business offering multiple products and services will find any campaign which aims to promote the too many of them, or even all of them, will become so watered down that its impact is lost entirely.
Any successful campaign will need to have a number of tight objectives. Moreover, these objectives will need to have tight performance criteria. If you are looking to promote a part of the business, there are several questions which it will be important to ask, and to which definite answers will need to be agreed.
For each of your promotional campaigns, exactly which product or service are you planning to promote? Assuming that your general aim is to sell more of these products or services, exactly what is your realistic objective which will be used as your performance criteria? A 5% increase, 20%? This can't be a figure plucked out of the air, but in conjunction with marketing, it will be a realistic interpretation of the current availability of the market.
Having performance criteria clearly laid out before your campaign is launched is essential. How else will you ever determine if your campaign is successful or not? If your sales increase, do you naturally attribute this to your campaign, or were other factors involved? Would this have been expected in any case?
A promotional campaign to increase your business sales can easily end up as a drain on your resources, and being unable to accurately assess the effectiveness of a previous campaign tactic is liable to result in you repeating the same mistakes over and over again, wasting more money and losing out on real potential gains.
In addition to considering carefully the exact product you are looking to promote, and the targets for success you are looking to reach, you will also need to think about who you are trying to reach. All of those extra customers of your will need to come from somewhere. A vague idea of customers being 'out there' is as helpful as assuming that aliens will find your product useful, and one day your adverts may reach them 'out there' too. You need to have a far more tangible idea of who your customers are likely to be, and where they can be best reached.
Are your customers mainly teenagers, or businessmen? People who use the web and mobile phones or people who prefer television and letters? People who have time to take on board a long message, or people who only have a few seconds to spare you? People who already use a similar product, or people who are completely new to the idea?
Each of these categories will require promotional campaigns to be fabricated and planned in completely different ways. The type of promotion you employ, the locations and media used, the language, phrasing, colors, design and even the products which you may be giving away will all need to be tailored to suit the particular audience you are trying to reach.
It is clearly no good giving plastic ball point pens away to city executives who carry Cartier diamond fountain pens in their pocket, nor to give teenagers a coffee mug, or housewives a baseball cap. Successful promotional campaigns have specific targets, defined goals, identified markets and effective ways in which to marry all aspects of the campaign together.
Unless you understand the essential components of successful promotional campaigns, and how to implement them effectively, this is too important an aspect of your business to chance to luck or hope.
