Sales promotions often offer low prices to attract customers.
To cut through the marketplace noise, today's sales promotions must be clever, informative and engaging. The object is to get a message across and deliver a call to action that inspires the potential customer to do something: buy this, do that, go there. Successful sales promotions use different mediums to deliver the same message. Depending on budget, a sales promotion campaign might include any combination of web, print, TV, outdoor, door-to-door or telephone advertising.
Target Marketing
One aspect of a successful sales promotion is identifying the target market. That's why TV commercials advertise products more likely to appeal to men are shown during sports, news and action shows, and products more likely to appeal to women are shown during the daytime soap operas. Toy, theme park and household cleaning products run during children's shows to target kids and their moms. The target market is the end consumer; the group of people who will be most interested in purchasing the product. Sales promotions that target a specific market deliver more effective advertising per dollar.
Branding and Point of Purchase
Branding is crucial to customer retention, and sales promotions are often used to launch or reinforce a product brand by flooding the market with images bearing the product logo. One excellent example of an effective sales promotion technique is employed by Budweiser during football season. Budweiser commercials air during games, sports related shows and primetime, while displays are set up to reinforce the campaign--and the brand--at the point of purchase in retail stores. Prominent displays are set up using beer cartons and large-scale images, inflatables and signage. In-store advertising that's impossible to ignore serves as a purchase reminder for a familiar product and reinforces the brand.
Giveaways
Giveaways are a marketing tool used to expand the customer base for a product or service. Customers who might not otherwise be interested will participate in a drawing or contest with an attractive prize. Advertisers know that a certain percentage of people attracted to the brand via a contest become loyal customers, in the long run making the cost of a vacation well worth it. Several major cigarette companies use a regular form of promotional giveaway to retain customers by offering branded merchandise in exchange for proof of purchase. Some proof of purchase giveaways appeal to altruism. Yoplait yogurt company pledges money for breast cancer research in exchange for proof of purchase, and reinforces the promotion with a pink ribbon printed on the container. Since yogurt is more popular with women and breast cancer is an issue more common to women, this is also a good example of targeted marketing.
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