The answer to this question hinges on you, your marketing strategy and how well you know your customers and your buying cycle. A tightly integrated promotional marketing campaign can show traction immediately, while ill-chosen swag may never convert recipients to buyers. Here’s how you can get the most from promotional marketing in the shortest amount of time:
Understand Your Audience
Who are they? What do they want? How does your product or service help them (specifically)?
Analyze Your Buying Cycle
Do you have a long sales cycle? Is it a multi-step, decision-making process? Do you do a lot of referral and repeat business? Understanding these nuances of how your customers come to find you, know you, and make the decision to buy are important. Without this knowledge you can’t tie appropriate incentives into place that will move them along this cycle.
Know that Promotions are Part of a Larger Picture
Even though I’m in the promotions business, I would never tell a client to invest every penny in promotional marketing. Marketing is a very large entity now with a number of tools at your disposal and every type of marketing must work together. The types you need vary by business but generally you’ll incorporate some form of:
- Offline Marketing (includes promotional marketing, networking, and direct mail)
- Content Marketing (and other forms of inbound marketing)
- Paid Advertising
- Digital Marketing (including SEO, email and marketing automation)
- Event Marketing (dependent on the length of your sales cycle and budget)
Know Where They’re Coming From
Once you select your marketing cocktail and the percentages of how everything fits together and you begin implementing it, you’ll want to track your success. You need something in place to tell you where customers are coming from. This could be as simple as asking when you get the sale or something more technology-based like tracking/coupon codes specific to your promotional items.
Even with tracking in place, you don’t market in a bubble. It is difficult to carve out one piece of the pie and blame your sales success or failures on it. Tightly integrated marketing makes this hard. While it could be a number of touches that lead up to the sale, ultimately you’ll need to decide whether to credit the first touch or the last. Do so consistently. With a promotional marketing piece you can track contacts that you receive from it when you use a coupon code or an event code.
Take Time to Optimize
Finally, you need to analyze results. If your tracking isn’t bringing in any hits, figure out where it might be going wrong. Is it the wrong offer? The wrong item to make an impression? Are you losing out to a competitor because they are offering something you aren’t? Is your promotional item bringing people in but then sales is failing to close? Look for weak parts of the process and adjust accordingly.
How long promotional marketing takes to be effective is up to you but marketing today isn’t a sprint. It’s about getting people to know, like, and trust you. How long does that take?
It all depends on you.
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