Marketing mix is part of your marketing plan. It defines product, place, price and endorsement. The promotion mix targets raising product or brand awareness, communicating the unique value proposition of your product and gaining acceptance of your products. The primary target and focus of promotional mix is to get the desired effect : the sale of your product. There are more than seven common promotion mix tactics and while most businesses do not employ all of these tactics to promote and sell their products, they do use a mix of these tactics.
The Top 4 Promotion Mix Tactics:
Personal selling is one of the most ordinary of the promotion tactics. Most companies will employ people to do the selling: sales representatives, account managers, inside sales representatives, retail sales, sales agents, or telemarketers. Face-to-face selling is one of the most common methods of selling, although sales by phone, and more lately, sales by email, are becoming well used. These are not automatically as effective, but they are low cost sales tactics.
Advertising is another common promotion tactic. Advertising focuses on brand recognition and identity ; not on the product alone. Advertising can be an expensive tactic that only the big businesses can invest in; chiefly advertising on television which can cost anywhere beginning from $100,000 to over $1 million for a national broadcast in prime time (for a 30-second spot!). This price is in addition to the cost of producing the commercial. Advertising in industry or consumer magazines is less costly and typically you can target your advertisement to a particular industry or region. Other advertising can include car or bus ‘wraps’, functions (such as sports, music, art), and billboards. The Internet is becoming a very popular place to advertise, and on a relative basis, it is more reasonably priced.
In the retail marketplace, consumer promotion is very common. Buy one, get one free. Coupons for discounted or free product. Free trial packages. Cash reductions or refunds. Contests that give back cash, prizes, or products. The commitment by marketers to consumer promotion is that this form of promotion can be designed to be very measurable. Coupons, contests, and packaging can be coded to report redemptions and to report sales increases and/or decreases related to consumer promotion. Additionally, packaging new products as a trial, with a mature or declining product, can often provide an opportunity to up-sell and extend the declining product’s life-cycle.
Public relations (PR) is another ordinary promotion tactic. Public relations involves writing and distributing press releases (to the local newspaper, the national newspapers, to online PR sites, to radio and television, to magazines, and more).
The most effective promotional program is usually one that uses a variety of tactics and techniques. It is important to measure the efficiency of the program you engage in, and adjust your advertising program to increase effectiveness and outcome (sales).
To find out more about promotional advertising, promotional marketing material, push and pull strategies, and product life-cycle, visit YourPromotionalAdvertising.com and also peruse that resource for more on promotional marketing services.