A promotional campaign is a valuable marketing tool, especially during new product launches.
Customers appreciate promotional events, specifically the ones that hand out freebies and give discount coupons.
And marketers have realized that giving away free promotional gifts is not enough to win customer loyalty.
To stay ahead of the competition, they have to be smart, take the front seat, and customize everything — from their marketing campaigns to their emails and promotional items.
In this post, we will discuss all the steps involved in planning a successful promotional campaign.
First Things First, Analyse What Others Are Doing
Before planning a campaign, you must identify what your target audience needs and what are the best channels to reach them.
Doing a competitor analysis is an excellent way to understand what the competition has put out in the market and the benchmark you need to establish in order to stand apart.
Additionally, you have to choose communication channels and strategies that resonate with your particular industry. Let’s say if you are a sports brand, hosting a sports and fitness event could be a great way to attract prospects, introduce new products to the market, and build a stronger relationship with existing customers.
Determine Your Objectives
What are your goals? What do you want to achieve at the end of the event?
Do you want to boost conversions? Or drive more traffic to your website? Or spread brand awareness?
If you want to attract more customers to your site, make sure your website is highly responsive and easy to navigate, before planning a promotional campaign. Hire the services of an eCommerce website development company for total website optimization.
By outsourcing web development services, you can leave the website development to the professionals while you work on ensuring the promotional campaign is a success.
Whatever goals you set, make sure they are measurable, realistic, time-oriented, specific, and practical.
Figure Out Your Marketing Mix
This is where you will need to allocate time and resources for advertising, promotion, and marketing of the event. Do not be ignorant when determining your marketing mix. It is a crucial step.
You can choose the promotional materials based on the industry you are targeting, products you are promoting, and the specific communication channels.
Commonly used promotional items are promotional merchandise, flyers, posters, etc.
Curate An Appealing Promotional Message
The power of words cannot be understated. Promotional campaigns are all about sending across the right message to the prospects and clients. Something that adds value to their lives and affects their purchase decision.
That said, when developing a promotional message, make sure you keep in mind the people you are targeting. From the title to catchy headlines, ensure you use attention-grabbing, compelling, emotional evoking words to highlight how the people might benefit from your offerings.
Estimate The Budget
Set a fixed budget for your campaign and make sure you follow it.
When estimating the budget, determine each and every aspect that will be included. Also, break down the total cost into various categories and ascertain the affordability of the event and the total conversions you are aiming at.
This step will help you determine a reasonable budget and gauge the success of the campaign.
Measure The Results
Lastly, measure the effectiveness of the campaign.
Measuring the outcomes will help you understand what promotional channels, strategies, and techniques worked the best for your brand.
It is also important to use marketing softwares to track the conversions. Apart from that, after every promotional event, you should conduct surveys to understand what your customers liked, and where do they want you to improve.
Final Thoughts
Planning a promotional campaign can be time-consuming and stressful. And that’s why to help you with the same, we discussed 6 essential steps to planning a promotional campaign.