While small businesses usually have a solid grasp of the first three P’s of marketing - price, product and positioning - many of them tend to struggle with the last item on the list: promotion.
Why is this such a challenge? Essentially, it’s because while most small business owners know how to promote their products, solutions and brand, they don’t know how to pull everything together as part of an effective, efficient and results-based promotional marketing strategy.
The good news is that turning this from a liability into asset isn’t difficult, time consuming, risky or costly. Here are three best practices to turn disparate promotional tasks into a cohesive strategy that takes the shortest path to ROI:
1. Do Your Homework (a.k.a. Market Research)
Feedback from a limited number of customers — and most of it probably positive — isn’t a substitute for legitimate, professional-grade market research. Creating surveys or running focus groups and interviews (or all of the above) is the only way to generate qualitative marketplace data, which can then be translated into the building blocks for an effective and profitable promotional strategy.
2. Don’t mix marketing and sales.
Obviously, the ultimately goal of marketing campaigns and strategies — promotional or otherwise — is to generate sales; either to existing customers or new ones. However, a promotional marketing strategy cannot be expected to “create sales” — because that’s not what marketing does (and why it’s called marketing in the first place!). The realistic goal here is to generate qualified prospects in the pipeline, which the sales force then engages and attempts to usher into transactions (which can be done over the phone, through email and/or in-person).
3. Use VoIP to track different promotional campaigns.
Hosted VoIP solutions are perfect — and affordable — for tracking various promotional campaigns, since each can be given a unique phone number and/or extension. This enables small businesses to monitor granular-level metrics and analytics, such as where prospects are calling from, when they’re calling, what devices they’re using to call (e.g. mobile phone, landline), and so on. All of this valuable information can be leveraged to improve — or in some cases, shutter — campaigns.
The Bottom Line
Promoting products, solutions and brands shouldn’t be a confusing and risky ordeal; one that typically ends up in questions like “how much money are we losing here?” and “why are we doing this in the first place?” Rather, it can be — and frankly, must be — a focused, targeted strategy that maps to ROI. The above best practices will help small businesses stay on-track vs. get sidetracked.