Define your product promotion strategy

Business Benefits

Lead the market and maximize sales.


Define your approach by categorizing strategy as either pull or push. Do you want to get to the customers, or do you want them to find you?

Push strategy applies when the customer is aware of your product. Consider these push tactics:

  • Trade shows, fairs, and exhibitions. Important when launching a new line of products or when entering new markets.
  • Direct selling to customers. If you don’t have your stores, use popular retailers to reach out to the audience.
  • Design unique packaging to create beautiful, engaging, and sustainable wrapping to make a lasting impression on the market. Packaging boosts brand identity and encourages customers to try out products.
  • Creative point of sale (POS) displays. Make use of your POS strategic location to push new products to customers.
  • Brand and erect pop-up tents on driveways or anywhere with traffic and combine them with banners and flags or anything that fits the occasion. Pop up tents are common on: Tailgate parties, events such as neighborhood barbecues, trade shows and bike races, Festivals, Conventions and expos, Farmer’s markets, and Beaches.

Employ the pull strategy when you want to get your product to a vast market in the shortest time.

Use mass media advertising to motivate customers to try out your product. Rise in product demand encourages retailers to stock it. Leverage advertising and mass media to let consumers know about the product. For example, whenever Apple launches a new iPhone, it performs repetitive and consistent promotions across various platforms. Use word-of-mouth referrals to prompt customers to buy new products:

  • Create a referral program.
  • Use emotional provocation in your campaigns.
  • Understand your customers’ lifetime value (LTV).
  • Push ratings by letting reviewers rate your product.

Engage in customer relationship management (CRM) by managing prospects. Personalize customer experience from the time they ask about your product to the time they purchase it and become returning customers. Use discounts, gifts, freebies, giveaways, and other promotional tactics that encourage customers to try your products.

Combine both push and pull strategies to increase your success rates in product promotion.

Persuade customers to buy your products and convince retailers to stock them.

Estimate the budget by determining what you want to accomplish and list all promotional activities for the marketing team. Research to find how much each activity costs.

Consider how much money will create brand awareness, drive conversions, and create meaningful ROI? Decide how much money to allocate to different marketing tasks. Use competitive parity or previous marketing expenditure to predict the cost of each task.

Identify optimal channels for reaching your audience to avoid spending on platforms that attract low ROI. For example, if you are targeting millennials, use both digital and print media. When targeting the elderly, use traditional channels like TVs, radios, and newspapers.

Identify your buyer persona and limit the number to prevent overspending. To develop buyer personas:

  • Survey your current customers.
  • Use tools like Google Analytics to identify customer demographics such as age, location, marital status, occupation, education, and lifestyle.
  • Use social media to track user interaction and engagement with your brand.
  • Interview your prospects.

Identify and set product promotion short-term and long-term goals to guide the entire strategy and help you know whether you’re winning. Zero in on milestones you want to reach after a particular period.

Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Some examples of SMART goals are:

  • Increase profits from 15 to 30 percent by the end of the year.
  • Double revenue through brand awareness and engagement in three years.

Come up with metrics to determine the attainment of the goals. Metrics can include: Conversion rates, customer retention, sales volume, and customer engagement and interaction.

Build an activity plan or schedule to act as a roadmap for actuating the promotional. Assign tasks to specific people and elaborate goals and timelines. Think of strategy as a bucket of activities focusing on common goals.

Your activity schedule should be reasonable and relevant to your workplace culture. Elect team leaders for each campaign to streamline team management. Spread your annual activities quarterly. Identify activities and goals for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4.

Put ad hoc measures in place to handle unforeseeable issues that can disrupt your budget, goals, and personnel.

Conduct a SWOT analysis to outline the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your promotional strategy.

SWOT analysis facilitates the creation of a short and low-cost path to success. It provides the most affordable way of achieving product promotion goals.

Monitor and review your strategies to determine whether they are achieving your objectives. Evaluation provides feedback regarding the effectiveness of each promotional strategy.

Consider, how is your program meeting the company’s goals? Are there market changes influencing results? Measure the profitability of each strategy. When running discounts or exhibitions, determine which method brings higher returns.

Use your key performance indices (KPIs). For example, you can review sales numbers to check if they align with your salesperson’s goals. Use profitability ratios for accurate assessment:

  • Gross Profit Margin.
  • EBITDA Margin.
  • Operating Profit Margin.
  • Net Profit Margin.
  • Cash Flow Margin.
  • Return on Equity.
  • ROI.

Find out what your marketing partners say about your strategy. Alternative insights are crucial in creating a better strategy if the existing one is not working.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:20:27Z