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Promotional Marketing Strategies for Small Business

April 13th, 2010 RRS 1 comment

Implementing promotional marketing strategies for small businesses is one of the biggest hurdles most small business owners face in their business marketing.

The Internet is rife with all kinds of promotional marketing strategies and ideas: Write a company blog. Start a company Facebook fan page. Engage people on Twitter.

But actually implementing the promotional marketing tactics is tough for small business owners. “I’m already busy enough, and now I have to do more?”

We feel your pain. We’re in small business as well, so we’re constantly dealing with the same struggles. If you’re a single person operation, or a small partnership with big aspirations, you’re wearing a lot of hats. You’re in charge of sales and marketing, and then fulfilling whatever you sold. You manage the billing, accounts payable, and taxes. You make sure the office is running smoothly, and that you maintain your business network. And now you’re supposed to try some new promotional marketing strategies.

But don’t worry, we’re not asking for much. In fact, we may make your life easier. Here are a few ideas you can use to implement your promotional marketing strategies with a minimal amount of pain:

Track the performance of all your promotional marketing efforts.

This one is crucial. You need to know what’s working for you and what’s not. The mistake many small businesses make is they don’t keep track of the ROI of their promotional marketing. They’ll run Yellow Pages listings, newspaper ads, radio spots, and dabble in social media. But they don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Do things like sticking unique discount codes on your promotional marketing campaigns. Use special phone numbers in your Yellow Pages listings. Put analytics tracking on your websites. Track the sources of your leads, and see which campaigns result in traffic to your location and your website.

Then count up all of that traffic, and see which leads turned into sales. Total up the sales from each promotional marketing campaign, and then subtract the money you spent on that campaign. The amount remaining is your ROI.

Drop the promotional marketing tactics that don’t work.

This part is easy. If the money you spent is bigger than the money you made, you lost money. If you made more than you spent, you have a positive ROI, and that promotional marketing effort was a success.

Drop all the campaigns that lost you money, including the ones you thought were doing you some good. (Note: this does not include youth team sponsorships. There are some things, like goodwill in the community, that you just don’t mess with!) Pour that reclaimed money back into the campaigns that worked the best. Or if they all made you money, drop the lowest performing ones.

Social media promotional marketing in minutes a day.

When you try something new, like blogging, Facebook, or Twitter, you shouldn’t jump into it with both feet, and spend hours a day on it. You’ll run out of time to do other things, and when you go to play catch-up, everything will be too overwhelming, and you’ll quit. Then, you’ll say it was a complete failure, when in actuality, you haven’t touched that promotional marketing tool in nine months.

Instead, just pace yourself. Work on it a little bit each day. If you’re blogging, just write one 300 word blog post per week. It should take you no more than an hour, and can take less time per day if you break it up. If you’re using Twitter, just spend 30 minutes a day on it, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the afternoon. Eventually you’ll reach a point that you’re so good at it, you’ll find that you’re actually spending 20 minutes a day in 60 second intervals, throughout the day, and wondering if you’re doing too much, rather than not enough.

Promotional marketing for small business is going to be what keeps you in business, but only if you actually try out some of the tactics you read about. Don’t make the mistake of trying something for two weeks and then quitting when you don’t see any results. It takes time, patience, and some work. But if you can make the time to do these tactics, whatever ones you’ll choose, you’ll be rewarded.

Build Your Online Brand Through Social Media Marketing

April 6th, 2010 RRS 1 comment

Building your online brand through social media marketing is a snap. Okay, a long series of snaps spread out over several days, but still it’s easy, and it’s free.

If you’ve been paying attention to what people are doing online, you’ve heard of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging. Basically, if you found this article, you’re technically savvy enough to deal with tools like that. You know they can build your online brand.

But, what most people don’t realize is that building an online brand doesn’t just involve opening up the social media toolbox and blasting out sales messages. Nothing will harm your online brand quicker than social media spam.

Social media marketing isn’t about numbers, it’s about relationships. Do your customers feel like they have a relationship with you? Do they know you care about them as people, not as sales targets? Online brands that build these relationships with people tend to be more successful than those that just treat them like numbers.

Here are five ways you can improve your brand through proper social media marketing techniques.

1) Listen

Rather than sending out constant messages about upcoming sales and special offers, “turn the bullhorn around,” Tara Hunt says in her book, “The Whuffie Factor.” People are talking about you, whether it’s complaints, questions, feedback, or compliments. Social media tools help you listen to them, and answer back where they are, rather than where you want them to go.

It’s also important to listen before you just jump in and start talking. Whether it’s Twitter or a specialty social media group, listen to what people are saying before you start talking about your online brand. Learn what the tone of the group is, and match it. Make sure the tone is right for your online brand, and a place you would actually want to associate with people.

2) Answer questions

This is where your online brand can prove some real worth to potential customers. Take any opportunity you can to answer questions in your field, not just about your online brand. If you’re a video marketing consultant, answer anyone’s questions about how to make online videos. Whether it’s about the best video camera to buy, how to edit video clips, or even how to do video marketing (yes, seriously). By doing this, you’ll establish your online brand as being someone who is knowledgeable and helpful.

3) Be a resource

This goes hand in hand with answering questions. Rather than waiting for people to ask something you can answer, push out other helpful information and articles. Forward articles you’re reading to your network. Help them learn, and show potential customers that you’re constantly keeping up to date. By staying on top of industry trends, you’re more able to help them with their own issues.

4) Be yourself

This sounds like advice our parents gave to us in high school, but it’s still good advice, even [**system error**] years later. Nothing kills an online brand like being inauthentic. This is where your personality and your face needs to shine through. Remember, you are your brand. If you’re a funny, quirky person, then your online brand should match it (within reason, of course). If you’re a caring person, then your online brand should be caring as well.

5) Gather more people like you

This is the fun part. This is where you build your network of people who can be potential customers, or even potential referral partners. The easiest way to do it is just to check out people who are already in your network, and see who they’re following or are connected to. You can be fairly safe in assuming that the people they’re following are people who have similar interests and are in the same field.

These techniques will apply to any social media tool. Remember, social media marketing is about engaging in relationships and conversations with customers. By using these techniques, you can help build your online brand and reach your ideal customers.

How is Online B2B Marketing Different From B2C Marketing?

March 5th, 2010 RRS 2 comments

Online B2B marketing (business-to-business) is a completely different animal from B2C marketing (business-to-consumer). Whether it’s the medium, the message, or even how you target your audience, online B2B marketing needs to be handled differently from your typical online B2C marketing efforts. There are plenty of similarities: you’re trying to persuade people to take an action, whether it’s visit your website, download a special report, or even buy a product from you. But there are enough differences that online B2B marketing needs some special considerations.

How online B2B marketing differs from online B2C marketing

Online B2B marketing is a lot different from online B2C marketing. For one thing, it’s more formal. In an online B2C setting, you’re going to have customers and visitors with a wide variety of interests, education levels, tastes, and even sense of propriety and appropriateness. You need to make sure your message appeals to the widest possible audience in a B2C setting. With some variable data and creative programming, you can deliver more tailored messages to your audience, but you either have to write one message as generically as possible, or write several messages tailored to each possible group.

But with an online B2B marketing audience, you can narrow your appeal. You’re writing only to the decision makers. You can reasonably assume certain levels of education, attitude, and professionalism among your customers. So your messages can be tailored to a specific group of people, without worrying too much about the non-industry crowd.

How to create the online B2B marketing message

Don’t forget that your online B2B marketing audience is someone else’s B2C audience. They don’t just stick decision makers in a closet at 5:00, and pull them out at 8:00 the next morning. Your B2B customers go home every night, watch TV, get on Facebook, and in general, still respond to the same emotional cues and language at the office that they will at home. Appealing to a person’s fears and desires in your message, showing them how to avoid pain or achieve goals, will work in online B2B marketing the same way it does in B2C marketing.

In online B2B marketing, you also want to focus on the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Don’t tell your customers what your service can do (“our Kick-Starter booster is made of titanium and polypropylene”), tell them what they’ll get out of it. Of course, make sure you personalize it whenever possible: “Our Kick-Starter booster will increase productivity by 20%, which can mean an additional $100,000 each year for Jones & Wells.”

Where to find your online B2B marketing customers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social networks and apps that will help you find your customers. But rather than trying to reach as many people on as many networks as you can manage, focus most of your energy on the best networks. We typically find our online B2B marketing audience on places like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even industry-specific networks like you’d find on Ning.com. While it’s possible to find the B2B audience on Facebook, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and money trying to reach them, while broadcasting your audience to people who don’t care. It would be like buying TV ads in a city just to reach 10 people on it.

Take a look at your online B2B marketing audiences age and technology expertise too. How do they use technology? The basic tenets of Internet marketing assume that your audience are online somehow. But where are they getting their information? Is there a niche social network for your industry? Or are the decision makers getting most of their information from email and websites? Or do they use mobile videos and texting as their primary form of communication? Your marketing campaign needs to match where your customers are, not where you want them to be.

Consider an Online Business Promotion Campaign

February 26th, 2010 RRS 1 comment

Business promotion is getting easier and cheaper, thanks to social media. However, don’t mistake cheap and easy with ineffective or a waste of time.

Many experienced businesspeople are still married to traditional marketing and business promotion techniques. They still think in terms of advertising in broadcast and print media. They still think about eyeballs, open rates, and CPMs (cost per thousand views). They’re thinking about impressions, drive time, and prime time. But business promotion has grown beyond traditional marketing and advertising, and moved online.

Why Is Business Promotion Changing?

It’s because of Generation Y and the explosive growth of social media. There are 82 million members of Generation Y (compared to the 78+ million Baby Boomers), and 96% of them are on a social network of some sort. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other networks, these online tools have reshaped business promotion as we know it.

If you want to reach Generation Y through business promotion, consider social media as your best bet. It costs less than traditional advertising, can be targeted to reach only the people you want, and can easily be measured. The problem with traditional advertising is that you can’t effectively measure whether it was your TV commercials or billboards that resulted in increased sales, and even if one of them was more effective.

How Can I Use Social Media for Online Business Promotion?

Social media is all about communicating and building trust through relationships. By speaking to your customer base on their terms and their turf, you can earn their trust a lot more easily, which can make your business promotion much more effective. Generation Y spends a lot of time online, getting their news and entertainment from the web. They communicate via text messages on their cell phone. And they are the biggest consumer of mobile videos of any generation.

Social media is becoming more popular and widespread. The biggest demographic on Facebook may still be Generation Y, but the fastest growing one is women 50 and over. If that was your biggest customer base, how would you reach them? You could advertise during shows that women over 50 typically watch, but you’re not going to necessarily reach them. Plus, you need to repeat those ads many times, which will get expensive. But with Facebook, you can create fan pages and groups specifically for your target audience. You can even purchase ads that are served only to women in their 50s. You can’t do that with traditional advertising.

Your online business promotion campaign should consist of Twitter, Facebook and/or MySpace, and blogging. Set up accounts, fan pages, blogs, and communicate with your potential customers about the things they want to talk about. Don’t tell them what you do, talk to them about what they do, like, and enjoy. Become a resource for their interests by forwarding articles, providing tips, and telling people about other resources that meet their interests and needs.

Whenever possible, use online business promotions to support your offline promotions as well. If you’re attending a trade show, are sponsoring a special event or team, or are still using traditional marketing, tell people about it through your social networks.

If you’re at a trade show, encourage people on Twitter to stop by your booth. If you’re sponsoring a special event, talk it up on your Facebook fan page. Or if you’re sponsoring a sports team, consider setting up a fan page for that team. Put your Twitter account and Facebook URL in your advertisements, and encourage people to follow you or become fans. There’s no reason these two business promotion methods have to be separate.

While we’re not predicting the death of traditional marketing methods, we are encouraging you to add social media as a big part of your business promotion toolbox.

The Consumer Loyalty Promotion

February 13th, 2010 RRS 1 comment

The consumer loyalty promotion is still a way for companies to earn repeat business from customers. Whether it’s a coffee shop giving you your 10th latte for free, or an airline miles program that gives you a free ticket after 25,000 travel miles, consumer loyalty promotions are an effective way to bring customers back time and again.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Green Stamps consumer loyalty promotion in the 60s and 70s and earlier. These consumer loyalty promotions actually started in the 1800s as a way to reward customers who paid with cash. Later, stamps were given to everyone who made a purchase. The stamps could be redeemed for store discounts, or for merchandise. The S&H Green Stamps were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and anyone in their 40s and older can remember their parents’ or even their own collections of the green stamps.

Nowadays, rather than giving stamps, many stores just give discounts, but only if you’re a member of one of their consumer loyalty promotions. You show your little card — usually kept on a keychain — when you check out, and they give you a discount on your groceries. Spend enough money, and the reward is usually a discount on their gasoline, in addition to the initial savings. Most people, about 75%, carry at least one of these consumer loyalty promotions cards.

The upside of a consumer loyalty promotion is that you can amass all kinds of purchasing information about your customers with their permission. Want to know how many people have recently begun buying diapers? Or cat food? Or prefer certain brands of beer? Direct mail marketers love to know this kind of information, and will pay for your consumer loyalty promotions lists just to find out new ways to get your customers to buy their products.

But consumer loyalty promotions are not just about selling mailing lists. They’re marketing tools. They encourage people to come back again and again, to earn the rewards you’re offering after 10 cups of coffee, 25,000 miles, $100 spent at a grocery store. The rewards in consumer loyalty promotions are there for you to continually show why your customers need to keep coming back. They’re not just a trick; they show your customers again and again why you’re their provider of choice.

In fact, that’s the point about a good consumer loyalty promotion: you can keep track of your customers, reward loyalty with prizes and discounts. You can also figure out ways to convert your occasional customers to loyal customers, and your loyal customers to raving fans.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, travel consumer loyalty promotions were all the rage. You got airline miles for flying a certain airlines, miles for staying in allied hotels, and could even double and triple those miles if you paid for the flight and night with your miles-earning credit cards. Some days it seemed like you needed a Ph.D. in customer loyalty management just to keep track of it all, but there were news stories of people who would take unnecessary flights just to reach the 500,000 mile platinum level for the next year.

If you’re thinking about setting up a consumer loyalty promotion of your own, be sure you give your customers something they want. It’s not enough just to give a discount, or a cheap piece of merchandise no one wanted in the first place, like the proverbial toaster for opening a new account. Figure out why your customers are there in the first place, and give them that. Sandwich shops give free sandwiches, airlines give free travel tickets. Give your customers something for free when they spend a certain amount of money or buy a specific number of items.

Referrals are another great form of consumer loyalty promotions. Customers are not just coming back themselves, they’re bringing their friends. If a customer comes to your store once a week and brings a friend who now comes once a week, that customer has actually doubled their value. They’re already fans, and by bringing in their friends, they will actually become more loyal to you and your company.

consumer loyalty promotions are a great way to not only thank your customers, but to market your company at no additional costs other than the rewards you gave out for your efforts.

Use Promotions to Reach Gen Y

January 23rd, 2010 RRS 2 comments

Using traditional promotions to reach Generation Y doesn’t work.

Let’s just get that out of the way. We’re normally not supposed to start articles like this on a down note, but you need to know what doesn’t work before we can really talk about what does.

Generation Y — those born between 1977 and 1994 — don’t respond to regular promotions. They don’t watch TV, they don’t read billboards, they don’t do direct mail. But they’re such an important target to marketers, that most marketers are looking for any kind of promotions to reach Gen Y.

So why Y?

Because they’re a consumer power that actually outnumber the Baby Boomers. There are 82 million Gen Yers, give or take a few, and only 78 million Boomers. Generation Y are 26% of the population, and their spending power is more than $200 billion, plus they influence another $300 – $400 billion. According to some reports, Gen Yers influence over 50% of their family’s car choices.

Tantalizing, huh? But if you can’t reach them with traditional promotions, how do you do it?

That’s where online and digital promotions become important. Generation Y is online. That’s where they grew up, that’s where they get their information. When asked where they get their news, most Gen Yers said “Yahoo.” They watch YouTube videos on their phones. They communicate through texts, and use Facebook.

In short, Generation Y wants you to communicate with them, not market to them. So what are some promotions ideas you can use?

First, you need to go where they are. Before you start any sort of Gen Y promotions campaign, get to know them. Figure out who your target audience is, and where they like to hang out, what they like to do, where they get their entertainment.

Vans Shoes, makers of the famous skateboard shoes, built skateboard parks in California and Florida. They sponsor a skateboard team. When their customers need to buy new skateboard shoes, they buy the ones they see at the skate parks, or on the shirts of the team from the skate competition.

Tampax sponsors a social network for young girls, without blatantly marketing to them. They place their logo discreetly on the network, while young girls connect with each other and discuss whatever young girls discuss. The logo just sits there. Then, when it’s time to go shopping for feminine products with their moms, they choose the product they see on their network.

Brands like Mountain Dew, Nokia, Coca-Cola, and Chrysler are paying video game developers for product placement promotions inside video games. Tony Hawk’s Ride, EA’s NBA “2K10,” and Need for Speed: Shift are just a few of the games that include ads. Whether it’s billboards, vending machines, or traditional sports advertising venues (like sponsor signs inside an arena), video game promotions are an excellent way to reach Gen Yers. Remember, Gen Y influences more than half of their family’s car purchases, so putting car ads in video games makes great promotions sense.

Text clubs are another form of digital promotions. Since most Gen Yers are communicating with each other via text, they’re a great way for local businesses like restaurants and clubs to reach Generation Y. Text clubs are opt-in marketing efforts. A restaurant can use text clubs to advertise hidden specials — “free appetizers with dinner, tonight only” — or a club can send out sneak previews about bands or drink specials.

When you’re creating your B2C marketing campaign, make sure you give digital promotions a good, hard look in order to reach the elusive Generation Y. With their spending power and large population, it’s important to connect with them now, so as they grow older and their spending power increases, you have earned their brand loyalty and top-of-mind awareness.

Gen Y Responds to Digital Brand Promotions

January 10th, 2010 jross No comments

Digital brand promotions continue to spur billions of dollars in annual sales for product suppliers. By offering promotional incentives, through mobile promotions, online promotions, music download promotions, and skins promotions, companies can tap into a vast pool of consumers that would otherwise be all but unreachable.

Generation Y is responding to digital promotions.   They are defined as the 10-30 year olds with more discretionary spending than their parents have, according to Author Kit Yarrow of Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing retail. On NPR this morning, she noted the average number of text messages sent by a teen, during a given month. The number was 2,273 text messages. They communicate in email, but chat more often, and they are active users of social media and video. Gen Y uses search engines daily. Schools introduce interaction with web 2.0 applications as early as elementary school and access to the internet is a requirement in secondary education. They are comfortable online and have chosen to use the medium over any other form of communication. If you are working in marketing, you can not afford to miss this generation which Yarrow coined Gen BuY. Online marketing has changed. This new generation expects you to communicate with them.

Promotional Currency brings a powerful combination of promotional incentives, entertainment promotions, music download promotions, ringtone promotions, skins promotions, mobile promotions, online instant win games and artist licensing – offering brand partners the first one-stop source for all online promotions, wireless and digital promotions.

Promotional Currency’s integrated approach incorporates cutting-edge promotional marketing strategies and the latest digital currencies with a complete backend management system that includes delivery, hosting, co-branding and fulfillment. The turnkey promotional marketing solution also features a proprietary promotional risk coverage service, enabling them to offer brands the budget certainty they require.

Incorporate these affordable digital brand promotions into your promotional marketing strategy today and watch your customer database soar!

Marketing Promotions Generate Revenue By Motivating Consumers To Take Action

December 16th, 2009 jross 3 comments

Digital Promotions EntertainmentMarketing promotions have become increasingly popular with brand marketers and retailers. Promotional incentives give you a unique advertising platform through which you can reach millions of consumers quickly and trigger a response. They generate valuable top of mind awareness for your brand. They excite consumers and motivate them to take action. Marketing promotions can drive traffic to your website and retail storefronts, creating a surge in sales while improving customer loyalty.

Despite the growing popularity, a lot of brand sponsors and product suppliers fail to fully appreciate the potential of launching targeted marketing promotions. They see digital promotions and promotional incentives merely as a way to increase sales. In reality, their potential extends much further and remains largely untapped.

Introduce New Products By Launching Marketing Promotions

One of the core challenges for brand marketers and retailers trying to launch a new product is to encourage consumers to try the product. Doing so requires consumers to modify their shopping behavior, which few are willing to do without an incentive. Marketing promotions can incentivize your target audience and motivate them to try the product or brand you’re promoting.

For example, think back to the last time you visited a large warehouse store, such as Costco or Sam’s Club. Strolling through the aisles, you probably saw several new items that offered generous coupons or other incentives upon purchase. In the food section, you likely saw employees giving out free samples of new foods and drinks. These are examples of marketing promotions that are designed to introduce new products to the marketplace. And they’re merely scratching the surface of the potential of promotional incentives.

Marketing Promotions Improve Brand Awareness: An Example

On Black Friday, Target launched a series of exciting marketing promotions for their customers. The marketing campaign was designed to extend their brand, build excitement in the marketplace, and generate a surge in holiday sales. It began with a $10 gift card given to every shopper who spent $100 during Black Friday. This was followed by their Giftacular Sweepstakes during which $200,000 in gift cards were awarded. Lastly, a Target Give and Get Sweepstakes offered consumers a chance to win a $10,000 grand prize.

These marketing promotions, in addition to generating excitement and triggering sales, thrust Target’s brand to the forefront of consumers’ minds. In doing so, the promotional incentives became a key component of Target’s ongoing customer loyalty programs.

Use Marketing Promotions To Attract Customer Data

Besides introducing new products, improving brand awareness, and building customer loyalty, you can use marketing promotions to attract valuable customer data. This data can be leveraged for future marketing campaigns.

For example, suppose your brand includes products in multiple categories, such as shoes, clothes, and cosmetics. Chances are, your customers will be receptive to buying related products from you within the same category. They’re also likely to remain loyal to your brand across categories. That is, those who buy your shoes may also buy your clothes and cosmetics (with the right promotional incentives). Consider the potential…

Marketing promotions can trigger an immediate response from your audience, providing you not only with customer contact information, but sales-related data. If you mine this data correctly, you can segment your customer base and design marketing campaigns that target specific customers. The tighter your targeting, the better the response.

Key Factors To Consider For A Successful Campaign

The success of your marketing promotions is measured by whether you meet your objectives. Brand managers often launch digital promotions and customer loyalty programs without having a clear idea regarding their goals.

For instance, if an increase in sales is your objective, quantify it by dollars or percentage increase. If your goal is to build a customer database for future marketing promotions, determine the database’s target size and breadth of data. If improving customer loyalty is your aim, success can be tied to an increase in sales volume by customer segment.

Also, depending on the type of marketing promotions you’re planning to launch, you should consider using promotional risk coverage. Doing so will protect your budget in the event of a larger-than-expected redemption rate. It’s also a cost-effective way to offer your customers the chance to win enormous cash prizes.

Marketing Promotions: Tapping Into A Massive Revenue Stream

Brand sponsors, marketing experts, and retailers have discovered that marketing promotions give them a unique way to reach a huge pool of consumers. In doing so, they tap into a lucrative revenue stream. But, that is merely the beginning. When you offer exciting promotional incentives to consumers, you’ll build brand awareness, increase sales, and attract valuable customer data. And if you harness those things properly, they can drive lasting sales with increasing momentum.

Promotional Risk Coverage Magnifies The Impact Of Your Marketing Promotions

December 11th, 2009 jross 1 comment

Promotional risk coverage eliminates the budget uncertainty associated with offering large prizes, attractive coupons, and generous rebates and premiums to your market. It gives you an opportunity to launch exciting marketing campaigns through which you offer high-value promotions that would otherwise lie beyond your budget. Such promotions attract attention. They excite people and generate an enormous response. As a result, you’ll enjoy a higher volume of in-store and online traffic, a surge in customer registrations, and a growth in sales.

As the economy continues to struggle, it is more important than ever that you stretch your marketing budget. Moreover, competition is increasing within every space. You need to have a way to differentiate your brand and products to an audience that is bombarded with promotional offers. Promotional risk coverage helps you to design exciting contests and games whereby consumers have a chance to win bigger and more compelling prizes. And you’ll be able to do so at a fraction of the prizes’ value.

Promotional Risk Coverage Protects You From Budget Overruns

Suppose you have a marketing budget of $15,000. You want to design a promotional contest that gives your customers the chance to win a $500,000 prize. The prize value is obviously much larger than your budget; it seems out of reach. Promotional risk coverage makes this type of contest possible.

The risk is placed with an insurance company. To outsource the risk, you would pay a small fixed fee. If a contestant wins the $500,000 prize, the promotional risk coverage takes effect and the insurance company steps in to cover the difference.

This same risk mitigation strategy can be easily integrated with your coupon programs, rebate offers, and high-value premiums. For example, suppose you want to launch a coupon program that carries a redemption value of $750,000 on a popular brand of deodorant. With a $15,000 budget, this may seem all but impossible. Promotional risk coverage makes this type of high-impact promotion possible by removing the risk of a larger-than-expected redemption rate.

When you notice your competitors offering staggering chance-to-win prizes of $1 million, it is not because they have a $1 million marketing budget. Chances are, their advertising budget is limited. They are able to design these exciting marketing programs because they are using promotional risk coverage to extend their impact. You can take advantage of the same opportunity.

Advantages Of Promotional Risk Coverage

The obvious advantage of promotional risk coverage is that it amplifies the impact of your marketing budget. It stretches every dollar. In reality, the benefits extend much further.

First, large prizes, coupons, and premium offers attract attention. They generate excitement and encourage consumers to participate. That gives you a chance to penetrate new markets, establish a presence, and improve brand awareness.

Second, by designing high-impact programs, you’ll quickly build a customer database that you can mine for future marketing campaigns.

Third, programs that leverage promotional risk coverage to offer massive chance-to-win prizes inevitably increase sales. This is due to the exposure you’ll enjoy as your customers get excited about the prizes.

Creative Marketing Campaigns With Promotional Risk Coverage

A lot of companies use promotional risk coverage to launch contests, games, and marketing programs at a fraction of the prize or redemption value. With a little creativity, you can design promotions that leverage this risk mitigation strategy even further.

For example, suppose you would like to launch a promotion that awards a $25,000 guaranteed prize. Promotional risk coverage will not cover guaranteed prizes, but it can eliminate the budget uncertainty of chance-to-win prizes, coupons, and high-value premiums. Instead of dedicating your budget to a $25,000 guaranteed prize, why not design a promotion that blends multiple types of promos? For instance, offer a $5,000 guaranteed prize, a $100,000 chance-to-win prize, and a $250,000 coupon program. Promotional risk coverage gives you the flexibility to design this type of creative marketing program.

Brand Differentiation With Promotional Risk Coverage

Differentiating your brand and products will always represent a major competitive advantage for your company. The challenge is using a strategy that excites your customers while keeping a tight rein on your advertising budget. Promotional risk coverage lets you offer high-value prizes, coupons, premiums, and rebates without concern for going over budget.

Would you like to generate excitement in your market by offering consumers a $500,000 chance-to-win prize? You can do so at a fraction of the prize value. Want to launch a $250,000 coupon program to stimulate a response and attract new customers? Doing so is easy at a small percentage of the program’s redemption value.

Invest the time to explore how promotional risk coverage can help you engage your audience, excite your market, and catapult your sales.

–Cyndi Walker, Promotional Currency

Use the promotional strategy that allows you to give away millions of dollars in cash and prizes.  Promotional Currency’s proprietary promotional risk coverage service is a powerful tool that enables you to super-size your promotional programs. Along with incorporating promotional risk coverage into all of their digital incentive product offerings, Promotional Currency helps businesses manage their risk on redemption-based promotions.  Protect your company from promotional risk.

Music Download Promotions: A Universal Promotional Marketing Passion

December 11th, 2009 jross No comments

Music Download Promotions have become a universal passion. Their appeal ignores gender, age, and all other demographics. Few digital promotional incentives are as powerful a lever as music download promotions. You can use them to launch a new brand, build consumer awareness about a new product, or to intensify your customers’ loyalty toward your company. You can leverage them to spur sales and build a consumer database for future marketing campaigns.

Digital music is a powerful promotional incentive because there is never a shortage of desired content. New artists rise to the top of the charts on a perpetual basis. That allows you to tap into an endless supply of popular music to build your brand, acquire new customers, and drive ongoing sales.

With the number of portable media devices at an all time high and growing due to the large number of new music capable mobile phones, music promotions have a broader reach than ever before.

Music download promotions can be delivered via a secure code and url. The codes are well-suited to a number of delivery methods, such as on-pack or in-pack, handed out via cards, or delivered via email. The landing pages and download sites can be customized to reflect the full personality of a promotion sponsor.

With over 3000 music download promotions successfully executed, Promotional Currency is a promotional partner you can count on to deliver. Promotional Currency’s integrated approach incorporates the latest digital currencies with a complete backend management system that includes co-branding, delivery, hosting, and fulfillment. These turnkey mobile promotions are created with a proprietary promotional risk coverage element, enabling them to offer brands response-based tactics within a fixed budget.

Incentive customers to respond through music download promotions with promotional risk coverage.