B2B Marketing Promotions

When you say promotional marketing, most people just think “marketing,” especially the non-marketing types. As if what we do is nothing but contests, coupons, and giving out free samples. While that is a part of marketing, promotional marketing is only one small fraction of the big umbrella that makes up Marketing (with a capital M).

Promotional marketing is the idea of promoting your product or service by attracting attention to potential customers. You see this quite a bit in places like grocery stores. The next time you’re walking through your grocery store, count how many promotional marketing items you see: coupons to try a new brand of breakfast cereal, or the free samples of a new food item.

Car dealers and timeshare companies are also big fans of promotional marketing. How many “game cards” have you received from a local car dealer where you would win a prize if it showed up under the silver scratch-off discs.

But there’s more to promotional marketing than just coupons and free items. Contests are another popular method of marketing promotions. Whether it’s a bank giving you 30 seconds in a giant box filled with money and a large fan, letting you grab as many of the fluttering bills as you can, or it’s a golf tournament that will give you a free car if you hit a hole in one on the 14th hole, contests are another great way to bring in potential new customers.

The most famous promotional marketing contest is the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, where you could win $1 million or more, as well as subscribe to different magazines. We went nuts for these when we were kids, begging our parents to please please enter, because we could win a million dollars!

The reason people respond to these promotional marketing campaigns is they’re attracted to the large cash and prize giveaways. Sure, in our heads we know that the odds of winning are higher than the odds of being struck by lightning, but in our hearts, we hope we’ll beat the odds just that one time.

Of course, promotional marketing experts are worried about the one person who does beat the odds, so promotional risk coverage is available for those promotional marketing campaigns that offer large prizes and cash to winners.

If you want to create a powerful promotional marketing campaign, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

• Why are you holding the promotional marketing campaign in the first place? Is it to sell more product, collect names for your customer mailing list, or just to increase brand awareness?
• How will you measure success? Through increased sales, a bigger customer list, or based on the number of promotional marketing items you gave away? We don’t recommend measuring this last item, because measuring the amount of money you spent does not always translate well to the amount of money you’ll make from it. Just ask any auto racing promoter who spent $100,000 and didn’t get a single sale as a result.
• Who is the marketing campaign geared toward? Is the promotional marketing item going to appeal to your target audience? If you’re trying to reach young men between 18 – 34, a contest that has tickets to a football game will draw them in, while two free passes to a day spa will not.
• Are you looking for new customers or trying to reach existing ones? The kinds of promotional marketing items you give away will attract one group or another.
• Are you compliant with the state and federal laws? Do you have promotional risk coverage in case someone wins bigger than you thought they would? (Imagine how the car dealer must feel when someone hits that hole-in-one and wins a car he wasn’t expecting to give away.) There are a lot of laws surrounding promotional marketing campaigns, and you could run afoul of laws without knowing it. Consult with a promotional marketing professional to make sure you run a clean campaign that doesn’t get you into trouble down the road.