The most common approach to music promotions campaign is to use the typical mainstream music. But in some cases, you may find that independent music will work better for your music promotions campaign instead.

Rather than pay licensing fees to offer specific artists, or creating a generic campaign that offers iTunes money, work with local and indie bands and offer their music instead.

If you’re trying to reach a college age audience in certain cities, you can appeal to them by offering cuts from their favorite local bands. Not only are you helping promote your own brand by affiliating yourself with popular bands, but you have new partners in cross-promotion as well. Some of these bands may be willing to help promote your music promotions campaign themselves. After all, the more fans they can drive to your site, the more people they can expose to their own music as well.

Other indie music promotions ideas can include giving away tickets to local shows. Not only can you offer a sample song with your music promotion, but you could even create a loyalty program along the lines of “buy 20 cones, and get a ticket to the next Tripping Daisies show at the Dew Drop Inn.”

You can help sponsor local shows. Not only will your name be announced during the show, you can also attend the show and recruit customers there. Think about what the audience would really be into, and offer that as music promotions incentives: “Post a photo of you wearing our t-shirt to your Facebook page, and you could win free widgets for you and 4 friends.”

Create a video campaign. Encourage people to take videos of their favorite bands (at your sponsored shows, of course), and upload them to YouTube, then share them on Facebook and Twitter. In each message, the fans will need to include that it’s part of YOUR promotion, which will not only bring in viewers to their movies, but will reinforce your name. As a result, your customers will be doing your marketing for you — thousands of dollars of marketing value, all for the cost of partnering with a few favorite local indie bands.

By working with indie musicians and bands, you can not only localize your music promotions efforts, you can get some additional support from the bands you’re partnering with.

Digital promotions provide unique customer loyalty programs. This digital promotions powerhouse merges digital music and virtual promotions content, with entertainment licensing, and proprietary promotional risk coverage models, to deliver turnkey, fixed cost solutions for the promotional market.

Examples of a digital promotion campaign are endless. For example, why not give away a free music download for every $10.00 spent? A customer will often round up to the next $10 increment just to get a $.99 download for free. In their mind, if a sale total comes to $16, they will justify spending that extra few bucks just to get the free song. That adds up the dollars and business for your company. Over time, this will add up.

Another way to boost your digital promotion campaign is by giving away free dollars. Why not give a free $10 gift card to your own store. This promotional idea does two things for you: First, keeps your money in your store. Second, the likelihood that the customer will only spend $10 is pretty low. They may use this as an excuse to spend a little more than normal, because they have a “free” $10.

You can even ask your customers to tell their friends about your digital promotion. We know several restaurants that have a digital promotion campaign on their Facebook page. Tell an interesting story or leave a positive comment, and you could with a $50 gift certificate to your restaurant. Then, their friends see the promotion and comment in their news feed, and they not only hear about your restaurant, but they will want to get in on the action too. If they’ve been to your restaurant, they’ll tell their story, and their friends will see it, and so on.

By giving away a larger gift as part of your digital promotion, you are generating more word-of-mouth conversation than you could ever get by spending that money on a “real” advertising campaign. The cost to you is $50 worth of food, the value you get can be in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Even if you only did this once a month, if you got two additional parties to spend $50 – $60 each month, you ROI is worth it.

Another digital promotion idea is to create a referral program. For every referral that results in a purchase, the referrer receives free movie passes, or coffee or dessert card. People love going to the movies and everyone definitely loves food. Your digital promotion coupons can be retrievable online by a code or even through email, which would also save you printing costs.

Several online websites have built their entire business around the digital promotion model. Websites like Groupon.com and Restaurant.com offer purchases of digital gift certificates for nearly half their value. A $45.00 gift certificate for some restaurants can be purchased for only $25.00 online. This is one of the best ways a digital promotion can create revenue. Who wouldn’t want to purchase a gift card for half the price and double the value?

The advantages for a digital promotion campaign are endless. The customer can print their certificates, download free music, or redeem their gifts at their convenience. Plus, by using a digital promotion, you are also make the lives of the winners much easier. No longer will they have to run all over town to retrieve their prize.

So the next time you’re looking for a marketing boost, consider a digital promotion campaign.

Digital promotions of Promotional Currency provide unique customer loyalty programs. This digital promotions powerhouse merges digital music and virtual promotions content, with entertainment licensing, and proprietary promotional risk coverage models, to deliver turnkey, fixed cost solutions for the promotional marketplace.

When running a digital promotion you must be covered for several reasons. Because it’s easy for marketers to miscalculate or underestimate their promotion costs, redemption coverage helps them know their costs before their digital promotion campaign ever hits the market. This way, if someone tries to overspend or overextend the contest, the redemption coverage will keep those costs in line with the original budget.

For example, if your company ran a “hole-in-one wins you a new car” contest, you can be fairly sure that no one will win. Your campaign costs are limited to the cost of the promotion. But what do you do if, against all odds, someone actually wins the car? You could be out $20,000 – $40,000 with the swing of a club. It is easy to think you are safe, until someone actually wins the car. Then companies running these campaigns find themselves in the hole, worrying about how to pay for the car.

Even in a digital promotion campaign, something can spin out of control, costing you thousands of dollars. Your free song giveaway may suddenly go viral, and thousands of downloads turns into tens of thousands of downloads. This is why redemption coverage should be your first step in your digital promotion campaign.

Another advantage to getting redemption coverage to accompany your promotion campaign is, it stops the overexposure of redemptions. For example, there is no overspend or underspend because you know the exact contest cost and guidelines. Redemption coverage gives marketers the “you have a chance to win” cushion to base their digital promotion campaign expenditures.

This is a great safety net for those talented marketing agencies that are used to only wearing their creative hat instead of their accounting hat. Instead of worrying and trying to calculate the odds of someone winning, just make sure you have redemption coverage.

The biggest advantage to this insurance, also known as promotional risk coverage, allows your company to launch bigger digital promotion campaigns and give away larger prizes than you might originally have done.

In all reality, using redemption coverage with your digital promotion campaign is more than smart and strategic. These strategies are exactly what builds a great brand and customer loyalty. Customers will work to win your prize, telling their friends, spreading the word. You’ll build fans, increase sales, and ultimately boost your ROI. This way, everyone will be successful, and you’ll rest easy knowing you’re not going to lose your shirt.

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.

The promotional industry offers a host of powerful marketing advantages to product suppliers. Digital promotions can be used to tap into new, robust markets. These b2b marketing promotions, or consumer targeted promotions improve customer loyalty and offer a channel to build customer databases for future marketing promotions.

The Key Advantages of Digital Promotions:

1.  The value of digital promotions is becoming more widely recognized, yet many companies still fail to fully appreciate their potential so there is less competition in marketing promotions using digital promotions.

2.  Digital Promotions using incentive promotions can be used to educate a market about a new product. When a product is developed, its success hinges upon the market’s awareness. In order to penetrate a retail sector, the supplier must have a way to introduce the product and educate the market regarding its use and value. This education often forms the core of market acceptance and customer acquisition.

3.  Digital promotions can also improve brand loyalty and increase the value of existing customer relationships. Once a product supplier has penetrated a new retail market, it is critical that they continue marketing to those customers. This can be accomplished by capturing customer data online and using it to launch an ongoing string of personalized digital promotions.

4.  Digital Promotions decrease the expense of building customer databases and customer loyalty programs.  Saturating a new customer base with digital promotions offers increases the value of each customer by increasing the lifespan of the customer.

Customers appreciate the value of digital promotions and the companies which offer them benefit from brand association to digital promotions.  Offer your customer promotional incentives of digital promotions and you may just gain a customer for life.