B2B Marketing Promotions

Believe it or not you can make money on the Internet giving things away. It is human nature for people to want to get something for nothing. This is why you see so many people trying to win things such as $! Million Dollars buying lottery tickets or playing a McDonald’s scratch game.

When it comes to making money online you can give away free stuff and turn them into an Internet income. Here are three ways you can do that.

1. Build your mailing list. Doing email marketing is a proven way to make money once you have a responsive list.

This is why you see so many Internet marketers giving away free ebooks, free reports, and access to free webinars. The trade off is the website visitor must give that Internet marketer their name and email address to receive access to the freebie they are offering.

Once you have a mailing list you can send offers out to it and sell products that earn you a commission. Affiliate marketing is a good place to get products that you can make money selling.

2. Take a free tour. This is a common tactic used in network marketing opportunities. You also see it in membership sites.

Let the prospect test the opportunity out for free for a certain period of time. In some opportunities they might charge $1 for one week and then if the prospect doesn’t cancel they are billed full price on a regular basis.

The idea is that if the opportunity is worthwhile letting them check it out before they have to pay is a good way to enroll new members. In network marketing you make more money when you build a large downline.

Once you have the few personal individual members enrolled, and they are working on building their own group, you can make a lot of money. Everyone uses the same strategy of giving away a free tour.

3. CPA Offers. This could be something as simple as having a website visitor provide their name and email address. There are actually cost per action offers that only require an email address for you to get paid.

You are not selling anything, but rather you are promoting a specific offer. Most affiliate companies that do this type of affiliate marketing have excellent landing pages that you can promote.

There is no cost to the website visitor and you earn money once they complete the specific action. You just spend your time marketing the landing page.

As you can see there are ways to make money online giving away free stuff. This is a proven strategy for doing Internet marketing that any one willing to work at can make money.

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Promotional risk covered promotions open up possibilities to offer larger prizes than most companies can afford, or would want to take promotional risk on. These large prizes are proven to increase registrations of online users, traffic in stores, and sales at any given time. Strategies including promotional risk coverage also build large brands through consumer loyalty. Everyone appreciates winning something, people enjoy watching others win, and everyone remembers who was offering the big prize.

Protect your company from  the promotional risk of over redemption on free promotional offers.

Promotional Incentives capitalize on the consumer’s insatiable desire for all things free. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail,” has turned the idea of “free” on its head with his new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”

In it, he talks about how “free” is often used as promotional incentives. “Free” is often an integral part of marketing promotional incentives, used as a way to get people to try our products, to buy something else, to showcase our products or services, and even to do some work for us.

Here are the four basic iterations of “free” Anderson discusses in his book.

* Direct cross-subsidies – These are promotional incentives that get you to pay for something else. It could be a buy-one-get-one-free item at your favorite clothing store, or a free “prize” given to you by a car dealership in the hopes of getting you to buy a new car. It could even be a cell phone company giving you a free cell phone because you’ll pay for the minutes, the text plan, and the data package.

* The Three-Party Market – With three-party promotional incentives, someone else pays for you to have access so you can use the program or product, in order for you to be exposed to their product — your basic television and radio mass media setup. I get to watch NBC’s “The Office” for free, but I have to watch the ads that go with it. Or I can subscribe to a free trade magazine that covers my industry, but with these promotional incentives, I have to make my name and address available to advertisers. The advertisers need us to consume that product, but we need the advertisers to pay for our access.

* Freemium – One of the promotional incentives we’re most familiar with: we get a free sample to try a product: the food samples we get at our local supermarket, as a way to entice us to buy the really huge bag of pizza rolls. Or in the digital world, giving us limited access so we’re willing to pay full price for total access. Anderson mentions Flickr.com as an example of the freemium promotional incentives. We can use Flickr for free, but can only include 200 photos in our general timeline. If we want to have all of our photos available, and/or we want some premium features, we need to pay $25 per year.

* Nonmonetary markets – The idea that people give away things with no expectation of payment is not one of your regular promotional incentives. Wikipedia is one example. Hundreds of volunteers have created millions of articles in 10 languages about a variety of topics. Wikipedia doesn’t charge for this access, it’s free. Sure, they’ll take donations, and in fact, this past Spring, they had a donation drive to help cover the costs. But there’s nothing else. No banner ads (three-party market), no limited access (freemiums), and no direct cross-subsidies (“get Wikipedia free if you buy a copy of Photoshop”).

It’s this last version of “free” that most people are becoming used to, which can make your own promotional incentives campaign a success. Since marketing promotional incentives in the digital world is cheap and easy, there are different ways people can use them to promote their services (i.e. a Freemium).

One example of promotional incentives is when a consultant posts free articles on her blog as a way to not only showcase their knowledge, but to get a potential client to consider them. Or a book author who offers a free audio version of his book on iTunes and a Kindle version, knowing that if people get the free version, they’re more likely to pay for a real copy too. This is one of the latest promotional incentives to hit the publishing world, and one that more and more authors are using to boost their own sales.

What kind of promotional incentives are you using to drive customer traffic? How are you getting sales leads? Have you thought of using free items as a way to do this? Consider all of the options when you launch your own promotional incentives campaign.

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.

Marketing 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 incentives are a powerful marketing lever that brand advertisers can use to engage and excite consumers. They play a key role in launching new products, lifting sales of existing products, and cultivating customer loyalty. From the smallest “mom and pop” retail stores to the largest brands in the world, promotional incentives encourage people to experience products they might otherwise ignore.

Creative Ways To Leverage Promotional Incentives

Giving away free items is one of the most effective ways to stimulate a response from your target market. Nothing excites consumers more than the chance to receive something with a high perceived value for free. There are a variety of ways in which you can use free promotional incentives to motivate your audience to take action.

You can give your customers something for free in exchange for trying a new product or service. For example, Starbucks recently launched their Via brand of instant coffee and used promotional incentives to spearhead the effort. They organized a Via Taste Challenge to entice customers to try their instant brew. Customers in the Los Angeles area were asked to order a cup of Via. In return, they received a coupon that could be redeemed for any cup of coffee in the future.

You can also use promotional incentives to create a surge in sales volume around your brand. For example, Estée Lauder launched a promotion in October 2009 called “Your Beauty. Your Style. Your Profile.” They invited women to visit participating counters and receive a free makeover and photo. The photos were emailed to women so they could be uploaded easily to dating and social networking sites. The Estée Lauder logo was in the background of each photo, strengthening their brand.

Using Promotional Incentives To Collect Customer Information

In the Estée Lauder example, the promotional incentives were emailed to women who received makeovers. That means in order to receive their digital photo, women had to provide a working email address. This mechanism helped Estée Lauder to create a database of customers to whom they could market their products in the future. For example, they can email these customers a targeted holiday promotion focusing on the products that were used during the makeovers.

Mobile promotions such as music download promotions can offer this same advantage. When consumers visit your customized landing page to download your promotional incentives (e.g. free music downloads), you can require them to provide their contact information. In doing so, you’ll build a database of customers for future marketing campaigns.

The Advantage Of Delivering Promotional Incentives Online

When your promotional incentives are delivered online, your expenses are limited to whatever it costs to fulfill redemption. For example, suppose you’re offering free music downloads to people who spend $70 at a certain clothing store. Provide a website address and promo code on their purchase receipt that directs them to your download site. They can redeem your promotional incentives online, which helps to minimize your costs while exposing customers to your brand and products.

Or, suppose you want to deliver a “buy three and get one free” promotion to customers’ mobile devices. The cost of delivery is practically zero. The same is true for launching instant win games, skins promotions, offering free ringtones, and other digital promotional incentives. While the cost is low compared to traditional advertising channels, the impact on your audience is high.

Why Promotional Incentives Are Effective

Brand sponsors realized long ago that promotional incentives were a potent trigger for stimulating a response from their market. Each year, billions of dollars are spent to launch promotions that improve brand awareness, drive traffic and sales, and strengthen customer loyalty.

The reason promotional incentives are so effective is because people always enjoy the chance to receive free products they consider valuable. Whether the incentive is a free tank of gas, limited access to an online fee-based service, or free song downloads, consumers are happy to participate. In some cases, they’ll increase their purchase order or buy new products in order to take advantage of a promotion. In other cases, they’ll willingly exchange their contact information to receive your promotional incentives.

Your marketing campaigns are ultimately designed to sell your products. The challenge is to motivate your audience to buy them. Digital promotional incentives will excite your market, educate them about your products, and encourage their loyalty to your brand. And they’ll do so at a lower cost than using other advertising channels. Now is the time to explore how promotional incentives can drive traffic and increase sales for your company.

Promotional Currency is THE leading digital promotions firm, merging digital technology, artist licensing and promotional risk coverage to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions for the promotional marketplace.  Promotional incentives such as music download promotions, ringtone promotions, mobile promotion, skins promotions and online instant win games and sweepstakes are powerful, multi-pronged promotional marketing tools build customer loyalty and drive sales.

–Cynthia Walker

Entertain your consumers with promotional incentives to differentiate your brand and boost sales through increased brand interest and customer loyalty.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail, has turned the idea of free on its head with his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

In it, he talks about how Free is often used as promotional incentives as a way to get people to buy them. Free is often an integral part of marketing promotions, used as a way to get people to try our products, to buy something else, to showcase our products or services, and even to do some work for us.

Here are the four basic iterations of Free Anderson discusses in his book.

1. Direct cross-subsidies - This is a product that gets you to pay for something else. It could be a buy-one-get-one-free item at your favorite clothing store. Or a free “prize” given to you by a car dealership in the hopes of getting you to buy a new car. Or even a cell phone company giving you a free cell phone because you’ll pay for the minutes, the text plan, and the data package.
2. The Three-Party Market - Someone else pays for you to have access so you can use the program, in order for you to be exposed to their product. In other words, your basic television and radio mass media setup. I get to watch NBC’s “The Office” for free. The catch is I have to watch the ads that go with it. Or I can subscribe to a free trade magazine that covers my industry. The catch is I have to make my name and address available to people who want to send me direct mail. The advertisers need us to consume that product, but we need the advertisers to pay for our access.
3. Freemium - One of the models we’re most familiar with: we get a free sample to try a product: the food samples we get at our local supermarket, as a way to entice us to buy the really huge bag of pizza rolls. Or in the digital world, giving us limited access so we’re willing to pay full price for total access. Anderson uses Flickr.com as an example. We can use Flickr for free, but can only include 200 photos in our general timeline. If we want to have all of our photos available, and/or we want some premium features, we need to pay $25 per year.
4. Nonmonetary markets - The idea that people give away things with no expectation of payment. Wikipedia is one example. Hundreds of volunteers have created millions of articles in 10 languages about a variety of topics. Wikipedia doesn’t charge for this access, it’s free. Sure, they’ll take donations, and in fact, this past Spring, they had a donation drive to help cover the costs. But there’s nothing else. No banner ads (three-party market), no limited access (freemiums), and no direct cross-subsidies (“get Wikipedia free if you buy a copy of Photoshop”)

It’s this last version of free that most people are becoming used to, and this latest version of free that Anderson wrote about. Since marketing promotions in the digital world is cheap and easy, there are different ways people can use them to promote their services (i.e. a Freemium).

For example, a consultant posts free articles on their blog as a way to not only showcase their knowledge, but to get a potential client to consider them. Or a book author who offers an audio version of his book on iTunes (also free) and on the Kindle, knowing that if people get the free version, they’re more likely to pay for a real copy too. This last technique is the latest promotional incentive to hit the publishing world, and one that more and more authors are using to boost their own sales.

What kind of promotional incentives are you using to drive customer traffic? How are you getting sales leads? Have you thought of using free items as a way to do this? Leave a comment in the comment section.

Customer loyalty programs work by offering customers incentives and encouraging their continued business so sellers can see huge returns. Sounds easy, right?

Unfortunately, customer loyalty programs aren’t always that simple. They have to be done correctly and there is, like all potentially successful business ventures, some risk involved. Potential cost overruns, incentives which fail to trigger the intended response, and poor audience targeting all threaten to impede the success of any customer loyalty program. But, there’s good news: these risks can be managed. The question is, how? Here’s your answer:

Link the Promotional Incentives to the Product

In any customer loyalty program, the promotional incentive should always be related to the product. In other words, if you’re selling baby bath products, don’t reward your customers with a free oil change. Instead, help your customers make a connection in their mind between the product and the reward. The easiest way to link your incentive to your product is to make the product itself the incentive. You see this all the time at coffee shops who hand out “Buy 10, Get 1 Free” cards to their customers. And guess what? It works.

Inject Perceived Value Into the Customer Loyalty Program

One of the interesting psychological effects of a customer loyalty program is the tendency for consumers to value the promotional incentive outside the bounds of monetary value. To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s return to our coffee shop example. In the case of a free cup of coffee, it’s reasonable to assume the incentive has a monetary value of $2.

However, a lowly $2 cash rebate offered after 10 purchases would be unlikely to generate an increase in business. Customers are more inclined to consider the “value” of the free coffee based upon the experience they anticipate while enjoying it. ??This clearly works to a company’s advantage. A customer loyalty program can be designed to deliver a high perceived value to consumers while still yielding a respectable ROI for the business.

Remember, a Customer Loyalty Program is an Investment

Not all customer loyalty programs are going to provide an instant ROI. Depending on the length of the program, how it’s introduced to the market and the cost for the customer, a program can take time.  For example, a widely advertised customer loyalty program based on $2 coffee sales, something many customers buy almost every day, is going to bring a return faster than it would on, say, $75 haircuts, something customers may only purchase once every few months.

Don’t let this dissuade you from exploring a customer loyalty program. Instead, look at them as an investment, whether it be short-term or long-term. For companies that take advantage of it, a good customer loyalty program can yield dividends for years.

Promotional Currency (PC) is a digital promotions firm that merges digital technology, artist licensing and promotional risk coverage to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions that meet the unique needs and budgets of the brand marketing or b2b marketing client. Among product offered are: unique customer loyalty programs, promotional incentives, online promotions and mobile promotions.
 

Marketing Promotions including digital promotions continue to spur billions of dollars in annual sales for product suppliers. By offering promotional incentives, companies can tap into a vast pool of responsive consumers. Promotional marketing professionals often pursue conventional advertising methods to penetrate new markets.

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.