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.

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.

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.

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.