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Whether you own a small or large company, effective marketing is critical for product promotions. Apart from creating brand awareness and loyalty, communicating the benefits of your products, both new and old, should take up the bulk of your marketing strategy. Here’s how to create product promotions that sell.
Product promotion and marketing strategy
What exactly is effective marketing for products?
If your product promotions make an impact, your customers should understand what differentiates your product from the competition’s, know the features of the product that make it useful to them, understand how the product benefits them and feel more brand loyalty.
Ultimately, the best way to promote products is to adjust your marketing strategy to your target market. What channels do they frequent? What does their behavior look like online? Once you have the research down, promote across multiple channels and cross-promote to ensure cohesive and consistent messaging.
Related: Push Your Product, Not the Promotion
Marketing strategies for product promotion
Influencer marketing uses endorsements from online personalities to spread awareness about your product or brand. It’s successful because it allows you to reach specific niches in which the influencer is considered a trusted expert. The influencer is already engaged with the audience you’re aiming to reach, so he or she is more likely to be open to your product promotions. For example, Tom’s of Maine wanted to increase brand and product awareness for their all-natural products. They used influencer marketing, targeting micro-influencers to spread awareness across all platforms. Micro-influencers encouraged their followers to share about the brand, which snowballed into reaching 4.4 million potential customers.
With influencer marketing, you’ll need to research which influencers are within your budget and have access to your target market. You should vet them to ensure that they have engagement on their social media, checking that their content aligns with your brand. Audience size isn’t all that matters — sometimes a smaller audience means stronger engagement. Once you find an influencer, set a budget and reach out to them via direct message or look for a business inquiries email in their bio. Be sure to set forth clear, organized goals for the best results.
Run a contest on social media
Giveaways are a simple and fun way to make your new product exciting for your customers. Giveaways are especially effective on Facebook: On average, contests bring in 34 percent of new customers. Whether you choose to run the contest on Facebook or another platform, you should advertise it across all of your social media as well as on your website, blog and email newsletters. This will drive traffic for you.
For the contest itself, set parameters to gain further reach. Entries should include follows, likes, comments and tagging friends.
Related: 28 High-ROI Ideas for Promoting Your Product on Facebook
Offer a preview to loyal customers
Your most loyal customers are most likely to purchase your new product, but they’re also most likely to share it with their friends. Offer them a preview of your new product by having a launch event (in person or virtual), a demo or tour, or by sending them free product in exchange for feedback. Americans actually value word of mouth over social-media recommendations by 41 percent, so this is an extremely effective way to promote a product.
Email marketing
Note that 76 percent of email subscribers report making purchases because of a marketing email, and the ROI for marketing emails can be as high as 4,400 percent. Take advantage of your existing email list and use it for product promotion. Build up anticipation with a campaign leading up to launch day or make it a primary focus of a newsletter.
Related: How Many Email Marketing Campaigns Should I Send a Month?
Use Google My Business
If you have a Google Business profile, you should be utilizing Google My Business to control what people see when they google you by promoting your product. In the GMB dashboard, select the “Posts” tab. From here, you can create a “What’s New” post to advertise your product. These expire every seven days, so be sure to time it around your product launch or repost it again once it’s expired. Separately, you can also share an “Offer” from the Posts tab and set a timeline so you don’t have to worry about taking the ad down. This is an excellent way to advertise introductory offers.
To get the most from your GMB profile, add posts, photos, products and services, and FAQs. A completely filled-in profile shows your customers that you’re a legitimate business and helps to optimize your profile.
Product promotion is a key part of your marketing strategy. When done properly, across multiple channels with cohesive messaging, you’ll see large returns. Don’t stick to just one marketing strategy — implement several, be consistent, and the results will follow.