Promotion Mix: Definition, Types, Importance, & Strategies

So, you’ve come up with that world-class product designed to meet the exact needs of the market. However, the best books are not always the bestselling, and that “out of this world” product can’t sell itself. Hence, as a business owner or marketer, the promotion mix strategy should always reverberate in your head because your target market segment needs information about your product or service and the reasons why they should go with your brand. Therefore, let’s talk about the promotion mix, and all the facts you need to know to establish one suitable for business.

What Is the Promotion Mix?

A promotion mix is a list of channels a company chooses to help them achieve a certain goal in the market. The communication in these channels must be compelling to attain reasonable market effectiveness. So, your selected promotional mix must be:

• Captivating

• Educating

• Persuasive

The promotion mix elements you choose must be the most appropriate while developing your promotion mix strategy.

What Is Promotional Mix With Example?

Publications such as newspapers and magazines, as well as media such as television and radio, charitable donations, speeches, issue advertising, and seminars, are all good examples. Another kind of advertising is word of mouth, which has evolved from word-of-mouth advertising through friends and family to endorsements by social media stars and bloggers.

Why Is Promotion Mix Important?

The promotion mix refers to the combination of several advertising channels used to reach a specific demographic. The marketing mix is useless without effective promotion, which draws in consumers, convinces them to make a purchase, and creates repeat customers.

Promotion Mix Elements

The promotion mix elements enable a company to effectively promote its products to its target market segment. Based on a company’s objectives and budget it allocates resources to the right elements. These elements are Advertisement, public relations, sales promotion, direct marketing, and personal selling. Let’s get to the details of each.

#1. Advertisement:

It is a way companies communicate their products and services through paid commercials. Most of the time, a third party serves as the facilitator. So, a company gets its promotion to the third party’s platform, and the third party gets it to their viewers. However, companies shouldn’t do this randomly, they should select the platform that has their target market segment. Examples of advertisement media are television, billboards, radio, posters, mobile apps, emails, and web pages.

#2. Public relations:

This way companies try to promote a positive public image. This could be achieved by having promotion shows with third parties, inserting their news stories in the media, and press releases about their activities.

#3. Sales promotion:

In this element of the promotion, mix marketers try to boost sales through an afore-determined limited market offering. For example, flash sales, coupons, and recurring sales. There are advantages to this. While new firms can use it to draw customers to themselves. Old ones, that have achieved good market penetration, can sustain the interest of their customers via it.

#4. Direct marketing:

With methods like interactive consumer websites, emails, and messaging firms can persuade customers into a call to action that prompts the customer to act. These channels of direct marketing produce results that are immediately measurable cos firms instantly get updated on customers’ interests.

#5. Personal selling:

Some firms feel that a direct face-to-face or over-the-phone interaction with their potential customers through agents like sales personnel is closer to the customer. This promotion mix element is called personal selling. It is the most traditional form of promotion. Clearly, for the face-to-face interaction, there is a significant amount of investment in time from the customer and sales representative also. So, this might be less efficient than other elements.

What Is the Impact of Promotion Mix?

In contemporary marketing, advertising is the most common tactic employed by businesses to attract customers. The promotional mix is a crucial method for increasing sales, which is why businesses attempt to increase the influence of their promotions through multiple media.

READ ALSO: MARKETING COMMUNICATION: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW (DETAILED GUIDE)

Promotion Mix Strategy

Now that you know the promotion mix elements. Let’s look at how you can select the promotion mix that’s right for your company under the promotion mix strategy.

#1. Determine Your Customers:

This should be a priority in your promotion mix strategy. You have to know where to get your target market segment. Some signature behavior could help with this. For example, If you are a jewelry store owner that targets consumers whose yearly income is more than $120,000. Your selected promotion mix element will target people who make such an amount yearly.

#2. Determine Your Objectives:

This is the reason why you want to promote your product. Different companies have different objectives for their commercials. Examples are, acquainting a new product to the market, correcting a wrong impression, retailer persuasion to stock more of your product, and communicating new features to the existing market to enable product development.

#3. Design Your Message:

In designing a message you have to consider both the content and the format. The content is the words, images, and text used to pass your message to the customers while the format is the way you pass that idea. Different promotion mix rely on different formats to communicate their message effectively. For example, while a web advertisement relies on colorful graphic images, personal selling might involve oratory charisma that will persuade the customers.

#4. Make your budget:

Once you’ve garnered information about your market segment, then you use that as a guide to making your budget. Also, make the funds available to you into consideration.

#5. Select Your Promotional Mix:

After designing your message you need to select the promotion mix that will be best for your marketing campaign. So, you should consider the different promotion mix and know the ones that are best for you.  For example, The promotion mix of a footwear store that makes a budget of $3,000 for their marketing campaign could be as follows.

• • • 50% sales promotion: $750 coupons, $750 worth of footwear for winners of their contest.

    • 20% Advertisement: $600 for web advertisement.

    • 20% public relations: $600 for a press release.

#6. Use Elements of the Selected Mix to Complement Each Other:

So, in the example, the store could use the elements in the mix to complement one another. For example, a web advertisement announcing their free coupons, and contest to their market segment. Then, a press release of the winners of the contest to the public.

#7. Measure the Results and Make Adjustments:

A rise in the number of sales by your firm would serve as a good yardstick in the measurement of how effective your promotion mix has been. You adjust for more growth or elimination of an ineffective element.

How Is Promotion Mix Planned?

The term “Promotion Mix” is used to refer to a company’s collection of promotional strategies. Advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing all come together to form what is called the “Promotion Mix.”

Why Promotion Mix Is Important in Marketing?

Customers are more likely to buy from you and your business if they are familiar with and interested in your brand. Marketing may be as simple as handing out free samples, which are quite effective in attracting new clients. After giving your goods a trial, they decide to buy from you.

READ ALSO: 7 WAYS TO DEFINE YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS

Importance of Promotion Mix

The importance of promotion mix is as follows

#1. Brand Name Reinforcement in Consumers’ Minds:

It is a common notion that something that gets repeated gets remembered and something that’s remembered gets done. So, in a promotional mix, especially advertisements, there are repetitions of your brand to the consumer. And this can lead to your brand name being synonymous with that product. For example, in Nigeria, most people call every noodle in the market Indomie.

#2. Increase in Sales:

The most common reason why companies engage in promotion is to promote sales and this will therefore increase profit.

#3. Build Relationships:

Companies can build strong relationships with retailers in that industry by creating a promotion mix targeted at them. Hence, this could help the company get a good market share of its market segment.

#4. Stir Excitement:

This is usually achieved by sales promotion. Some consumers are turned on by contests and by giving to them. You can turn a dreary purchase into a livelier one.

#4. Credulity:

Public presentation of your company helps consolidate the belief of legitimacy and permanence in the minds of the consumer.

Factors That Affect the Promotion Mix

Different factors that affect the promotion mix can be company-related, product-related, or customer-related. So, let’s look at these factors and know how they can influence your promotion mix.

#1. Product Type:

There are different types of products. Some of the types are branded products, non-branded products, and new products. Marketers ought to use different elements of the promotion mix for any of the aforementioned product types. While advertising will be more suitable for branded products, personal selling might be the element of choice for non-branded products.

#2. Product Usage:

Consumer goods usually target more customers than industrial goods. So, advertisement and sales promotion are more appropriate for consumer goods while personal selling is more appropriate for industrial goods.

#3. The Target Market Segment:

The target market segment is a factor that can affect the promotion mix. Hence, a firm that has distributed customers within a country can use social media or TV advertisements for its products. However, firms that have a single area of concentrated customers can just use personal selling.

#4. Availability of Funds:

This is a very important factor that affects all promotion mix. Personal selling is the cheapest in the cost spectrum of all promotion mix. Advertisement and sales promotion are costly and should be done by firms that can afford them. So, available funds will affect your choice of promotion mix greatly. Also, not only do funds affect your mix it also affects the duration of your promotion mix.

#5. Marketer’s Competence:

Some marketers lack experience in some promotion mix. So, they tend not to use it in their promotion campaign even when it’s vital to the success of that campaign.

Conclusion

With the details outlined in this article, hope you were able to get a good grasp of the concept of promotion mix? If not reach out in the comment section for clarifications or additional information.

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