The success of your business depends on several contending factors; perhaps top on the list besides product development is marketing. You must have heard the famous saying that the best mouse trap in the market may not always be the fastest selling mouse trap. Why? Because the market needs to buy from you first to know whether you are the best mouse trap or not and before they can buy from you, they need to know you exist.

Many entrepreneurs fall prey to the best mouse trap illusion; your product/service can be the best ever, but it won’t sell itself until you find a way to get the word out. The aspect of marketing that deals with getting the word out is called promotion. Without this critical element of promotion in your marketing strategy, it doesn’t matter how extraordinary your product/service may be, if the market doesn’t know about it, it will definitely fail.

Business Promotion Strategies

In this unusual article, I want to share some ideas on how you can get noticed in the market by implementing some promotional strategies. There are several promotional strategies available to businesses, such as;

• Branded Free Gifts:

Everybody loves a freebie especially items they can use to gain knowledge or improve their lives. This is popularly known as business promo items like pens, t-shirts, jotters, lapel pins, greeting cards, artisan balm, etc. These can be used to create powerful brand awareness for your products/services. The benefit of using branded free gifts is the “no resistance” effect it has on your target customers. Since it’s a free gift, your target customers would not hesitate to collect it and use it and by so doing, they are spreading the word about the existence of your product/service.

• Public Relations:

PR as it’s popularly called is a strategy for proactively shaping the public’s perception about your company, product and services. The dictionary defines it as the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by an organization or a famous person. The objective of PR is to help companies, organizations or people to enhance their reputations. It involves communicating with the media and through the media [newspaper, TV, Radio] to present your brand in the most favorable way possible.

Examples include;

• Press releases,
• Organizing public events,
• Charitable donations,
• CSR initiatives,
• etc.

• Blogging:

This is simply the creation of valuable FREE information on the internet through your website in order to build up your target audience’s interest and desire about your business, products/services. In other words, blogging is Content Marketing. Information regardless of the format in which it is presented; written, video, audio or picture is content. And when content is being shared for FREE on any particular subject matter to any particular target audience for any reason whatsoever over the internet, this is called Blogging.

Here are THREE things blogging can do for you

1) GLOBAL EXPOSURE

The world is now flat, no longer round or spherical thanks to the emergence of IT. In a flat world, the playing field of business has been leveled allowing individuals the rare opportunity to now build Global Microbrands [mini-multinationals] through which they can competitively produce and sell their goods/services worldwide.

Blogging is the platform through which this Global Microbrands reach out to their target audiences worldwide. Meaning, if you own a blog, you are positioned for a global impact regardless of the industry you operate in.

2) INCREASED PROFITABILITY

With a global exposure comes a global target audience to sell to. Thanks to Amazon, you can sell more goods worldwide now than any other time in human history.

What does this mean to you?

• Your books gets read the more globally.
• As a speaker you get more speaking invitations globally.
• As a consultant your expertise gets demanded globally.
• In short, whatever you represent and can do gets a global demand!

3)  CREATIVITY BOOSTER

Perhaps of all the benefits of blogging this is my personal favourite. Blogging allows you to do more of what you were born to do. Because of the expectation of your readers, blogging helps you to grow as an expert since you have to constantly think up practical articles to share with them.

This not only makes you a better writer, it makes you a better thinker, a more knowledgeable expert and a solution provider/problem solver. All these are the ingredients of success.

Because you are closer to your target audience than ever before, you don’t have to go through the creation of products/services alone as you have been used to, now you simply involve them in the creation process as collaborators. Meaning, they tell you what they need you to make, how they want it to look, function and delivered, at what price they want it sold and will even offer to review the product/service for free.

This is certainly a motherload of feedback and market research has never been this easier! 

• Write a book:

This promotional strategy is very closely related to blogging, except that this is not free information and it’s not shared over the internet. Why write a book to promote your business? A book is the ultimate instrument for establishing your thought leadership, expertise or authority in any particular field. Today’s consumers and service buyers have been enlightened. They are looking for companies, products, and services that exhibit credibility, authority, expertise, reliability, substance, innovation, and value. They’re not fooled by your marketing slogans or gimmicks. They research everything by comparison shopping, collecting opinions, and sampling to know their options and exercise the best ones. In other words, a book is the best company profile or product/service brochure you can ever create for your business.

• Own a website:

Your website is your office on the internet. It is the replica of your physical ‘brick and mortar’ office. The only difference is that one is physical and the other is digital. Both offices must exist to serve your target market. The world is no longer ONE as we used to know it, but has become TWO –a physical world called ‘offline’ and a digital world called ‘online’. As you draw visitors to your physical office by marketing your business offline, so it’s necessary to create a digital office online to capture your target market in that world too. If you aren’t marketing your business in both worlds, your business is heading for the rocks. Believe it or not, your target market are online and they are searching for what you sell. The big question is this; is your brand VISIBLE online? Can they easily locate your digital office [website] online?

Your Turn

Obiously, these are not the only promotional strategies available to businesses, the list is endless and often require a lot of creativity on your part as an entrepreneur. What I have done above is to help you spark up your creativity and remind you of the never ending importance of promotion in your business.

So, besides the ones I have shared above, what other promotional strategies have you adopted in ensuring that you get the word out about your business, products/services?

Kindly share your contributions in the comment section below. Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments!