The Longevity of Your Promotion
You have an offer and one way to sell it is through a promotion, a marketing plan for your offer. The thing you promote is your proposition, the rationale behind your offer. The longevity of your promotion is one thing to consider.
So, if you have a shop front, you could display a sign offering a discount on one of your offers. The discount is likely to be more effective if it is for a short period: “For one week only …” “Offer ends on Saturday …”
If you are going to do it that way, it is usually a good idea to have a reason for the promotion that you can make public, scarcity or urgency, for example.
Where your offer is long-term, perhaps if it is the main thing you sell, then you need a long-term promotion.
So, let’s take a look at short and long-term promotions:
Short-Term Promotions
- Always have a public reason for your short-term promotion. You may need to make some quick money to pay off your debts. If so, that is a reason but is it a good idea to make it public? Scarcity and urgency are among the best type of reason for a promotion.
- Information products are generally not suitable for this sort of promotion. When you offer access to a members’ area or downloads, it is not convincing to say they will become unavailable . However, something like a course where you can manage no more than a number of people, is more convincing.
- Online, a short-term promotion is best suited to a product launch. These can be very effective. They do take a lot of preparation and most people find they have to attempt them several times before they begin to make progress.
- There are other credible reasons to launch information products this way. You could offer a special rate for early users of your offer. Your short-term promotion could make the offer at the lower price and then the offer would become long-term at a higher rate. Take care not to repeat the same special rate, because people who purchased th earlier offer will feel cheated. Also people may hold back from purchasing at the higher price if they believe you will bring the lower price back down again.
- There are more traditional online advertising opportunities, mainly through social media such as Google and Facebook. If you choose these, you may need specialist advice.
Long-Term Promotions
- If you have something that’s popular then you may find you have something that will sell steadily over a long period. This is unlikely to last forever as fashions change or new offers appear on the market, so sales will tail off over time. You may find others copy your success and attempt to improve on your offer or sell similar ones at lower prices.
- Online your main concern is traffic. You need to find ways to bring people to your site. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) becomes important. The point to remember about SEO is you need to start it from day one, whatever methods you use, because it takes time to build traffic. Some people are very lucky and generate traffic quickly but it can take a few years. If you have a long-term offer, SEO is relatively important.
- Don’t forget traffic is only a part of the equation. Conversion is also important and so how you present your offer is important. You will need a sales funnel and you should consider some way potential customers can test your offer, perhaps by offering use for a month without charge.
- If your SEO is delivering poor results you can consider some form of advertising. If you are marketing locally, you have tradition approaches available such as referral marketing or public speaking events, you can use to introduce people to your website.
The main thing to remember is plan about how you are going to combine short-term and long-term promotions. A product launch for a new offer can pave the way for a long-term promotion. Once people find you through a short-term promotion, they may be interested to explore what else you offer.
How have you organised your offers, to encourage people to explore everything you offer?