Five P's: Storytelling With Promotion

The way you promote and position your business in the market has a dramatic effect on what type of customers you can acquire and how much value you get out of each customer.

While we are often tempted to focus on pumping out a continuous stream of marketing content, it can often be a lot more productive to send fewer, but more targeted, promotional material. The continuously expanding array of platforms you can use to promote your business make it tempting to sink large amounts of time, capital, and effort into having a strong presence on all platforms where there may be only a few that are truly worth your attention.

Platforms

First and foremost we want to know which platforms make the most sense for your business to be promoted on. This ties in closely with some of our previous discussions around understanding your customer as you want to promote yourself where the target customers congregate. Customer intimacy is a critical input for this part of the process. For example, if your target demographic doesn't use social media or is primarily in a more rural setting (with limited high speed internet capabilities) it would be much more effective to advertise on traditional radio as opposed to advertising on a social media platform. It is also worth considering how targeted we really need to be for these promotions. This is a little tricky, we usually want to go for as specific of a market as possible but there is a risk that you over segment your market and miss out on potential customers who will resonate with your messaging. While internet based advertising firms often enable you to develop highly targeted advertisements, which is very appealing, there are some instances where the better use of your marketing dollars would be to send a mass mailing flyer via traditional mail delivery services. Even within the same company it may make sense to advertise different products and services differently.

The Story You Tell

Promotion activities are where you craft the story of your firm. You define your firm's value to the customer and tell them how to interact with your brand. Leveraging your carefully crafted messaging strategy, you can easily guide your customers through the sales funnel while keeping them engaged with valuable content around your brand.

Always keep in mind that the length of this journey will vary greatly based on the items you are selling and you want to make sure there is plenty of valuable content to assist them in their buyers journey. We also find there is a lot of value in having different versions of the same story playing on the various platforms you operate on. Each platform needs a careful execution strategy in place to engage with customers in the way they expect to be engaged with when on a specific platform.

The Partners You Choose

When deciding which partners you should work with there are a few key things to consider. First and foremost you want to ensure that your partners image aligns with your brand image. If you are aiming to be viewed as a luxury brand you want to consistently message to the market that you are a luxury brand and should be treated as such. One popular method these days has been to hire social media influencers to promote your products.

This has had mixed results for sure but if your brand can find an engaging influencer who aligns with your brand image this can be a particularly potent tool. Additionally, when deciding on a marketing partner, such as an advertising agency, take your time and ask for examples of previous work. Lots of these firms excel at creating messages for a few, very specific, types of business so seeing their work can help determine if they are the right fit for you.

Promotion is where the background work you have done on customer intimacy is showcased to the market. We would always recommend that a firm not start an advertising campaign until after a thorough review of what the end goal is and a clear definition of how each advertisement addresses a customer need. These customer centric advertisements placed where your customers congregate will turbocharge your sales while building a strong brand image.