Marketing promotions can be a super-effective way of bolstering your brand exposure and positively affecting your all-important bottom line – but running successful promotions can be a challenge.

Luckily, we’re here to come to the rescue, offering up 6 ways to ensure your promotion is a resounding success, keeping your brand community happy in the process.

Know your audience inside-out

Of course, knowing your audience is marketing 101 – but when it comes to running marketing promotions, understanding the different segments of your wider audience is key.

Many promotions adopt the mindset that casting the widest net possible is the best course of action. After all, if you reach enough people, eventually, some of them will convert – right? Probably. However, this is an incredibly inefficient way to run a promotion, and is sure to produce far less impressive results when compared to a more strategic and better targeted campaign.

With this in mind, look to reach a targeted, relevant audience for your promotional campaign. To do this effectively, conduct audience research to better understand them. Who are they? What are their pain points? What is their lifestyle?

This more comprehensive understanding of audience segments will enable you to better target your promotions by knowing what type of promotion will incentivise members of your community. As such, you’re likely to see far higher conversion rates, and this innate understanding of audience preferences and incentives can even inspire future sales promotion ideas.

Know your goals (and measure them)

Without clearly setting out your goals and knowing how to accurately track and measure them, how will you ever judge whether your promotion was successful?

This is particularly important, as no two promotions have the same goal. When mapping out what you’d like to achieve, be sure to consider the bigger picture, too. Is your goal simply to drive initial sales, or is your promotion designed to reap longer-term rewards such as customer retention or an increased average spend?

Establish your goal, regardless of whether it’s short-term or long-term, and identify the relevant metrics needed to measure your success. This will help you identify what works and what doesn’t – reacting accordingly where needed – to the benefit of your campaigns both now and in the future.

Champion exclusivity

Consumers like to feel special.

Considering that, look to utilise the psychology of exclusivity to your advantage, playing on FOMO (fear of missing out) and other triggers. What do we mean by this? Don’t just run a promotion such as a free gift – instead, make that free gift available for a limited time, or in limited quantity.

Doing this will incentivise your community to act on your promotion, and fast.

Promote, promote, promote

Sure, your promotion serves the purpose of attracting customers to your brand and service, but have you considered how you’ll attract attention to the promotion itself?

Successful sales promotion ideas rely on engagement, meaning you need to ensure your community and wider audiences know about it.

Remember: visibility is key to ensuring a worthwhile return on investment, so look to advertise your promotion like you would your products or services. From in-store signs and posters to blog posts, social media posts and emails, look to explore a range of physical and digital avenues for maximum coverage.

Demonstrate genuine value

Of course, to properly incentivise customers to engage, successful promotions must offer genuine value.

Utilising audience segmentation, ask yourself what types of offers provide authentic value to your customers. Sure, that free gift with every order is a nice idea, but does your audience really want that gift?

Find that precious middle ground between providing your audience with the utmost value and what you can feasibly afford to give them. Doing so will ensure a more effectively optimised campaign – both in terms of audience value and, just as importantly, cost-effectiveness. 

Review, critique and learn

When mapping out your sales promotion ideas, never go in blind. Aside from your audience information, look to also utilise lessons learnt from past campaigns. What worked and what didn’t?

With this in mind, be sure to schedule a review of your marketing promotions at the end of each cycle. Not only is this the best way to obtain valuable insight into the success of your promotion, but it also helps you provide more real-time, personalised promotions in future by reactively fine-tuning your approach.

Now you’re armed with the right know-how, your marketing promotions are sure to be a resounding success time after time – it’s all about understanding what incentivises your community and giving it to them.

The promotion feature on the Six Circles community engagement platform gives you this level of control. With the ability to tailor promotions to different community members, customising brand communications has never been easier. Request your free demo today.