Generating new leads while accommodating current customers can be an ongoing battle for your small business. All you need is a balance between maintaining loyal customers and constantly seeking to attract new ones.
However, the customer journey is unique for each one of your users, so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to customer satisfaction. Luckily, we have prepared five effective sales promotion ideas you can add to your marketing plan to attract more of your target audience and generate business benefits.
In this material, we will focus on sales promotion examples and how attractive campaigns can increase the perceived value of your brand.
Let’s get started!
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What Is a Sales Promotion Technique?
So far, things are going well and business as usual. However, you believe that your products must make an immediate impact in the market, create buzz, and that the company must have the velocity that you had envisioned.
This is the moment when you realize you need to improve your results by incorporating new effective sales promotion strategies into your marketing plan.
Let’s take a moment to understand how sales promotions work in a marketing campaign.
Sales promotion is a marketing strategy that uses short-term promotions to raise demand and boost sales for a specific product. It focuses on creating a sense of urgency to induce customer FOMO and encourage people to buy more in a limited time frame (for example, holiday sales, a pre-order period, or even Black Friday).
And, let’s be serious, who ever says no to a discount?
B2B marketers need to be very specific about their marketing strategies. They have to have a clear idea of their target audience and the problems they are facing and keep in mind that the average B2B conversion rate is 2%.
But a good sales promotion goes beyond a simple one-time good deal. It’s a sales strategy aimed at boosting customer satisfaction and turning a potential customer into one that is here to stay.
It’s Time to Boost Your Sales Promotion Strategy!
We know that sometimes generating new leads is easier said than done. However, we are here to offer you sales promotion tips that will build customer loyalty and will help you increase revenue.
So, how can businesses strategically structure their sales promotions to win more leads?
These are the strategies you need to implement in order to have a successful sale promotion and attract new customers:
- Consolidate your social media presence
- Consider giveaways and flash sales
- Get ready for new product launches
- Use video marketing
- Create referral and loyalty programs
#1: Consolidate Your Social Media Presence
Digital marketing is here to stay, and this should come as no surprise to your business. And what better way to increase customer interest and engage with your existing audience than by using social media?
Therefore, every marketer’s sales promotion strategy should include social media lead generation in some form. Finding leads through social media can help you stay in contact with potential customers and let them know of new brand updates, sales plans, or new products.
Expanding your brand across multiple social media platforms allows you to establish yourself as a trusted source and generate new leads by reaching more people.
One thing you can do is to post lead magnets on social media. This will help you gather email addresses that you can then use to nurture leads through email marketing, which you can also use as a tool for sales promotions. Additionally, consider incorporating outreach emails as part of your strategy. Crafting compelling outreach emails can be an effective way to initiate and cultivate meaningful connections with potential leads, further enhancing your overall email marketing and sales promotion efforts.
Moreover, consider creating a cohesive brand image by keeping your branding consistent on all your media pages. Use the same color scheme, image style, and font for the text wherever possible.
To win more leads and engage more individuals with your business, make sure your pages look professional with high-quality images.
Real Life Sales Promotion Examples
The color scheme of your brand should be recognizable on all of your social media channels. For example, whether it’s Instagram or LinkedIn, you can easily spot SocialBee’s posts based on the touches of yellow, black, and white, which all happen to be the colours of a bee.
Social Bee’s Instagram Feed
So, if you come across pictures like this one from our sales promotion campaign, our loyal customers could easily recognize us from a prior interaction, and they will be more likely to repeat purchases. Through a simple, yet effective color scheme, we stay at the top of our mind of our customers.
Using Hashtags on Social Media
TikTok has become the latest emerging social media platform to generate viral video content.
Nowadays, small businesses have modernized their sales promotions and marketing techniques by uploading short product packaging videos, focusing on an aesthetically pleasing process.
Sales and marketing teams use hashtags such as ‘#handmade’, ‘#limitedoffer’, ‘#newproduct’ and ‘#smallbusiness’ to gain attention for their products, utilizing TikTok to appeal to their niche audiences and win more leads.
You can reach a wider audience by using hashtags in your sales promotions content. Adding hashtags can also boost the number of leads you get, as your content may be more easily found. But this is not the only reason to use them.
For instance, on Twitter, you can’t write more than 280 characters. Using a few hashtags instead of writing a couple of sentences will add context to your post without taking too much from the character count you can use for your main message.
These are our main tips when it comes to using hashtags on social media:
- Respect the hashtag requirements of each platform
- Research relevant hashtags
- Use niche & industry-specific hashtags
- Create branded hashtags
- Keep your hashtags short
You can use hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok to better describe the topic of your posts and reach a larger audience.
The goal of your research should be to find valuable hashtags and organize them in collections depending on their topic and popularity. You can easily do this by using a social media management tool. SocialBee allows you to create multiple hashtag collections and add them to your posts with just one click directly from the content editor.
Start your free 14-day trial today and start improving your hashtag strategy with SocialBee!
Real Life Sales Promotion Example
One sales promotion example is the TikTok user Asani Brand, which uses the hashtags frequently and has accumulated 4.9 million views and 526K followers. It shows how hashtags on social media can generate new leads and effectively market your brand.
Asani keeps their hashtags readable, making it easier for your audience to understand the context of their posts. Not only this but avoiding long hashtags improves the aesthetic of their social media content.
Another way to boost leads through TikTok is to invest in services like SocialBee that help you share content easier and faster than ever. You will have all the management tools to create, edit, schedule, and post on your TikTok accounts!
Post on TikTok with SocialBee!
#2: Consider Giveaways and Flash Sales
Giveaways are contests in which companies offer participants a chance to win free samples as prizes, usually by random selection.
You can increase your followers, boost engagement and gain brand awareness by hosting a giveaway on your brand’s social media pages.
A company may state different requirements for participants to be eligible for the giveaway, such as liking and commentig, tagging friends, re-sharing content, etc.
Participants can also tag a friend in the comments below your giveaway post to directly expose your brand to new leads. The increase in engagement may help boost your social media’s position in algorithms, helping your brand reach new audiences.
Real Life Sales Promotion Examples
For a limited amount of time, people can like, comment, and share this image with the potential of winning a charcuterie board. Sounds yummy, doesn’t it?
One advantage of giveaways is that it can convince customers to engage with your brand and generate reactions in a quick period of time.
How to choose the perfect prize for your giveaway?
For a very short period of time, you can increase site visitors and customer spends through limited time free shipping offers, offering a free gift, 1+1 packages, or a reduced price for specific items.
#3: Get Ready for New Product Launches
Product launches are one of the greatest sales promotion techniques. They are amazing opportunities to generate new leads for your business, create hype around your brand and boost your sales.
To gain new leads through your product launch, you first must create an effective promotion strategy on all your marketing channels.
To conduct the fruitful promotion of products:
- Include engaging language
- Use high-quality images
- Add a direct link in which customers can follow to sign up to email marketing, as well as purchase new items or services
In fact, a good flash sale idea could be to offer customers a discount if they pre-order a product ahead of time.
Use an embedded link with a short but snappy “call to action” phrase, so that customers can easily go to your website and boost your traffic as a result.
With an optimized website, businesses can use the launch of a new product to not only win new leads and build brand awareness, but to also stimulate sales from both loyal and prospective customers.
Real Life Sales Promotion Example
Take a look at one of the greatest sales promotion examples, an email product launch for the Apple Watch Series 4:
Apple uses short sentences to create a sense of hype, focusing on the product benefits and how these positively affect the consumer.
With two calls to action through the hyperlinks of ‘learn more’ and ‘find a store,’ leads are forwarded towards business pages, social media pages, and websites.
In a tried and true way, successful email marketing campaigns for product launches are usually split in three main stages:
- The preparation: something new is coming, but you can’t tell what yet. You are working on something, but nothing is revealed.
- The hint: Maybe it’s an upgrade to an already existing service or something completely new, you are throwing hints here and there about what is being launched. You know how to keep us in suspense, don’t you?
- The reveal: It’s time for your customers to know what new product is being launched! Usually, the reveal consists also in pre-order offers and discounts that can benefit the first ones to try your newly launched product.
#4: Use Video Marketing
The use of video marketing in sales promotions can help you generate more leads by enhancing audience engagement and growth.
With recent research discovering that video marketing has the potential to boost click-through rates by up to 300%, brands can use videos to enhance their emails, website, and social media pages. In fact, a video that goes viral will generate buzz and help you create demand.
With videos, users can access a wealth of information over a multi-modal discipline, utilizing a listening and viewing experience to advertise your brand. Therefore, a high-quality video can increase trust by presenting the brand as a professional business, even if the customer has never heard of the brand before.
This is essential for businesses that are trying to generate leads—and it doesn’t have to be expensive, either.
Real Life Sales Promotion Example
A great example of video marketing being used effectively is this IKEA YouTube video, which is one of the greatest sales promotion examples.
IKEA has adapted the style of their video to fit the growing trend of ‘ASMR’ on YouTube, even though the video is primarily an advertisement. By taking advantage of trending videos, you can increase traffic and win more leads.
The IKEA example shows that engaging with an ASMR style video attracted over 3.1 million views, with comments praising the marketing strategy as innovative. Posting marketing videos on YouTube also makes the content more shareable, increasing your lead generation.
Furthermore, you can also offer your leads the option to subscribe to your channel, enabling you to further market to them.
Video marketing offers a modern approach that is appealing to more prospective customers. Most consumers will find it easier to absorb information and advertisements this way, leading to a higher retention of consumer attention.
#5: Create Referral and Loyalty Programs
Prospects often find out about your brand through word of mouth. In fact, word of mouth is one of the most effective sales promotions techniques.
This is why referral marketing and loyalty programs are great sales promotion examples you can use to generate positive word of mouth for your brand and gain the trust of your potential customers, which can later on turn into customer loyalty.
Why Do We Use Brand Ambassadors?
A great sales promotion idea is having brand ambassadors. It’s proven that customers respond better to feedback from people they already know, so this is the opportunity you need to generate more brand awareness and attract new customers.
In fact, the easiest sales promo idea is to generate a discount code for a previous client that they can share with their personal networks. You can even offer them cashback promotions based on the number of people that have used their discount coupon.
So, without much implication from your side, you can attract potential customers, and following the advice from industry experts or learning from the best books for sales, you can make the already existing ones to repeat business purchases.
Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?
How to Create a Loyalty Program
Besides brand ambassadors, there are many other methods in which you can create a loyalty program to engage with your existing customers, whether you offer discounts or a limited time offer. What you want is to gather a community that believes in your brand and your brand’s values.
It’s important to offer the people in your community some benefits to make them feel appreciated for their devotion.
Some examples to include in your sales promotion strategy in order to both reward customers and boost customer buys:
- One-time free sales promotions
- A one-time significant discounted price for the next purchase
- A free product accompanying a more expensive purchase
- Referral discounts for social media shares
- Creating an entire referral program
- Free shipping or reduced shipping costs
- Branded gifts
- Gift card promotions
- Sign-up promotions
- A flash sale for members only
Real Life Sales Promotion Example
One of the most well-known and internationally used loyalty programs to increase sales is Amazon Prime.
While subscribing to Amazon Prime, users can benefit from free delivery, exclusive deals, as well as other incentives, like Amazon’s streaming service or Prime Day sales. It combines loyalty programs with a subscription service. It requires customers to pay an upfront fee, and then customers spend more on Amazon to at least compensate for the membership fee. It is a method of persuading customers to buy exclusively from Amazon. And it works: Prime members spend four times more than other Amazon customers.
It’s Time for You to Build Your Sales Campaigns!
Many physical and online businesses are sales promotion strategies to increase sales by engaging with regular customers and attracting new ones!
So what’s stopping you from implementing your own sales promotions? Consider addressing the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) factor for your target audience. Clearly communicate the benefits and value propositions that your sales promotions bring to your customers. Understanding and highlighting the WIIFM aspect can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your promotional efforts, as it directly appeals to the needs and interests of your audience.
Whether it’s flash sales, video marketing, or giveaways, you now have the tools and knowledge to make the most out of whatever type of sales promotions you choose.
And worry not, we are here to help you make the most out of your sales promotions through our social media tool. Let’s use marketing automation in your favor!
Keep in mind that you can create, manage, plan, and post content to all of your social media channels from one location: SocialBee. Isn’t that the dream?
Begin your 14-day free trial today and make content creation faster and easier than ever before!
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