Ways to Promote Your Business Products & Services to Potential Customers

Having carefully designed a product or service which can satisfy the needs of your potential customers, it is time to let them know that the solution is at hand. You need to find the best way to communicate with your customers.

Promotion includes all the activities and logical messages you design to communicate with potential customers to persuade them to buy from you. Some of these activities may include:

1- Advertising

2- Sharing information about discounts

3- Personal (one -on-one) selling

4- Public Relations

Advertising

With this promotional method, there’s no direct contact with the prospect. It involves the use of media like billboards, banners, and print Ads in the newspapers and magazines.

The advantage with advertising is that it gets very specific audiences. You also have control over the content by choosing what to say about your products or services and how to say it.

Advertising can achieve mass reach for example, an advert on super sport 3 during a live match broadcast can reach many millions of football lovers.

Adverts can also be placed on the web i.e. online advertising or digital advertising. You may also choose traditional media like TV, and radio which are in the category of offline advertising.

Public Relations

This is where a business gets positive mentions by a 3rd party in a magazine or during a TV show. You may also get a tweet from one happy customer. This type of publicity is what marketers call earned.

Apart from earned mentions, the company may have owned publicity or mentions from their own channels like a Twitter handle and press releases.

As a sales team you need to have your hands on all the three content types – earned, paid, and owned.

Word of Mouth

Word of mouth (WOM) is one of the most effective ways to gain new customers. This can be through writing a good review on Google Business Profile, Facebook or Amazon.

You can also engage in word-of-mouth marketing by encouraging your customers to provide positive comments, reviews, and referrals.

You may attach a reward to this although Google discourages business owners from obtaining paid reviews on their profiles. The best way is to request your customers to give genuine positive reviews at no cost.

Influencer Marketing

Your business may also get paid or earned mentions from an influential individual. This may be a TV star, actress or Media personality with a large following on Twitter or Instagram.

Influencers have loyal audiences that trust what they say. An endorsement from one of them can be a win for your business. You may pay cash or give them free products.

Sales Promotion

One of the most important promotional strategies is a sales promotion. This is a temporary offer that is intended to incentivize your customers to buy.

For example, your products may be new and customers are not sure if they’ll like it. You can give a free trial so that they can try it before buying. Sales promotion can also take the form of a coupon in the case of expensive products.

PROMOTIONAL MIX

For you to achieve your sales targets, you may have to run a promotional campaign using both online and offline advertising.

We call this combination of methods a promotional mix. Your promotional mix will depend on the position of your potential customers in the purchase funnel.

Awareness Stage

For prospects who are not yet aware of your products or services, you can start by writing a generic post about how your products or services. This can be on your website or blog platforms.

Interest Stage

For prospects who are at the stage where thy have gained interest in your product you can run an advert about the features and benefits of your product design. Your prospects who see the Ad can easily get the desire to consider a purchase.

Desire

For those who have the desire to make a purchase, your focus should be on running adverts which portray your product is more superior than the competition. This should target those who are searching for you on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Bing.

Action

In order to trigger action, you can give a 15% discount. This can be shared via email to your subscribers.

When making your promotional decision, you should also be guided by your budget. A small budget may not allow for things like TV advertising.

You should also consider the nature of your product. Some products like computer application may benefits more from mobile advertising than a furniture show room.

Try to figure out where your prospects or target market can easily find information about your products or services.