Product Promotion: Elevating Your Product Visibility

Is getting your product out there taking a toll on you? Product promotion can take more effort and resources than you imagine! You may have the best quality or the most innovative product but if you lack the right strategies to make it visible to the right audience, it just sits in your warehouse. 

Sales and marketing are very powerful tools; about 87% of sales and marketing leaders say intertwining sales and marketing encourages critical business growth. Moreover, market research reveals that small businesses usually invest between 7% and 8% of their revenue in promotions, while startups may spend between 3% and 5% before establishing themselves well.

So, let’s understand how product promotion can add those extra millions to your revenue.

Product Promotion: Strategies for Success

Here are some effective ways to let a wider audience know, test, and try your product:

1. Discounts and Offers

A study reveals that nearly 93% of buyers apply a discount or coupon code throughout the year, which means a vast majority is mostly in search of a good deal. 

For new product launches, offering a coupon, combo offer, or free shipping to new buyers is a great strategy to lure them. There may be customers who find your product interesting or useful but don’t want to pay as much. A discount will give them the needed push to buy it. 

Setting a time limit on the offer would be a cherry on top for your business, as it will create a sense of urgency and motivate them to take the irresistible deal. This will work wonders especially if it’s the holiday season, when people are looking to spend lavishly. 

2. Content and Email Marketing

Before you launch or relaunch a product, you can create a buzz around it through social media campaigns, blog posts, or a press release from your brand. You could also use email marketing to excite your customers about the upcoming launch. 

A survey by experts suggests that content marketing, at 32%, is the third most prominent source of customer retention, email marketing being the primary medium at 58%, followed by social media marketing (32%).

Moreover, 97% of marketers achieved success with their content marketing in 2023, as per a Semrush survey. You can leverage many channels like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and more. Especially, using the video ad formats on these platforms can demonstrate your product’s features and functions clearly to your potential and existing customers. 

If you use the right mix of digital advertising strategies, it can give you a jumpstart by helping you reach audiences on multiple channels. 

3. Brand Collaborations

Joining hands with the right influencer in your industry or market with a well-thought-out product promotion strategy can become an effective route to reach a niche or targeted audience. According to Matter Communications, 69% of consumers trust recommendations from influencers.

It can help you increase brand awareness, or establish credibility through a person that the audience already trusts. Plus, you’re at an advantage if your targeted audience is GenZ. Studies show that GenZs often trust influencers over celebrities. 

After finding the right influencer, hand them over some samples of the products you want to promote. For example, a famous food blogger can promote a brand from the food industry, as they would have followers who love to try new food recipes or items. 

4. Marketing Events

You could kickstart your product launch with virtual or in-person events to connect with potential customers. It is a fun way to engage people who show interest in your brand. 

Marketing events like soirees, fests, influencer gatherings, live broadcasts through social media, and many others entice your customer base. You can show off the features and creative packaging, give out free samples or offers, and do more at such events. 

The more creative your sales promotion approach would be, the better the engagement. You can use behind-the-scenes demonstrations or a compelling story for your product promotion. For instance, Apple almost always nails its product launch events and is even known for it. 

Power of Product Promotion: Importance Explored

Effective product promotion is the backbone for increasing brand awareness among your target audience, informing potential customers about new product launches, and more. It piques the interest of your prospects by giving them a sneak peek into your product’s unique features and benefits. 

Promotional activities, like discounts and limited-time offers, beget high demand by creating a sense of urgency in consumers while offering them a cracking deal they can’t refuse. Consistent promotion gives your brand recognition and strengthens its identity, which creates credibility and trust in people through repeated exposure. 

Moreover, strategic promotion gives you a competitive edge by differentiating your products from other similar ones in the market and showcasing their unique selling points. 

Ultimately, it drives home more sales and revenue through leads and higher conversions. Another perk is the engagement and feedback you get from customers, which you can use to improve your marketing strategy or product.

How Does Product Promotion Influence Product Management?

Before beginning product promotion, product managers do thorough market research to figure out the brand’s target audience, their preferences, needs, and pain points. This helps convey the right marketing message to the right people, through appropriate channels. 

They, then, define the value proposition of the product and communicate it to the desired audience. It encompasses letting customers know what problem your product solves, its benefits, and why customers should choose it over other products in the market.  

The managers align their product promotion efforts with the overall goals and objectives to achieve with the product. They set specific parameters, like customer acquisition, revenue targets, or conversion rates to see how effective the promotional campaign is.

Their next move is to develop marketing strategies, based on their market research and product positioning, by collaborating with cross-functional teams, like marketing, sales, design, etc. These strategies involve having the right mix of promotional channels and creating marketing messages that resonate with different audience segments.

Product managers regularly track the performance of these promotional campaigns, collecting data and insights to measure their effectiveness. Product promotions are also great feedback loops that managers use to gather comments or product experiences from prospects and existing customers during promotional activities and make improvements wherever necessary. 

Product Promotion: Steps to Follow

Here’s the trail to follow for your product promotions: 

1. Evaluate the Product 

You need to consider these things to effectively promote an item:

2. Design Ad Campaign

Collaborate with your design team to come up with fun and attractive product packaging to match the marketing strategy. Your ad’s theme must revolve around the features you want to promote. 

For example, the Sass Bar promotes its recently launched dusk body wash cleanser in packaging that looks like a milk carton. This strategy totally encapsulates the idea of their body wash using plant-based milk as the main ingredient in the formula. 

Create print and digital advertisements to publish immediately after the product’s launch.

3. Release the Product

After all the thinking and designing, it’s time to unleash the product to your audience, using your promotional strategy. You may seek support from your loyal customers and the press to give out information ahead of the launch. 

Providing a launch date is also a good idea to build curiosity and excitement around your new product.

4. Promote the Product

After the launch, intrigue your existing customer base to buy and try the new product. You can use a mix of product promotion strategies to get your message through. Reward these customers by offering them exclusive referral discounts or other offers.

Strategic Approaches to Promoting Products

Here is how you can have more people singing praises for your products:

• Tap Target Audience: Dive deep into research to figure out your target audience’s demographics, preferences, needs, and pain points. Understanding these prospects will help you design your promotional strategies accordingly. 
• Select Appropriate Channels: Opt for the channels where your desired audience is and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly. You may use digital channels like social media, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), and even offline channels, including events, print advertising, and direct mail.
• Make Interesting Content: You can use different ideas like product demonstrations, videos, customer testimonials, infographics, blog posts, and more to create high-quality and engaging content that properly shows your product’s features, value proposition, and benefits. 
• Updo Your Brand Website: Turn your website into a digital space where people want to stay longer and enjoy their experience. If your website has things like user-friendly navigation, clear product information, compelling calls-to-action (CTAs), and a simple and easy checkout process, it can impress your buyers. 
• Get on Social Media: With social media’s fame and power, you can pull customers in by bonding well with your target audience, sharing some valuable content, and marketing your products. Reply to their comments, share the posts they make about your products, and release ad campaigns to win their hearts.
• Do Email Marketing: Create an email list of subscribers interested in your products and regularly communicate with them by sending targeted emails, like discounts, new product launches, or other offers. You can even personalise these emails based on subscribers’ purchasing behaviour and preferences to get a better response. 
• Analyse Outcomes: Regularly track the performance of your marketing campaigns to see if they’re working well or giving you the desired outcome. This will help you deconstruct and reconstruct your product promotion strategies for better results. 

The Benefits of Product Promotion

Promoting your products does a lot of good for your business: 

• More visibility: Product promotion activities give your brand and product the visibility they need. More potential customers get to know about your business, adding more brand recognition and recall.
• Increased Demand: You’ll find more prospects drooling over your product when you extend discounts, offers, and other lucrative deals. It stimulates demand and helps you sell and earn more. 
• Bigger Audience: You can become a beloved brand name in new markets or consumer segments by promoting your products to diverse audiences through various channels. It provides new expansion and growth opportunities for you.
• Customer Relationships: Product promotions are one of the most amazing ways to connect with your customers. It strengthens the bond between you and your customers, building brand loyalty.
• Competitive Edge: Strategic product promotion helps you differentiate your product from rival brands, helping you sell or promote the unique features of your offerings. 
• Hiked Profits: Promotions, coupons, discounts, creative storytelling, and special incentives can motivate people to buy your product and fill your pockets through more profits.

Navigating the Downsides: Limitations of Product Promotion

Here’s the flip side of product promotions for you to be aware of while marketing your products: 

Product promotion activities don’t come for free! You need a considerable investment to get your message through a broader and new audience. It means keeping a hefty budget for advertising and marketing materials aside.

If the marketing goes south for you with excessive promotion or discounting, it can dampen your brand’s image. For instance, some studies confirm that many consumers relate discounted products with a lack of product/brand performance.

As it goes for most things in life, customers may take receiving discounts or offers from you for granted if you overdo it. It can set unrealistic expectations among buyers, leading them to only buy when there’s an ongoing sale or offer at your store.

When selling in highly competitive markets, over-promotion can saturate channels and make it difficult to break through the clutter and get audience attention.

If you heavily rely on promotional offers or discounts to sell your products or execute poorly planned promotional activities, it can cut into your profits and negatively impact your revenue. 

Product Promotion Across Industries: Versatile Applications

If you’re wondering how to apply product promotion for your brand, here are some reasonable answers:

• Product Launches and Relaunches

Do extensive product promotions when you want to launch a new product or relaunch one with an added feature or new flavour. These marketing tactics build anticipation and excitement in people, driving initial sales.

• End-of-Season or Clearance Sales

If you have excessive inventory that won’t sell out, put it out on sale or at discounted prices and use product promotions to encourage customers to buy those products. 

• Occasional Campaigns

Holidays (Diwali, Christmas, etc.), season-change, or special events are the best time to capitalise on the increased purchasing power and buying intention of consumers. Use your promotional campaigns to drive more traffic at your stores. 

• Rebranding 

If you’re thinking of rebranding or repositioning, the right promotional activities will help you change consumer perceptions or even target new markets.

• Acquiring Customers

Promotional incentives, like special offers, discounts, or other deals can attract new customers, adding more prospects to your customer pool.

• Retaining Customers

Initiating loyalty programs, personalised promotions, and exclusive offers for your existing customers can woo them to buy repeatedly from you and stay loyal to your brand.

Real-world Product Promotion Examples

Let’s look at some brands that took product promotion to a new level: 

• KitKat asked the Twitch community to take a break

After almost nine decades of debuting their chocolate-covered wafer, KitKat reached out to Amazon Ads to capture the interest of adult millennial and Gen Z shoppers. By creating Twitch premium video ads, KatKat struck chords with a highly engaged community, reminding the viewers that “Even the best champ needs a break.” It’s a new and refreshing take on their tagline.

After this, there was a buzz on social media as well where people took up the challenge of breaking KitKat chocolate sticks into a perfect half. Many influencers enjoyed and promoted this challenge. 

• HARPIC spread awareness about their Flushmatic tablet in India

Upon noticing the lukewarm reviews for their Flushmatic toilet cleaner, Harpic launched a new version of the product and wanted to convey the updates to its customers. 

They did this by engaging audiences through display ads and an interactive quiz that may turn into a coupon for them. As a result, the parent company Reckitt succeeded in educating customers and supporting conversion.

• HP leveraged Amazon Business to relaunch their 1005W laser printer series

In 2022, when HP thought of relaunching their laser printer series with a new ink-tank technology, they collaborated with Amazon Ads to make a full-funnel promotional campaign. 

As Amazon Business caters to over 2 million verified B2B Indian customers, HP could tap small businesses and re-engage audiences that previously had shown their interest in printers.

• CHEETOS Mac ’n Cheese gets Millennials’ attention

Cheetos combined one of their wildly popular products with a comfort-food staple, PepsiCo to add more Cheetos lovers to their customer base by reaching new-to-brand millennials through Cheetos Mac ’n Cheese. 

This campaign used major audience insights across Amazon DSP. Consequently, Cheetos witnessed a lift in ad awareness, customer purchase intent, and brand preference.

Key Insights for Effective Product Promotion

Follow these tips to effectively promote your products:

• Time-sensitivity: Timing is what helps you hit the sweet spot! You must promote your products just around the time of its launch, and make extra efforts to market after launch as well. It makes the product more relevant to your customers or prospects. 
• Know your prospects: Make sure to get into the psyche of your potential buyers before you design your product promotion campaigns. Learn about their key demographics to decide how to market the product to them.
• Using multiple tactics: You’ll mostly need a good marketing mix to promote your product effectively. Using different promotional resources can help you reach diverse customer groups and have a broader sales audience.
• Befriend social media: People spend hours scrolling through and engaging on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media channels. 
• So, leverage these consumer favourites to carry out product promotions. Shares and likes on your brand’s social posts can even get you some organic marketing and sales without spending much on advertisements.
• Global promotion: If you want to promote your product in foreign markets, keep the global audience in mind while designing campaigns. Research how the images, message tone, and language choices in your promotional materials can differ in global markets.

Conclusion

Get your product out in the market with a bang! Product promotions excite and intrigue people to find out more about your offerings or brand. Think of a conducive strategy that pushes your message creatively to your target audience. 

Weighing the benefits and drawbacks of product promotions, create your marketing mix that shines your product in a positive light, and makes it irresistible to consumers.