Maybe you have an offer you want to highlight, or a group class you’re going to give in a few months.
This offer is important to you. You’ve put a lot of care into crafting it and now you want to help it find its way to the hands and hearts of your ideal clients. You want to make sure you’re doing your marketing right.
This is right where one of my clients is at in her business building journey. We’ve been working together, figuring out who she helps and what she helps them with, creating a compelling offer, and aligning her website copy. It is now time to start planning to promote an event she has coming up in a few months. So exciting!
She said she’s ready to start taking notes, because when she fully jumps into promoting her event, she wants to make sure she’s doing it right.
I told her the good news is there aren't a whole lot of rules to follow; you can’t really do it wrong.
There are, however, some important principles and general guidelines to keep in mind.
I’m going to walk through those for you in today’s article.
Four Principles of Successful Promotional Campaigns
People Need to Hear About Things More Than Once to Remember
There are reams of advertising research and science-based memory studies that debate how many times someone needs to hear about something before they remember it. (I’ve heard anywhere from three to five to over seven). The number itself doesn’t matter that much.
What it means though is when someone reads your promotion, they might forget about it if they don’t hear about it again.
This may not be fully true for your current clients or members of your audience that may have been following you for some time and already have a level of trust built up, but for others it is.
For your promotional campaigns, repeated consistent communication is important.
People are in different spaces and in different times
Some people are email people. Some people are not. Some people read blog posts, some don’t. Some people watch videos, others can’t stand them if they’re over 5 minutes…
Some people hang out on Instagram. Others on Facebook or Twitter. Others only in your local coffee shop.
Some people hang out online or elsewhere for a loooooong time, other people pop in from time to time.
You get the idea. Different people are in different places and at different times and with different levels of engagement. Traditional marketing would have you either cover them all; or at a minimum identify where your ideal client is at and when she’s engaging and target that with your promotions. The truth is, unless your Coca-Cola and have their marketing budget, that’s just not realistic or sustainable.
What works much better is to plan an email campaign and, if you’re on social media, a reasonable social campaign and leverage content back and forth. Choose a sustainable schedule based on what you can consistently plan for and commit to, and then start paying to attention over time what, if anything, seems to work for your audience.
People Need Time to Make a Decision
I’ve written about this elsewhere. People need time to see if the time is right for them to say yes to your offer.
It’s true that some people are very intuitive, and they can make a decision relatively quickly. You might be one of those people. You know when it's right and then you act. But not everyone makes decisions that way. Maybe they’re not as connected to their inner knowing or they struggle with self-doubt.
For those people, they need more time to decide. And even once they’ve decided, they might need to arrange their schedule or speak to their spouse or partner. They need time to discuss important things, like money, time and other commitments they may have ongoing.
So what does this mean in terms of your promotional campaign? It means you have to start early enough to give people time to make those decisions.
Go All the Way to the Finish Line
I’m not a huge fan of sports’ analogies, but sometimes they just work. This principle is about planning your campaign and carrying it all the way through to the end. Now, if you sell out your group program, then, you obviously don’t have to keep promoting it! But otherwise, keep your promotion up until the end of the planned promotion period or until it’s full.
What sometimes happens to some business owners is they start out their campaign strong and then they just sort of fade away. This usually happens because of unrealistic expectations:
Time and content
This might happen because they haven’t really understood how much preparation is needed or how much time it takes when you run one of these campaigns for the first time.
Results
The other thing that might be happening is they might not have realistic expectations about their results, and then if the offer isn’t getting a lot of people signing up, they get down. Maybe they have a transactional relationship with their marketing. Or perhaps they have been influenced to believe they can expect phenomenal results right out of the gate, no matter what their exposure or audience size is.
So, in your next marketing campaign go the distance. Keep promoting throughout the entire campaign until your deadline to sign up. Or until your event or class fills up.
Be Yourself
This is actually the idea that underlies all the others, a foundation of authentic marketing. When you create your campaign materials, be you, the real you. Authenticity is magnetic. When you’re authentic in your marketing, and freely sharing your essence, people can sense your genuineness and are more willing to trust you.
And remember, when promoting your offer, tell people about your offer often, so they don’t’ forget about it. Tell them about it in a few different ways, because they’re in different places at different times. Give them enough time to make a decision, and keep promoting your offer no matter what initial response looks like.
This way, you can worry less about getting it right and more about meeting your ideal clients right where there at.