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Artefact Team
Creative Graphic Design
Dublin, Ireland

Promotions

BOGOFF! Not the insult it may sound like. It just means Buy One, Get One For FREE! Together with discounts, free samples, free trial periods, free limited versions, special offers, coupons, special low price off-peak season deals and other variations, Bogoff is simply a popular form of promotion. A promotion may be defined as an inducement to customers to try your product. Have you ever had your shoes shined for free at a trade exhibition - the idea being that you would be so impressed by the special new shoe polish being demonstrated, you would immediately stock up on it?

Most products and services are amenable to one form of promotion or another. If you are selling a house a 'buy one get one free' promotion is clearly not an option unless perhaps the house is in a war zone but there may be other things you can do like throw in the carpets and curtains to sweeten the deal. Sellers of software will often give a thirty day free trial period, or will let you download a version with enough functionality to allow you to see the potential of the product - once you're hooked it readily becomes apparent that in order to enjoy its real benefits you will have to order the complete product.

Let us put a new paradigm to you. The traditional model for getting a product from seller to buyer was primarily seller centred. The door to door brush salesman is the archetype of this model. He gets his foot in the door, delivers his sales pitch, maybe does a quick demo and by force of personality and technique virtually bullies the housewife into buying something even if she does not really want it. In a much less obvious way the big corporations were doing much the same thing - by not offering choice, by not offering customisation, by setting delivery dates and arrangements to suit themselves, by making the product available in the stores that suited them, by deliberately failing to standardise or to facilitate comparisons with competing products and so on. It still happens. But here's the key point - the internet does not let them work that way. The internet is buyer centred! The buyer has control of the mouse and can compare all competing offerings before settling on the one that suits him or her.

What this means is that being good at snake-oil-salesmanship is not as important as it was. What is very important now is being good at making it easier for the buyer to buy - and that's what marketing is about. If you simply equate marketing with selling there is a fundamental mistake in your thinking which will cost you.

An important part of making it easy to buy the product is making it easy to try the product! That's what promotion is about. So what are you marketing, and what can you do to supplement your advertising efforts and your publicity efforts with some effective promotional strategies?

Here's an example of a recent promotion from Macintosh - giving away something free as an inducement to purchase:

"Buy a Power Macintosh G3 before Sept. 25 and choose 128 MB RAM or an HP DeskJet 810c printer at no additional cost."

If you take a trip around the web you will find that in the case of almost everything out there for sale, you get inducements like 'first 30 days free', or 'download the trial version free' or 'win a vacation!' or '20,000 free banner impressions when you register' - and so on.That's promotion and you should be thinking about how you can sweeten the deal for your customers with a promotion of your own.