The 4 p’s of marketing include promotion. I’ve covered the other 3 p’s in prior posts this series. Today’s post explains four questions about promotion. By answering these questions, you, as a small business owner, can improve your marketing.

4 P’s Of Marketing Question 17: Promotion - What percentage of the promotion budget should be advertising, sales, and other promotion tactics?

Answering the following three questions on promotion will aid you in answering this question. Your past marketing experience and knowledge of what has worked for your business influences how to spend your promotion budget.

The life cycle stage that your product is in, your target market, and your product itself also affect how you can most effectively spend your promotion budget.

How much money you have to spend also influences your promotion choices. Advertising can be expensive and eat a chunk from your budget quickly. Other tactics are less expensive but more labor intensive. So you have to consider the ratio of time and monetary resources you have to spend in your answer to this question.

4 P’s Of Marketing Question 18: Promotion - How well does the promotion mix match your business’ other marketing practices?

How you’ve marketed similar products in the past can provide you with valuable information and experiences for determining your promotion or marketing mix.

For example, maybe you have regularly advertised in a particular medium that reaches your target market, and it has provided you with good return on your advertising investment in the past. Perhaps you have a good relationship with a sales person at that medium who often offers you exceptional value on your advertising. Then it’s a good idea to at least test that medium for marketing your new product.

So look at what you’ve done in the past, determine if you can reach the target market for your new product doing the same things. Then base your decisions on how effective what you’ve done before has worked.

You do keep records on your marketing investments and return, don’t you? Records specific to your business can guide you better than almost any generic information that I can give you. Of course, you still need to test it with your new product and marketing campaign.

4 P’s Of Marketing Question 19: Promotion - How well does the promotion mix match the product, and its stage in the product life cycle?

Promotion tactics work better for some industries and products than for others. So part of your marketing mix decisions rely on what works best in your industry and for products like yours.

Now this doesn’t mean that you should do just what everybody else is doing. That’s the path to mediocrity. But you should use it as a guide and add more innovative and unique ideas to it. Of course you should test the results of every tactic you use.

If you’ve read my posts on product life stages, you know that you have to invest the most in marketing for the introductory stage. If you haven’t read them, click on the link below:

http://strategicmarketsegmentation.com/blog/birth-and-growth-through-your-marketing-product-life-cycle/

It will take you to one of my articles on the introductory and growth stages. It also links to my two posts on the mature and decline stages.

4 P’s Of Marketing Question 20: Promotion - How well does the promotion mix match the target market?

Answering this question requires that you have already identified your target market and know its members’ information needs and media preferences. For example, older Americans read newspapers and will likely see a newspaper advertisement, but twenty-something Americans can be better reached by word of mouth.

Traditional advertising reaches some markets well and fails measurable with other markets. Selling directly in person or over the telephone works well with Latinos if you speak Spanish, but doesn’t work as well with Caucasians.

So you need to decide where to put your promotion investments according to your target market.

You can get 20 Questions to Determine Your Four Ps Of Marketing. Just click the link.

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Posted 6-11-08: 4 P’s Of Marketing:
Promotion

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 6:41 am and is filed under Marketing Mix, Promotion.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.