It’s imperative to generate more awareness and demand in order to bring more business in the door. This step helps you understand specific ways to ramp up interest from the market.
LEARN ABOUT SIX PUBLIC OUTREACH IDEAS:
- Promotions
- Creative Advertising Ideas
- Campaigns and Continuity
- Narrowcasting (vs. Broadcasting)
- Types of People to Target
- Networking
Promotions
Catching people’s attention isn’t easy these days. To do it, you have to make some noise, create some sizzle and be compelling. Special promotions do exactly that.
First and foremost, you have to decide on your objectives. For example, is your goal to create better branding and awareness for your business? Or is it the more direct objective of actually generating sales leads? Is it more focused on new customers or current ones?
From this fundamental level, you can start conjuring up your promotional concepts. You’ll have to identify something that’s consistent with your company’s brand and attractive to your type of customer. Believe it or not, your customer needn’t know exactly what your goal is; you may want to educate them about a new offer without them knowing that’s the purpose of the promotion.
It’s conceivable that people “enter to win” a reward that has nothing to do with what you sell – but in the process you can share information with them about what you do and why it’s potentially valuable to them. And it’s also conceivable that you wish to be blunter about your promotion. If you sell cars, want more buyers and want your promotion to get people onto your lot, a car-lease giveaway may be just the thing.
You should factor into this decision the actual delivery method. You might decide the Internet is the best way to get the promotion in front of your desired audience. Or you might choose to place sign-up sheets at your social club or to display your promotion next to the cash registers in local stores. It’s up to you to decide how best to reach your target given their preferences, your objectives and your budget.
A piece of advice that always seems to make promotions more effective: Create urgency. You can just hear it ringing in your head – “For a limited time!” or “While supplies last!” – and it’s proven to work.