Promotion is one of the 4 P’s in the Marketing mix. Each of the 4 P’s (Price, Product, Place and Promotion) must be effectively covered in order to successfully promote a product. In basic terms, promotion is the term concerned with any activity that is performed to let people know about a certain product or service. Due to the depth of the word, and its various uses in marketing, there are a lot of aspects of promotion. Therefore, to better understand the act of promotion, it is necessary to cover each of its individual aspects in detail.
Below are all of the aspects of promotion or the tools that marketers use to perform promotion:
1. Advertising:
Advertising is one of the components of the promotional mix. It involves the act of getting the word across about a business’ products and services. Advertising also involves the use of certain strategies that are concerned with advert placement and the frequency at which these ads are put out. Advertising is generally performed through the use of channels such as newspaper ads, radio ads, television ads, and internet ads. Far from being a new phenomenon, advertising can be dated back to as early as the 19th century.
2. Personal Selling:
Personal selling involves the use of customized, individually tailored, messages to potential prospects by sellers. These messages usually are in the form of face to face communication, correspondence on the phone, or personal correspondence. Unlike advertising which focuses on uniformed messages to the masses, messages delivered through personal selling can be changed according to the individual behavior. In addition, these messages can also be altered if they are not successful. However, unlike advertising, personal selling is quite time consuming and therefore only suitable for products that cater to niche markets.
3. Sales Promotion:
Sales promotion refers to an initiative taken by a company to force an increase in the number of sales its products make or simply to make people try out the product by handing out free samples or trials. Since different businesses use sales promotion in unique ways, it is quite hard to point out any sales promotion techniques that are universal. However, buy one get one free schemes and discount coupons are the common sales promotion techniques.
4. Publicity:
Publicity is the use of certain tactics to alter or manage the public perception of certain products or services. A common example of publicity is event sponsorship. Businesses can sponsor events of all types to increase its publicity. This act of promotion is generally cost effective in nature and builds great credibility. In addition, the possibility of reaching out to a huge number of people by sponsoring large scale events such as football games is ever present.
Source by Jafar Adam
