Setting promotional objectives

Promotion is what you do to generate demand for your products and services. Here’s how you do it. Before you send any promotional message, you must first determine the objectives of the program. For any new product or service, you must create basic awareness. Hey, customers need to know that your product or service exists before they can even consider buying it. Basic awareness is achieved when the customer simply recognizes your product or service when they see it or hear it mentioned. After you create basic awareness, you want to achieve top-of-mind awareness. Now the customer not only knows your product, but also would recall it first if they were asked to list names of products in a particular category. Another objective might be information awareness. This is where the customer can actually explain something about your product to others, perhaps about its features, its performance, or how to use the product. Finally, your promotion objective might be to cause some type of behavior, where you are suggesting that they actually do something. That behavior may be as simple as going to your website, or it may be more aggressive, such as asking the customer to buy the product. Now, notice how these objectives are more complicated and difficult to achieve as we go from basic awareness all the way to behavior objectives. It’s typically more expensive as you set more difficult objectives. You set your objectives depending on your value proposition. Look at your Five-Box Positioning Tool, especially in the desired belief and desired do. And of course, the value proposition itself. What are you hoping to communicate? And how does that translate into one of the four promotional objectives? Once you set an objective, you’re ready to communicate to the market.