Easy Marketing Promotions

I have always felt that easy marketing promotions were broadly applied but not always very well thought out. Promotional marketing in some ways is generally a pretty good idea for a wide variety of things. You may hand out things like stickers, pens, or other little trinkets with your brand name on it. This is an ideal way to spend little money on an advertising campaign that will generate some degree of valuable name recognition. The question of how effective these easy promotional marketing campaigns are is open, however. If I open my pen drawer, I will find literally dozens of promotional pens and pencils in there, but I couldn't name a single brand offhand. Unless you sell something like stationary which people associate with pens, these type of promotional giveaways are nothing but a waste of your money.

In my sincere opinion – and I always inform my clients of this – marketing promotions should only be done for special purposes. Guerrilla marketing can work remarkably well depending on what kind of product or service you sell, but this easy marketing promotion must be carefully tailored to ones needs. Just going out into a public square and holding a contest or giving away a product will not generate any business for you at all. You need to think, strategically.

One of my all time favorite places to do marketing promotions is at various clubs and bars. When people are drinking, they will do what they can to win anything. Whether you are giving away food, drink mixers, or banners, people will get excited about your marketing promotion. If they get to come home with a souvenir for their efforts, they will forever associate it with the fun of going out drinking with friends. This is what successful marketing promotions aim to do – create those kinds of positive associations around your product or brand name.

Warm summer afternoons are also a great time for marketing promotions. If you are willing to spend a few thousand dollars giving away free drinks in a crowded public thoroughfare, people will absolutely love you. Even if you are giving out something that doesn't strictly go along with the weather – such as a salty or sweet snack – people will still be grateful as long as they get some water with it. If you can catch people at an unguarded moment, you can gain their brand loyalty before they even know what hit them. That is what successful marketing promotions are all about. Leave the brand-name pens at home!