How to promote a product and market your business
Follow our top five tips on how to promote and market your product, business or service to ensure maximum success!
The key to a winning marketing strategy is not to limit yourself to one line of advertising – throughout creating your plan, make sure you focus not only on new customers, but on your existing database too. Include online and offline advertising, and ensure you make the best of the tools at your disposal.
How to promote a product through branding
Brand reinforcement
Your brand is your image, so make sure it’s a strong one! Consider some of the most memorable branding out there – what makes them so memorable? Is it a catchy slogan? ‘Eat Fresh!’ ‘Every Little Helps’ or ‘The best a man can get’ becomes integral to the brand and evokes immediate associations.
Perhaps it’s a memorable logo? Think of Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Disney, all of which use unique custom fonts to ensure their branding remains at the forefront of customers’ minds. Or could it be an image or video snippet that resonates with people? The galloping black horse of Lloyds bank, for example, is instantly recognisable. Whatever branding you’re choosing to go with, make sure that your branding is on point and comprehensive.
You may also want to ensure that your social media is kept up to date and has a certain ‘voice’. Recently, Aldi found fame with it’s hilarious social media posts, during the Colin vs Cuthbert the caterpillar controversy. As such, the supermarket’s popularity is continuing to rise. It’s worth reinforcing your brand with a strong, interesting and vocal social media presence that speaks ‘in the tone’ of your company. Not only will it mean you can advertise new products and offers, but it also provides you with a crucial likeability factor, meaning those products are more likely to be purchased!
Rebrand if necessary
Don’t be afraid to rebrand if needs be! If, for example, you were a nappy company and were branching out into cosmetics – you might not want to use the classic image of a baby to sell your makeup. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to use the word ‘cosmetic’ on your babycare products; all sorts of confusion would ensue!
A famous example of such a faux pas would be the haircare brand Clairol, known for Herbal Essences. Renowned for their evocative advertising and focussed branding, the shampoo giants tried to create a new hair product called ‘Yoghurt Shampoo’ – which, due to its branding and focus on the dairy product, many customers tried to eat!!
The moral of the story is this: create a strong brand, but don’t be afraid to rebrand for different products. Proctor and Gamble have multiple brands under their umbrella (Oral B, Gillette, Always, Ariel) and it’s certainly working well for them!
Marketing to your existing customers
If you’ve got a new product don’t forget to first market to your existing client base. Just because people know you for one product, doesn’t mean they won’t give another a go! Furthermore, your brand is already trusted, so you’ve got a head start on the competition.
Make sure to check in with your loyal customers at all stages, as they are the most likely to buy repeat products. Offer existing customers select discount codes on your new product, or perhaps a competition giveaway.
Alternatively, present your customers with exclusive behind the scenes tours; everyone loves to know how the sausage gets made! Tell them the story of your brand and new product. This will create an affable, likeable persona, making it more likely that customers will trust your brand time and time again, whatever the product.
Exclusivity is key for keeping existing customers happy. Let them be the first ones to be able to purchase your new product, or perhaps offer a ‘pre-launch’ event for your loyal customer base. You could even give out some freebies and ask your customers to test the product first – providing you with a hefty number of good reviews before the product officially is launched to the general public.
Find new customers
The next step for promoting your product is to find new customers. Advertise your product online through social media, PPC and Google Ads; try to focus on the audience that is most likely to buy your product, for example, a new Xbox game would be aimed primarily at young people.
Targeted ads are a useful tool. On Facebook, for example, you can create a profile of the type of person you’re trying to promote your product to: age, gender, location, interests etc. For example, if you’re selling a new kitchen appliance, you might target those who include ‘baking’ and ‘cooking’ in their hobbies.
Online is where it’s at for the moment, but don’t forget to advertise your product with offsite marketing too! Work with local newspapers, magazines, billboards etc to promote and market your product offline.
Ensure that you are targeting your hard marketing material advertisements. For example, you probably wouldn’t include your new brand of vegan burger in a magazine for meat eaters! Targeting your ad will give you the best chance of having a good take up of your product. A great example of good targeted advertising is including ads for stage schools in theatre programmes; you are guaranteed an interested audience, and an interested audience means an audience more likely to buy the product or service.
Let new customers find you!
A famous way of advertising is not promote your product, but to offer a solution to a problem. If you focus on this, you’ll be sure to draw people in.
For example, if you’re looking for an anti-dandruff shampoo, chances are you’ll type ‘how to stop dandruff’, ‘fix dandruff’ or ‘hair products for dandruff’ into Google – and hey presto you get Head an Shoulders! Make sure your online lexis and advertising solves a problem; the better at solving the problem, the more people will seek out your product.
Make yourself as accessible as possible! It’s a good idea to have a visible digital presence; this means social media, website, blogs etc. Try to get your previous customers to leave authentic Google reviews, as this will help with your visibility. Consider spending some time and money on SEO, to ensure that your website is visible on the first page of a google search for the appropriate product. After all, there’s not many people who are going to scroll through to page 7 or 8 to find you!
And accessibility goes for the checkout stage too! There’s nothing worse than finding a product you want to try and not being able to purchase it swiftly and easily. Make your product as buyable as possible; include Paypal and GooglePay as purchase options and ensure your website is full of calls to action – directing customers to the POS. Make sure you advertise your product effectively with a website that is easy to use, informative fast and pleasing to the eye!
Your digital presence is important for new customers, but so are traditional marketing methods. Use signs, flyers, billboards etc to let new customers know about your products and how to purchase them. Try thinking outside the box a little, and purchasing some custom printed marketing materials to really catch the eye – for example, bollard covers make use of otherwise empty space in high footfall areas like car parks (plus, with variable data printing you can get creative with a sequence of covers to promote multiple products).
Track your progress
Once you’ve set up all your promotions for your new product, it’s worth keeping an eye on your progress. Use a Google Analytics account to track your site views and bounce rate, and see which blogs are performing well. Once you know what works for your product – keep doing it!
Similarly, social media ads offer you the option to track your engagement and progress; you’ll be able to see the number of people who engaged with your post and allow for target ads budget in the future.
By keeping an eye on the trend of your engagements, both social and website, you’ll be able to more accurately target future audiences in the long run, increasing your sales and brand awareness!
So there you have it – top tips on how to promote a product to ensure your business and product get the attention they deserve! We hope you found our guide on how to promote a product useful! For further information on how bollard covers can help you with your advertising, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team today.
