The Number 1 Secret in Promotions

(Nurhafihz (BBA, Marketing) is the guest writer for abangabu.com for Marketing Mondays)

In this first Monday Marketing posting, we’re going to discuss strategy when it comes to promotions. Now, we all know that promotions is important: without promoting, it’s hard for your target group to know aboutyour offering. So now we want to promote… what exactly then should be our strategy?
 
Classic Promotions Strategy
  1. Print flyers, banners, ads
  2. Distribute to as many places as you can
  3. Wait, and hope

This is the theory of "Reach", of attempting to get as many people as you can from the crowd. This theory can work, except for one problem…

It doesn’t work.

How many advertisements do you remember having seen today? The average to most Singaporeans is ZERO. In fact, if you have a new product, you need to show that same ad / banner / flyer about 27 times to the same person. This is because on average we only care to look at 1 out of 9 ads, and we may remember that ad if we see the same ad 3 times. So 9 times 3 gives us 27.

What does this mean? Introducing that one secret that is important in all promotions campaigns: Frequency (Yes, it’s so important, I’ll bold, underline and colour it too). Take time to say the same thing to Ahmad, Siti about your Nasi Lemak. Sure first time they might ignore, second time you might be irritating, but keep repeating and they might just listen. You can understand why some business people go nervous at this… they fundamentally believe that once your product is ignored, that means they didn’t care about you in the first place…

Relationships take time. Trust takes time. We malays should be champions when it comes to promotions, because it is in our culture to take the time to give the person kueh, air and maybe even bungkus-kan, even if we have no idea what the returns to our goodwill is. But we don’t calculate them too, because we believe it will come around and help us.

So apply the same trust im marketing. Take time on a certain group of persons instead of going all over the place and talking to many people once. One day, when you sakit and you wake up… you might be pleasantly surprised to see who might just come visiting you…

Your friends (once your customers).

Find out more about Hafihz by visiting his website http://www.hafihz.com

48 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *