Promotion:Introduction

• Organizations come up with promotional strategies to communicate with customers or clients
• Promotional strategy- the choice of a target market and formulation of the most appropriate promotion mix to influence it.
• Promotion refers to the organisational function concerned with the advancement of a product, idea, or point of view through publicity and/or advertising
• These techniques are aimed at persuading, influencing and persuading customers
• These techniques take a number of forms and they include:
• Advertising-which is a non-personal, one way communication to promote the sale of goods or services via paid-for advertising in the media
• Publicity-is the promotion of products via press releases to the news media which are published free of cost
• Direct mailing-involves direct communication with customers traditionally via snail mail but increasingly through modern innovations such as email, social media messages
• Packaging-is promotion by means of design and display. The intention is to create an impact at the point of sale
• Sales promotion-refers to a group of activities including competitions, gifts, point of sale displays, leaflets, raffles and sponsorship aimed mainly at promoting the product
• Personal selling-is a promotional presentation made on a person to person basis which usually involves two-way communication between salesperson and potential buyer
• Merchandising-may include display techniques, free samples, on-the-spot demonstration, pricing, shelf talkers, special offers, and other point-of-sale methods.
• Candidates often confuse promotion with advertising
• It is important to know that promotion involves advertising as well as some of the activities mentioned above
• Promotional mix-refers to a specific combination of promotional techniques employed to increase the sales a given product or family of products

To access more topics go to the O Level Business Notes