Promotional Mix

Promotional Mix Definition

The promotional mix is a term that describes how a company combines marketing and promotion to create business growth. It includes content marketing, personal selling, publicity, advertising, direct marketing, and sales promotion.

Promotional Mix Examples

The 6 components that make up the promotional mix are listed below. Each includes an example of best use, pros, cons, and how it helps.

1) Content Marketing

Blog articles, social media, downloadable guides, educational material, guest articles, and more.
Best use: Encourages people to share their contact information in exchange for helpful information.
Pros: Positions a company as experts in their industry while building trust, providing collateral for sales people, and generating leads long after the content was created.
Cons: Expensive to produce, doesn’t create immediate ROI, people are becoming resistant to exchanging their email address for content.
How it helps: Content that helps people is one of the biggest sources of website traffic from search engines like Google. If a company is seen as a source for helpful content then people are more likely to care about what they have to offer.

2) Personal Selling

Sales presentations, trade shows, events, social media, webinars, strategic partnerships, and more.
Best use: For complicated sales cycles that require a large commitment from buyers.
Pros: Good salespeople are often the best marketing tools a company can have.
Cons: Salespeople can be expensive and take a lot of training.
How it helps: Personal selling provides one on one interaction which can be critical for selling expensive, technical, or specialized products.

3) Publicity

Media, press, social media, speaking engagements, interviews, and more.
Best use: Getting attention for something that is newsworthy.
Pros: Objective news media is more trusted. Good for SEO.
Cons: High cost. Little control of outcomes.
How it helps: Publicity generates “buzz” and word-of-mouth business.

4) Advertising

Broadcast, print, pay-per-click, outdoor, remarketing, and more.
Best use: Introduce people to new products, features, and uses.
Pros: Helps build brand awareness. Can be used to target specific groups of people. Can produce immediate results.
Cons: High cost. Results stop when advertising stops. Traditional advertising is difficult to measure.
How it helps: Advertising is a guaranteed way to get your message out to as many people as possible at once.

5) Direct Marketing

Mailings, telemarketing, email marketing, text marketing, and more.
Best use: Direct outreach to prospects in a database or sales list.
Pros: Easier to reach specific audiences and measure results.
Cons: People are oversaturated with direct marketing offers.
How it helps: Direct marketing creates awareness of new products or services that a company offers.

6) Sales Promotion

Discounts, coupons, displays, sample kits, trial offers, landing pages, demonstrations, and more.
Best use: Get people to buy more often or to try something new.
Pros: Creates immediate results. Useful for testing price sensitivity.
Cons: Risks trivializing brand and product. Sales might become dependent on discounted promotions.
How it helps: Sales promotion helps sell as much product as possible in a short time frame.

Why is Promotional Mix Important in Strategic Marketing?

Strategy: Developing the right promotional mix helps a company focus their marketing efforts (and dollars) on the areas that provide the highest return on investment.
Lead Generation: Determining the right promotional mix helps a company keep their marketing relevant and interesting which makes it easier to get leads.