What is promotion? What are its most important strategies? How to benefit from it?

Promotion is a set of activities that aim to communicate with customers, in order to spread awareness about a specific product or brand, which motivates customers to buy this product and raise the value of the brand in the market and distinguish it from others.

Examples of promotion:

• An electoral candidate holds conferences with the people of his electoral district in order to convince them of himself, so that they nominate him in the elections.

• A new shop owner distributes promotional papers to people in the street to tell them about his products and services.

• A company offers discounts on its products to increase sales.

• A friend of yours opened a new law office, and asks you to tell your friends and acquaintances about it in order to get new clients.

• The Ministry of Tourism films videos about the most famous tourist places in Egypt in order to attract tourists to it.

• A restaurant publishes information and photos on social media in order to attract people to it.

Promotion is nothing more than saying “I am here” so that everyone interested comes to you.

Promotion is a communication process intended to achieve a specific goal, your friend called you to tell you about the new law office in order to get new clients… and not for any other reason.

Therefore, promotion has a number of images and forms, which we will learn about in detail later, but let's delve into the second part of the definition of promotion ... which is the goal.

What is the difference between promotion and advertising?

Think carefully about this question ... and to help you answer, let me ask you another question ... What is the goal of advertising in the first place? If you think about it, you will know the answer to your question easily.

The goal of advertising is almost the same as the goal of the promotion process, which we presented previously, all that matters is that you pay money for advertisements, while promotion may happen for free.

Advertising is one of the different methods of promotion, as you target specific people with your ads in order to increase awareness and thus increase sales.

Despite that, advertising is of great importance in the promotion process, as some companies rely almost solely on advertisements for promotion because they achieve the best results.

That's why we have devoted a separate article to talk about advertisements of various types and different strategies, which I advise you to read,

Different Promotion Strategies

There are many ideas through which you can promote any new product or service, but no matter how many these ideas are, they will not go beyond one of the following four strategies:

1- Personal Promotion

Personal promotion is based on the ability of a specific person to promote any product or service, this promotion may take more than one form such as:

Salesman: who communicates with customers himself and tries to convince them of the product.

Personal Brand: Just as influencers do by promoting themselves through creating content (website - YouTube channel).

Personal Relationships: As in the example of your lawyer friend that we presented earlier.

Many of today's giant companies started with this type of promotion until they stood on their feet and had a position in the market.

2- Advertising

There are different forms of advertising such as:

TV and radio ads.

Newspaper and newspaper ads.

Print ads (banners - promotional posts).

Social media ads (Facebook ads - Instagram ads).

Search engine ads (Google ads - YouTube).

Influencer ads (an influencer is anyone who has an audience on any platform, with whom brands cooperate to reach this audience).

All these different images and others are one of the promotion strategies, and as I mentioned earlier, ads are very important, especially digital ads, because of the ease of tracking their results.

3- Sales Promotion

Sales promotion means making discounts and offers for specific periods or at specific times of the year, or even distributing discount coupons to customers personally.

Sales promotion is not just discounts, you can promote an additional service such as free delivery in the event of purchasing a certain number of products or purchasing for a certain amount of money, or distributing free samples of the product.

All these ideas and others fall under the sales promotion strategy as long as they depend directly on the cost of the product or service that the customer will receive for a certain amount of money.

4- Public Relations

This is one of the most important promotional strategies that almost everyone relies on in various fields, whether business owners or even social media influencers.

Promotion through public relations depends on building a relationship with any entity or institution that your audience cares about, and exploiting this relationship to spread awareness about your services.

For example:

• Sponsoring a sporting event and providing some products for free to participants.

• Providing some services to companies in exchange for promoting your products or services among their customers.

• Carrying out joint promotional campaigns (such as phone companies' campaigns with soft drink companies - drink and talk for free).

• Cooperating with charitable organizations.

• Organizing a gathering of influencers in the field you work in.

There are many other examples, even on a smaller scale, such as the cooperation of a YouTube channel owner with the owner of another channel to promote the channel.

Promotion through public relations is one of the oldest and most effective methods of promotion, because it helps strengthen the brand in general among all interested parties.

It also makes customers trust the brand more because they feel its influence and spread in many activities, and all of this leads to an increase in profits in the end.

Everyone promotes, even when you discuss with your father to ask him to buy you something new, you are trying to increase his awareness of a certain idea so that he can make the decision you want.

Therefore, before you think about what promotion is and how to choose the best strategy, you must first determine the goal you want to achieve and the capabilities available to you.