Get their attention.
Whether you run a small or a large business, promotion is the lifeblood of your sales. You must create and implement creative, cost-effective campaigns to attract customers and close sales. With planning and effective sales campaign strategies, you can prepare to amaze yourself as you raise sales, gain new customers, and move product.
Instructions
1. What do the customers really want?
Identify what your clients want from your product or service, because successful promotions begin with your customers. Come up with a creative campaign that appeals to their needs. For example, if you are planning a fall sales push on your new sweaters, don't build your sales promotion around the pretty colors. Instead, plan a promotion that emphasizes how warm they are, how they will make your customers feel, and how confident they can be going back to school or college in these sweaters. People are motivated to buy based on how something makes them feel. Tap that.
2. These jeans might complement those sweaters perfectly.
Make the promotion simple. If you are promoting your sweaters, stick to promoting items that are related to this market sector. For example, as part of your promotion, you may want to reduce your inventory of fall hats. This is fine, as long as the hats and the sweaters can be paired. But it is a bad idea to throw a promotion where you are pushing fall sweaters and winter skis, for example. This will unnecessarily distract your target market.
3. Yard signs still work.
Promote your sale in as many venues as you can. Many business owners are tapping into the networking power of Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities. This is great. But older methods of promotion still work. Consider printing up fliers and posting them where your customers shop, work, go to school and live. Look into the possibility of getting your local radio station down to do a live program, or "remote," at your place of business. Dollar for dollar, radio advertising is still the most effective paid advertising method, according to a 2009 study by the Nielson Research Group.
4. Track the progress of your sales campaign.
Determine a sales goal. Decide before the event starts how many units of each product you want to unload. That way if your goal is to sell 350 blue sweaters, 150 orange ones, and so on, you will have a better idea how you want to aim your sales campaign and measure its success. It will also be useful during the campaign to know what your goals are because it will help you decide where you place your products, which products you may want to bundle, and so on. If you see that you are falling short in a certain item in terms of sales, you can offer more aggressive pricing on that item to make sure it moves.
Tags: your sales, sales campaign, your customers, still work, what your