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
| 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
| 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
| 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
| 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
| 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
| 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.
