When you have a business, it can feel like you’re desperate to get any kind of sale coming in. However, to keep your business afloat, you have to be careful about what you’re willing to sacrifice in order to get customers or clients buying from you. If the margins aren’t right, you could wind up doing business at a loss rather than at a profit.
To help you find the right balance here, here are three things to consider when creating promotional offers for your business.
Plan How You’ll Promote Your Promotion
If you’re wanting to run some kind of promotion to encourage more people to bring their business to you, you’re going to first have to plan out what that promotion will be and how you’ll promote that you’re running this promotion. Otherwise, you could put all this effort into a promotion that doesn’t actually prove to bring in more business.
To help your customers or target audience know about the promotion you’re offering, Janet Attard, a contributor to BusinessKnowHow.com, recommends that you use both online and traditional marketing tactics. Along with creating online ads and sharing the news on your website and social media channels, you should also print out things like direct mailers, sales letters, brochures, and other flyers and collateral that you can physically share with people in your area to inform them of your upcoming or ongoing promotional offers.
Use Flash Sales Wisely
One strategy many businesses use when creating a promotional offer is to hold a flash sale. However, for your flash sale to be successful, you’ve got to be wise about how and when you use it.
According to WordStream.com, flash sales are generally most successful when they’re either done once a year or once a month. When you have a flash sale once a year, people will usually take advantage of this sale to buy more than they ordinarily would during other times during the year. And if you have a flash sale for a short period of time every month, people will often hold off on making a purchase until your flash sale happens. But during this time, they’ll often buy more than they originally planned, too.
Choose The Right Items For Samples Or Giveaways
Another type of promotion you might be considering is to offer samples of products or a giveaway. The idea behind this type of promotion is to get people to love your product so much that they want to buy it for themselves in the future. But in order to get to this point, you have to be sure that you’re choosing the right items to include in this promotion.
Carl Hose, a contributor to Chron Small Business, shares that this type of promotion usually works best with food or household items. So if you sell something like this that is better than your competitors, this could be a great option for you.
If you’re having trouble coming up with good promotions within your business, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you find some success.