Digital Sales Promotion
Digital sales promotion encompasses a huge range of creative promotional ideas and approaches. In fact there are too many to list here; so this short lesson on digital sales promotion will give you some ideas, but it is certainly not limited to this small number of approaches. Just think about the multitude of different sales promotion activities that you are exposed to in the everyday terrestrial world, I think that these could be transposed into the digital world or even combined with digital activities.
The online experience is ideal for digital self-promotion. Again many of the topics which are covered in other lessons on Marketing Teacher raised their heads again, it is digital marketing communications is integrated; so yes SEO and SEM can be part of a sales promotion campaign.
Some examples of digital sales promotion:
• free trials and giveaways e.g. some free software for 30 days, and then you must sign up for a full version. Companies such as Spotify are good examples of this.
• you can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter as teasers or as part of the guerrilla marketing campaign; viral campaigns are also ideal when combined with social media and are in themselves digital self promotional tools.
• promotional product or service videos are good examples of self promotional activities.
• product reviews and expert articles in blogs or other online media.
• e-mail can be combined as part of an integrated digital sales campaign.
• product codes and vouchers such as Groupon.com and similar suppliers.
• price-based promotions such as discounts or good old-fashioned Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) online promotions
• shipping can be undertaken for free as an incentive, for example eBay and Amazon.
• you could offer online only specials if you are a bricks and mortar company.
• contests in competitions online are sometimes popular especially in niche markets.
• valuations such as www.webuyanycar.com is a new and innovative way of creating user interest and self-promotion.
• naturally loyalty programmes and CRM embed sales promotions to retain and communicate with customers.
• there are a reseller promotions and drop shipping incentives whereby services and products from one supplier sold via another online retail organisation.
As you can see from the examples above there are many different and exciting types of sales promotion that can be combined and extended in order to generate new types of digital self-promotion.
