Promotions are a great way to get sales for your product. They offer customers you already have a really good discount, which incentivises them to spend more. They can also help with brand awareness, with people that haven't heard of or used your services before.
Some of the most powerful or influential promotions are that of the seasonal ones. Holidays or events that are celebrated are rather influential to the potential audience. This is because these events are ingrained into the lives and culture of many people. These can range from anything as large as Christmas, or even just based on the time of year such as Summer or Winter sales.
Using these themes and events to your advantage is key as a business. In this blog we will look into just how important it really is to keep up to date with cultural goings on and how you can use them to your advantage to generate more publicity.
Choosing Your Sales
Choosing what, when and how often is very important for your sales campaigns. These questions can be answered by breaking down several factors to figure out the best course of action for your personal sale.
Taking a Summer sale as an example, most Summer sales last for a couple of weeks up to a month or so. This can be starting anywhere from as early as June, to ending as late as the start of September.
You then need to figure out your percentages of how much the sale will be. Again using a more generic Summer sale as an example, this can range anywhere from 30%-70% and sometimes even more off of selected products. These are based off of what the product is, how popular it is/has been previously.
To round off things to think about when making a holiday or event based sale, deciding when to start advertising to the public about your sale and how best to go about that. This mostly depends on how popular your products or services already are, as well as other factors like how many products/services you have to sell and how well your other sales did in the past.
Using your past metrics, you can figure out all of the above and more. If it is your first time having a sale, looking to other similar companies or services can give you an idea of what you should and shouldn't do.
When and How Often Should You Have a Sale?
Choosing exactly when to have a sale and how long it should last is quite crucial. If your sale lasts too long and ends up being extremely popular, you may end up turning less of a profit than you would have liked, depending on how low you were charging for a product or service.
Having sales draw out for too long can make their impact not as impressive for when you do have sales. If you seemingly always have a sale on, it wont bring in the same amount of people trying to get a good bargain as you would if your sales are more calculated in their length and timing.
Making a sale seem like a special event that the public are having a premium experience to be even given in the first place should be how you come across. Your audience should be excited and maybe even a little hungry for offers you have and be wanting to lap up everything you have. Obviously not every product or service will be this popular and this is data you will use in future to change up all the statistics to make the next sale of this kind better.
As for when you should have a sale, it really depends where you are located. In the UK, the majority of people will celebrate Easter, Halloween and Christmas to name just a few day based holidays. Other lesser celebrated events or more seasonal events such as having a sale on to celebrate the start of a new season, or celebrating something like bonfire night or valentines day.
How Should You Advertise Your Sale?
The other large factor that goes into how successful your sale ends up being, is how many people saw adverts for your promotional sale and how effective the advert itself was.
To figure this all out, you need to realise who your target audience is and how best to advertise to them. We have already talked a little about this topic, which you can find here. But as an example, say you're selling clothes for men via your online store on your website. You would need to advertise at least 2-3 weeks in advance, to give your audience time to not only see your adverts before you sale is live, but also gives them time to put money aside specifically for your sale if they need to.
You also need to decide where best to place your adverts for where your target audience will frequent often. Social Media like Facebook or Instagram are a good start if you run your own accounts. If you don't already run your own business account, this is another topic we have covered that you can read here.
Also running ad campaigns through Google will help gain interest from people who have searched for similar things to what you are advertising. Of course this takes more time to perfect and isn't free like posting your own content on social media, but it will certainly reach more people if your advertisement is good.
What Makes An Advert Good?
For your advertisement to be good, it needs to clearly show the audience the following:
• What products you are selling
• What products are covered in your specific sale
• What the savings to the customer are
Other things you may want to include could be, similar products that are also on offer as well as how long the sale lasts. Telling the audience in tone that signals urgency to get your items on sale whilst they are still on sale can incentivise your audience to buy what they otherwise may have decided against.
A template of a Summer Sale as an example of theming within your adverts
Theming the aesthetics and language of your adverts to suit the particular holiday or event isn't necessary, but certainly suggested. Having colours or particular items that easily convey why you are having a sale to the audience is useful and in general just looks better than having a Winter sale filled with lots of yellow and other bright colours.
By now you should have a good idea of what exactly you want to do and how you'd like to go about it when making a promotional sale. Even if it doesn't go right the first time, you can use your own experience and data to figure out what could be improved upon from your last attempt.
If you are still wanting more information or want some help to kickstart your own advertising game, Responsive Web Design has options for you.
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