Back To Top

How you can maximize your chances for an impactful promotional campaign

In a market where brands compete with each other with their promotional campaigns, how do we increase our chances of having a great project? The success of a communication campaign is primarily about consumer motivation and how you manage to communicate relevantly.

Article written by Ioana Mucenic, CEO Minio Studio

I have over 15 years of experience in marketing and communication, I have worked on thousands of promotional campaigns in the country and in the markets in the region. Every decision I make begins with the consumer and their motivations.

Why do people participate in promotions? To win prizes, right? Human motivations are more sophisticated than just that because people do not make purely rational decisions. I use the same methodology in promotions as in branding processes – I create a user persona, a profile of my consumer participating in the promotional campaign. Based on this, I identify this person’s underlying motivations and the result will guide me to make intentional and impactful decisions. Here are the 8 core motivations and their application in promotions.

  • Joy: participate because it’s fun. Maybe integrate a game or a special experience to receive the prize (eg through a vending machine). Whatever it is, it’s fun and you want to try it for the experience itself, not necessarily because you’ll win.
  • Conviviality: more than one person benefits from your prize. You win and a friend wins. Or you can win a family vacation or a holiday villa for all your friends.
  • Belonging: Participate for social impact – when the campaign has a social component. For every product you buy, you donate 1 leu and plant a tree. It’s a gesture you would want to make too, but logistically it’s easier to buy the product and register the purchase.
  • Security: It’s easy to sign up – send a picture on WhatsApp or a text message. It’s simple, no hassle.
  • Control: It’s a clear mechanism and you’re probably guaranteed benefits. You buy X lei worth of products and get another Y lei worth of products as a gift. No risk, it’s all clear and firm.
  • Recognition: You participate because it’s a campaign run by a brand that is special to you. Maybe it’s your favorite brand in a category, or maybe it rarely runs promotions or offers something special.
  • Power: There’s a big prize at stake. For something smaller or less relevant, you wouldn’t enter, but you would for something big – maybe it’s a car, an exotic holiday – something superlative.
  • Vitality: Brings adrenaline or things happen fast. You find out on the spot if you’ve won. Spin the wheel of fortune and see right then what you get. It’s a new mechanism and you’re curious to try it. It’s about speed, independence, exploration.

Don’t try to address all the motivations, because trying to please everyone will be too generic. Try to build your campaign on one fundamental motivation and build boldly around it.

Product vs. awards

It’s essential to establish where the focus of your communication falls: is it a campaign about awards or your products? Whatever you decide, go all the way.

– If the focus is on the awards, then build a show around them. You can use different images in your communication, you can do a dedicated photoshoot with participating products alongside the prize. Create a context for the awards and products, don’t just use images cut out of and used in the main visual. Make sure you present the awards in different and attractive ways. Announce as you have winners, even for smaller prizes. Post thank-you messages from winners.

– If the focus is on the product, create the creative concept around it and develop dedicated content. Prizes will be in the background, your emotional connection with the consumer will be in the spotlight. KFC does very well with this type of promotions, where the offer is perfectly aligned with the consumer’s lifestyle.

Varied content vs. repetitive messages

We have a campaign visual. Do we repeat it identically across all channels so people remember it, or do we have different executions?

– In-store, repeating the message makes sense because you don’t know at what point you’ll capture the shopper’s attention. So you should be consistent and use the same visuals.

– Online, repeating the same visual 3-4 times creates “blindness” – the user stops seeing it. That’s why most campaigns have a pattern – high interest in the first few days and then a gradual reduction in click-through rate and sign-ups. To counteract this effect, we need content. What does that mean? Video productions that correlate with the creative concept of the campaign, different visuals, GIFs, or animations. Tell your message in different ways, of course, visually unified and under the same narrative, but not obsessively repeating the same visual across all digital formats.

From the campaigns I have run, I can say that the diversity of visuals and messages, under the same communication umbrella, has yielded the best results.

Prizes vs. other incentives

The thing that first comes up about promotions is prizes. But there are other options. You can offer vouchers or discount codes, complementary products offered on the spot, money-back-guaranteed product trial campaigns, cash-back campaigns, promotional packages, you can offer sampling on online deliveries, or start loyalty campaigns with guaranteed prizes. You can also have campaigns with a CSR component – a portion of the profit automatically goes to a social cause, and of course, you can combine these mechanisms for greater impact.

 

Read more HERE.

 

Source: Progressive Magazine