Promotional Marketing Review

Design your digital download incentive promotion with the newest music, ringtone, and branded content. Hip Digital Media, the leading digital promotions firm, joined forces with Promotional Currency, merging digital content, entertainment licensing and proprietary risk coverage models to deliver turnkey, fixed-cost solutions for the promotional marketplace. http://www.hipdigitalmedia.com

Business promotion is getting easier and cheaper, thanks to social media. However, don’t mistake cheap and easy with ineffective or a waste of time.

Many experienced businesspeople are still married to traditional marketing and business promotion techniques. They still think in terms of advertising in broadcast and print media. They still think about eyeballs, open rates, and CPMs (cost per thousand views). They’re thinking about impressions, drive time, and prime time. But business promotion has grown beyond traditional marketing and advertising, and moved online.

<h3>Why Is Business Promotion Changing?</h3>
It’s because of Generation Y and the explosive growth of social media. There are 82 million members of Generation Y (compared to the 78+ million Baby Boomers), and 96% of them are on a social network of some sort. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other networks, these online tools have reshaped business promotion as we know it.

If you want to reach Generation Y through business promotion, consider social media as your best bet. It costs less than traditional advertising, can be targeted to reach only the people you want, and can easily be measured. The problem with traditional advertising is that you can’t effectively measure whether it was your TV commercials or billboards that resulted in increased sales, and even if one of them was more effective.

<h3>How Can I Use Social Media for Online Business Promotion?</h3>
Social media is all about communicating and building trust through relationships. By speaking to your customer base on their terms and their turf, you can earn their trust a lot more easily, which can make your business promotion much more effective. Generation Y spends a lot of time online, getting their news and entertainment from the web. They communicate via text messages on their cell phone. And they are the biggest consumer of mobile videos of any generation.

Social media is becoming more popular and widespread. The biggest demographic on Facebook may still be Generation Y, but the fastest growing one is women 50 and over. If that was your biggest customer base, how would you reach them? You could advertise during shows that women over 50 typically watch, but you’re not going to necessarily reach them. Plus, you need to repeat those ads many times, which will get expensive. But with Facebook, you can create fan pages and groups specifically for your target audience. You can even purchase ads that are served only to women in their 50s. You can’t do that with traditional advertising.

Your online business promotion campaign should consist of Twitter, Facebook and/or MySpace, and blogging. Set up accounts, fan pages, blogs, and communicate with your potential customers about the things <em>they</em> want to talk about. Don’t tell them what you do, talk to them about what they do, like, and enjoy. Become a resource for their interests by forwarding articles, providing tips, and telling people about other resources that meet their interests and needs.

Whenever possible, use online business promotions to support your offline promotions as well. If you’re attending a trade show, are sponsoring a special event or team, or are still using traditional marketing, tell people about it through your social networks.

If you’re at a trade show, encourage people on Twitter to stop by your booth. If you’re sponsoring a special event, talk it up on your Facebook fan page. Or if you’re sponsoring a sports team, consider setting up a fan page for that team. Put your Twitter account and Facebook URL in your advertisements, and encourage people to follow you or become fans. There’s no reason these two business promotion methods have to be separate.

While we’re not predicting the death of traditional marketing methods, we are encouraging you to add social media as a big part of your business promotion toolbox.

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The entertainment promotion is working for big and small business alike. Everyone likes to win something and to receive something for free. Most people like music and to be entertained. An entertainment promotion builds upon the public’s insatiable appetite for promotional sweepstakes, ringtone promotions, music download promotions, skins promotions and online instant win games. These digital promotions are being used by a growing number of companies. In fact, they are replacing conventional channels and attracting larger budgets. Businesses of every size have begun to use mobile promotions to appeal to new segments of their market. They have also used them to strengthen the loyalty of their existing customer base. Bottom line: entertainment promotions work because customers appreciate the free promotional offers and remember the company giving them away.

Big business use to be the only ones who could afford entertainment promotions. They had the money and resources to move into markets on a wide scale. Today, promotional risk coverage has made it possible for small companies to enjoy the same advantages. Today, you can use entertainment promotions to improve customer loyalty, strengthen your brand, and lift sales.

Entertainment Promotions offer free music downloads to consumers. They are affordable and easy to deploy and entertainment promotions cater perfectly to your customers’ attraction to instant gratification. By directing consumers to a branded landing page and requiring them to register for a free music download, your entertainment promotion can capture consumer contact information and other information you need for marketing.

Promotional Currency’s clients can now attach an actual entertainment brand or artist to a product, and then marry that to any number of digital promotions such as music downloads, ringtones, skins and more.

Promotion Insurance gives businesses or individuals the ability to give away prizes without risk.  Big corporations run promotion campaigns all the time to build brand loyalty, generate leads and increase sales.  With promotion insurance you can do the same for your business even if you’re a little fish in a big pond.

Promotion insurance is similar in a way to car or home insurance. You pay a promotion insurance premium that insures you against the possibility of someone winning the prize you specify.  If someone wins the prize the promotion insurance company pays you and you deliver the prize to the winner, gaining brand loyalty and name exposure for your business.

Offering a big prize from your business is a great way to generate leads.  Online promotions can build a huge database of potential customers.  Turnkey promotion campaigns are a cost effective way to boost traffic and generate sales. When you add promotion insurance into your budget you will most likely see a large return on your investment. 

The cost to insure a prize promotion is generally a fraction of the cost of the prize value.  A very affordable marketing strategy indeed.Technorati Tags: promotion insurance, prize promotions, online promotions

Trade shows promotions are competitive.  Every company marketing has spent endless hours and large dollars to market their company.  Companies are there because marketers know that there is one way to get in front of their target market — big time — and that is at a trade show.

There are thousands of different ways to do give aways at trade show events…but what you want to really do is convert that lookey loo dude into a prospective customer.

Company A is giving away a whole booth full of goodies..and candy in the front to get folks over there. They are trying to give away a hat, tee-shirt, or the good ole coffee mug…for your phone number…like those would make the dude want to bother….he walks away thinking “not in this lifetime is any mug worth that guy calling…whew.”

Company B is engaging the customers and not only getting them to get excited about filling out a marketing questionnaire but…they are giving away a $Million Dollars to someone that rolls the dice. There is a line clear down the isle. Everyone wants a chance at that million dollars.  That is definitely worth it!

This is what promotional marketing is about. It is about utilizing a promotional marketing company to build you a custom right out of the box trade show promotion, that will allow you to give a way a huge and amazing prize at a fixed fraction of the real cost. Using promotional risk insurance, will allow you to have a fixed cost with no surprises and be able to build a better mousetrap. People will remember the company that was giving away the million dollars as the successfull place they would want to do business with compared to the company with the coffee mug.

Weigh them out…..Million Dollar Company…..Coffee Mug Company ????

There are many different types of trade show promotions that will fit any size and any type of company you can not only find the right one for you….but you will never again dread the 3 day trade show because you won’t be bored with the long line waiting for their chance at the big prize.

Prize Promotions deliver big return on promotional marketing investment.  Holidays are a great time for launching a prize promotion campaign for you business. Take the M&M’s Million Dollar Mansion game running for Halloween. Players enter a UPC from Mars products and have a chance of winning one million dollars.

McDonald’s Monopoly game is always a big draw, this year the prize promotion drives visitors to a website to enter their info in order to roll the dice and play the game. (I’m playing that one as my teenage boys eat LOTS of McDonald’s and bring home tons of those game pieces.)

You can have one of these cool, branded promotions for your own company or business. Prize promotions drive traffic, generate leads and build brand loyalty like nothing else.

Think ahead to Christmas, what can your business offer as a promotion for the holidays? How about $50,000? Enter your email to see a working demo of a Christmas Prize Promotion you can have branded for your own site.

Well promotional risk did add up to tacos on October 28th 2008 from 2pm-6pm for those of us in the United States.

Taco Bell ran a prize promotion during the World Series, “Steal a Base..Steal a Taco”, where everyone in the United States would win a free taco if a base was stolen. Well, in the bottom of the fifth Jason Bartlett of the Tampa Bay Rays stole second. Let the taco-stravaganza begin!

Why would Taco Bell give away free tacos? Branding and loyalty for one, not to mention sales. Can you eat just one taco? Do you order tacos without something to drink? Not likely. Taco Bell gave away tacos yes, but they cashed in on the increased sales that day and on increased brand loyalty.

Anyone can use this same strategy for their business with promotional risk insurance. Well maybe not everyone would want to give away free tacos, even though tacos are tasty, they might not build your business.

You can think bigger than tacos and give away a million dollar prize. Think of the publicity your company or name would receive with that kind of prize promotion.

Promotional Risk = Big Return on Investment (even with .89 cent tacos! yummmmm)