There’s one core word in promotional budgeting- Value. A big budget doesn’t mean a great result. In some cases, particularly if in relation to promotional items, a big budget can just mean “waste”. Best practice these days is to focus on value, and not cost.
There are two reasons for this approach:
- Value is a far more efficient approach to promotions: The fact is that throwing money at promotions is as likely to be a recipe for failure as for success. Big “Hollywood” budgets are no guarantee of success. Quality, however, is a good indicator of cost efficiency on a low budget, and keeps costs well contained as well.
- Any promotion needs to be tested in the market: Professional marketing is by nature cautious. Best practice for many years has been to test market approaches and promotional methods. This can be done very effectively on a low-budget, low-maintenance approach, without committing capital.
For example:
Compare two promotional programs:
1. Promotion A held a major product promotion in an exhibition centre, including a large range of promotional gifts from various stalls and events and a huge presentation budget. It was like a Broadway musical, and expensive.
There were a lot of issues:
Someone forgot to include the promotional bags to carry all the gifts. There was more presentation than promotion- Some people attending didn’t even know there was a promotion for a particular product. Others thought the promotional gifts were the products being promoted.
2. Promotion B, on a much lower budget, did a targeted citywide promotion of its product, using a combination of free customized promotional gifts and samples, with information sheets in their very visually branded promotional bags. This promotion gave out all its materials in about three hours.
The values of these promotions are pretty clear- Promotion A was a flop in several respects. Promotion B, being highly targeted to a core demographic, was extremely effective at about 10% of the cost of Promotion A. Add to this the fact that Promotion B didn’t distract the customers with too much hype and was therefore far more successful in promoting its product.
Presentation and budgets
The above example was really a comparison of presentation options. The combination of quality and focused marketing will always achieve contact with a market. This type of presentation is considered very reliable, and better yet, comparatively extremely cheap.
A good low budget presentation can do anything a big budget can do, provided it stays focused on the objectives of the promotion.
The key elements in an effective low budget promotion are:
- Information- Product awareness can be a very straightforward thing to achieve, simply by providing something as basic as an information sheet. As long as the visual values are good, the information will be checked out.
- Simple focus- A basic message, “Look at this product”, isn’t exactly difficult to deliver. That’s the whole value of any promotional program.
- Promotional gifts should be easy to deliver- You don’t need a major production to give people gifts. The gifts themselves represent value.
- Promotional product delivery must be well organized- Simply providing some custom printed promotional bags isn’t hard, either. Promotion A blew it by turning a sort of promotional Christmas stocking into “more stuff to lug around”.
Budgets aren’t the problem. It’s how you spend your promotional money that’s the problem. Forget cost, focus on value.
