Task 3:Below the line technique and their usage
3.1 Identify three primary advertising techniques which companies use as integrated promotional strategies and examine why most companies prefer the below-the-line technique
Advertising techniques
There are various advertising and promotional techniques:
- Association: This is the commonly used technique by advertising agencies to link product with famous personality, attractive jingle or desirable emotion that creates a strong psychological connection with the customer. Product based companies use famous movie stars, sports companies use successful sportsman or athlete, automobile companies advertise their cars in front of mansions and likewise. This advertisement creates an emotional response in the consumer (Friedmann, 1988). The advertisement makes the product attractive through change.
- Claims: This type of advertising strategy promotes claims and special feature of the product. These advertisement claims about the successful results of the product. The advertisement informs or educates the consumer about the specialty of the product. The claim that the advertisement is proposing could be a fact or merely hype. The claims could be misleading because mostly the weasel words used in the promotion are meaningless (Schrank, 2006). For example, some advertisement call a product best when there are other similar product which gives same results.
- Promotions: Promotion is so far the best way to attract customers and encourage them to purchase the items. The promotion technique in advertisement offers numerous deals, various coupons, gifts with purchase, sweepstakes and games with prices. Participation in these schemes encourages the customer to connect with the sponsoring services (Kim, 1992). The excitement in the customer about these schemes and the attraction to receive free rewards has made this technique a success. This promotion strategy is a limited time offer which compels the customer to avail this promotional offer as fast as possible.
Below-the-line technique
It has been observed that below the line technique is mostly preferred by the companies. Below the line promotional technique includes door to door selling, coupons, rebates, promotional pricing, loyalty program, free sampling and various other offers. This promotional technique is more preferred by the organizations because the control over offers and promotion is in the hands of the organization itself (Kim, 1992). Moreover below the line technique reaches to the customer more directly. This includes variety of effective ways to reach to the target customer and attract them to avail the offer.
Advantages of below the line promotional technique:
- Intelligent: Market research has allowed the organization to understand the target audience accurately. Social perception, marketing forces and economic need differs from country to country. Segmentation of the market enables this technique to target the potential customers.
- Directly engage with customers and quick: Personalised email or mail is a method to directly communicate with the customer and offer then various deals. Telemarketing allows having one to one communication with the customer. This is a way to gather information and enables the follow up communication and deal offering.
- Cost effective: The campaigns are designed to be cost effective. Various promotional prices, discount coupons and free gifts with purchase attracts customer and suits the budget of the customer and objective of the company.
- Flexible and trackable: Telemarketing and email promotional campaign offers time and cost flexibility. Below the line promotion campaign allows the company to test the advertising efficiency before deploying it fully. Also, the responses to the telemarketing and email are easily trackable through direct response to mail or through some web analytics.
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Task 4:Ability to plan integrated promotional strategies
4.1 Highlight the necessary process for formulation of an organizational budget to carry out the development of an integrated promotional strategy
The success of advertisement campaign depends on the effective planning and creation of integrated promotional strategy. Developing an integrated promotional plan includes steps:
- Identifying the customer: The initial step is to identify the target customer. We need to identify the requirement of the customer whom we are targeting to attract to the promotional plan. A successful promotional strategy starts and ends with customer. The market researchis necessary for this phase and it requires some expense. However this is very necessary for the success of the promotional campaign. We need to design our marketing strategy around them.
- Interdepartmental coordination: Effective communication and information flow between departments like sales, marketing and customer care is very important for promotional strategy. We need to work together as a unit with commitment for profitability.
- Database communication: Different department have different database that have raw data and valuable information about customers. Creating a new integrated database for promotional campaign is costly. Instead we will create communication path between departments to share key information which is less expensive.
- Promotion: The key information about the targeted customer enables a direct to the customer. Various promotional offers and deals for the product could be sent to the customer through email and telemarketing instead of using association technique or claims technique which arenot very cost effective. The deals offered should connect with the customer as well as should be cost effective. More the sale of the product more will be the profit of the company.
- Returns: The expected returns from the investment are the priority of developing promotional strategy. Any activity that does not increase profit is wastage of resource. One of the ways to increase the sale of the product is to associate the product with social cause. This has some advantages such as it will connect with the customer emotionally, increase the rate of purchase of the product and most important it will helpful for social institution.
4.2 Use the integrated promotional marketing techniques to analyse how to build a promotional campaign strategy for a business and state the need to measure campaign effectiveness
Increasing customer engagement is a key aspect of advertising and promotion strategy. We can use various methods to engage with the customers such as interacting in an e-commerce site, loyalty program, promotional price offers. Social media like facebook and twitter offers numerous ways to conduct a market research. By conducting market research like hashtag search in twitter we can receive instant messages whenever a customer uses the term (Mangold, 2009). Using social media requires only investment of time. Marketing techniques differ from country to country. The marketing slogans, themes and images should be chosen carefully and it should not hamper the trust, belief and religion of any person. At the end the one thing with is very much required for customer satisfaction is the quality of the product. The promotional strategy should not affect the quality of the product as it will set up degrade the reputation of the brand or company in the market.
Need to measure campaign effectiveness:
- Measuring campaign effectiveness gives us the clear idea about the status of the promotional strategy in the market. It will clearly state whether the promotional strategy was able to connect with the customer or not.
- Measuring campaign effectiveness will allow us to refine our target customers and target geography.
- It will determine the resource requirement to achieve the goal and how the effort should be channeled to achieve the goal.
- It will determine the additional changes required in the promotional strategy in future advertising campaign.
Conclusion
The promotional strategy is very essential for any advertisement and promotional campaign. The promotional strategy should be customer oriented and should be able to engage with the customer. A better promotional strategy uses cost effective way to perform market research and to offer great deals to the customer. However, the brand or any company, in the race to offer better deal, should maintain the quality of product. After all customer satisfaction is the basic requirement for a brand or a company to grow.
Reference
Athey, S., &Gans, J. S. (2009). The impact of targeting technology on advertising markets and media competition.
Belch, G. E., Belch, M. A., Kerr, G. F., & Powell, I. (2008). Advertising and promotion: An integrated marketing communications perspective. mcgraw-hill.
Brady, M., Saren, M., &Tzokas, N. (2002). Integrating information technology into marketing practice–the IT reality of contemporary marketing practice. Journal of Marketing Management, 18(5-6), 555-577.
Friedmann, R., & Zimmer, M. R. (1988). The role of psychological meaning in advertising. Journal of Advertising, 17(1), 31-40.
Kim, P. (1992). Does advertising work: a review of the evidence. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 9(4), 5-21.
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