How to marry promotions with performance marketing.

Read time: 3 minutes

First, let me be clear, by promotions, I do not only mean discounts.

If you can offer discounts every now and then, great.

But if yours is a brand that is a strict no to offers or discounts, you can promote a new design, a fresh arrival, a new product line a limited design product, or even a physical event as a kind of promotion (For example, Zomaland by Zomato)

In my definition of promotion- it is an event that creates the need to shop right now.

In today’s newsletter, I will describe why your performance marketing objectives have to be in line with promotions. Why you should keep your performance team informed from the day you decide that you will run a promotion and how can you marry the execution of a performance campaign with promotions.

Anticipation- I love this word in the context of digital marketing.

Very few brands are able to do this well.

The ones that do, have a great headstart to their promotions.

You will start noticing brands like Flipkart will start doing PR on how its marquee sale event like- Big Billion Days helps small entrepreneurs in India, it has a strong emotional appeal which is hard to ignore.

While you shop from Flipkart, Flipkart wants you to think that you are helping Indian entrepreneurs first.

Don’t believe me or have not seen this yet? Here is an article published in Business Insider already. Read it here. The article was published on 29th September, about 10 days before the sale event.

Your target audience probably sees 100s of ads every day, and they don’t even remember 2%-3% of those.

Before you ask the source for this data, the percentage here is based on a study done by Ogilvy some time back (Please Google it if you are one of those guys who comment on every statistical post- ‘Source’?)

Coming back to the point- people don’t care about your brand. Even if they do, they may click on your ad to ‘check it out’ but most people out that will not shop. (Avg conversion rate of e-commerce is less than 1%).

People don’t care till the time they find something that makes them feel important or smart.

And your promotion has to do this job.

If you run an exclusive promotion you make them feel Important.

If you play with FOMO, and greed and reward the audience when they buy from you, you make them feel Smart.

This is where you create peaks in your business.

Here are some examples:

One plus phone launches make people feel smart because they are sold out fast and only a few are able to get their hands on them at the time of launch.

Zara’s new collection makes people look important because they produce designs in limited quantities and people who buy it, feel important and have a sense of pride with sleek style.

Flipkart’s big billion days, and Amazon’s great Indian sale, again makes people feel smart because they feel they are getting smart deals on the items they buy which otherwise was not possible.

Building promotions is hard.

You do a lot of calculations, and apply all your business maths to come up with products, mark-downs, margins etc.

Now imagine your performance team messes it up by not showing your promotion to enough people and the right people. (Quantity and quality of audience both are important when it comes to promotions).

Happens more often than not.

Hence the first connection that plays an important role between promotions and performance marketing is that of:

Planning:

When you run a promotion, your goal is to get maximum sales.

And who are the people who have the highest propensity to shop?

People who have either already shopped with you earlier or people who have engaged with your brand recently.

That’s the first audience you have to reach out to. With direct promotion communication. No flowery or clever words. Be clear.

Since you are running a promotion, you are probably offering something great and this could also be a great opportunity to broaden your reach and show your ads to newer audiences too, because if the promotion is good, more people will engage with it, the more people engage with it, the more your creative will travel, the more your creative travels, the more algorithm will further push it at lesser cost.

All green flash for new acquisitions too.

Planning of above, setting it up correctly and being ready with creatives does take some time, hence the advance Planning of these audiences and setups is critical.

Great e-commerce websites plan smaller promotions on a monthly basis and Hero promotions on a yearly basis.

For example, if your peak season is Diwali or black Friday and if you have not started prepping for the campaign, you are already late.

Similarly, if your performance team has not started creating a bigger pool of audience to juice during the sale period, you are already behind.

The second connection between promotions and performance marketing is that of:

Platforms:

What are the platforms that you have to focus on?

Depends on the duration of the promotion and which is your primary platform.

If it’s a 2-3 days duration promotion, most of the performance marketers, don’t explore Google because it’s too short of a duration for Google to show any substantial results. Then typically, Facebook becomes the go-to platform.

Choose the platform that complements the timing of the promotion and receptiveness of your target audience.

And don’t forget the top funnel here. For example, whenever I have done promotions for mid to large-scale brands, YouTube bumper inventory is part of the media plan almost every time.

If it’s a small-scale brand or a startup with lean budgets then Reels for the top funnel becomes critical.

The third connection between promotions and performance marketing is:

Creative strategy:

In case you do not know this already: your brand and performance creatives are separate and need to be looked at separately as well.

I always say this, Facebook and Google are machines, and machine needs signals in the form of intelligence and they get this intelligence with the help of data. And to get this data, Facebook and Google try to show your ads to many people to understand their reactions. Their reaction is the data fuel this machine needs in order to perform well.

Hence if you are giving enough creative options to these machines, they will be able to test it out better and push the best performing ones.

There is no right or wrong count of creatives. However always be testing, even if you have one promotion on one product, feed 3-4 different variations of the creatives to the machine.

The fourth connection between promotions and performance marketing is

Website UX:

Whether you are running a discount-based promotion or not, your ad and website experience need to go hand in hand.

Clear communication and easy-to-navigate structure along with easy-to-buy steps (especially guest checkout in the case of e-commerce) play an important role in your campaign performance.

Many marketers, run landing page view campaigns as well during these promotions to create a broad middle funnel audience, it will be a futile exercise if the page itself is not optimised for speed.

Videos: if your promotion campaign has no videos- it is not really a campaign.

Today videos are top-performing inventories on major platforms and having a plan to create videos as per your promotions calendar will help you to narrate your story in an effective way and your performance team can make full use of these videos by running them at all 3 marketing funnel stages (depending on duration and budgets)- awareness, consideration and conversion.

So plan your campaigns in advance, choose the right platform, and creative strategy and layer it with excellent UX on your website/app for promotions to perform better while making complete use of performance marketing.

That’s it for today, folks.

If you like today’s newsletter, you can consider hiring me as your marketing consultant.

I spend time with founders, and CMOs 1:1 as part of the consulting scope to help grow your business. Reply back to this email if you want to get in touch.

Also, there are only a few seats left for A to Z of SEO fundamentals masterclass starting 7th Oct. Book yours from here.

I am also conducting a free online event on How should you plan your performance marketing campaigns for Diwali or Black Friday on 6th Oct. Sign up for it from here.

Have an awesome Sunday ahead.

Cheers,

Apurv