Planning out your marketing year means less stress and more creative energy for promotions. Here are some tips to help make your promo planning easy.
Have an overall plan
When we’re talking about a promotional plan, we’re talking about looking at the big picture. Your promotional plan or schedule should be for the next three to six months at a minimum. This provides a good timeline to understand what promotions you want to run, how many, and when. It helps provide a good consistent base that helps keep you top of mind with your customers.
Utilize different types of promos
You should never just run the same promo over and over all year. Promotions give you the opportunity to showcase what you’re great at, but also introduce services and products that your clients may not know about. Let’s talk about the three main types of promos you can run through your spaboom account:
Buy one, Get one (BOGO)
This is a fun promo for the customer because they get something extra that they can either keep for themselves or gift to someone else. It could be an additional service or a product, depending on what you want to promote. And you can also tier BOGOs to offer more than one freebee: Purchase $100, Get $10, Purchase $200, Get $20, etc. The benefit of running a BOGO is that it often creates 2 visits out of one purchase. Get creative and come up with interesting offerings for the Get One section of the promo. Something like, purchase $200 and get a free haircut. Or, purchase $100 and get a free product. A good time to run a BOGO is when you know you’re going to have an influx of gift purchases, such as during the holidays. Or run one during your anniversary month to celebrate your business’s birthday.
Percentage discount
Everyone loves a discount. They make your customers feel like they’re saving money on things they already do and can help drive additional sales on services that a customer may want to try out but at a discounted price. You don’t want to run a discount all the time because it can devalue your services and overall brand if it is always available, but these types of discounts are great to run a few times a year. Discount promos discount all services universally across your menu by whatever percentage you offer. Take a look at the average ticket prices of your more popular services and products as well as discounts you have offered in the past. This will help you determine when it makes sense to offer a discount and how much the discount should be. We generally recommend running a deeper discount for a shorter timeframe or a smaller discount for a slightly longer timeframe.
Featured services
We believe you should be promoting something at your business all the time. It’s why you often see featured services included in our monthly promo messaging. But having a featured service does not mean you need to have a discounted price or create something new. Utilize your featured services to draw attention to services at your business that may not get as much attention or feature a shorter version of a popular service to help introduce people to your offerings. You can even stack featured services to feature more than one service. Pro tip: Don’t use featured services to feature your best seller. Featured services give people an opportunity to learn about the different services you offer that they may not be familiar with and that can help increase interest.
Build in flexibility
Just because you have a plan doesn’t mean it needs to be set in stone. Your promo calendar should be specific enough that you know the types of promos you want to run every month. But you shouldn’t create all the verbiage in advance. Let the landscape of what is going on in the world, in your community, and with your customers drive that messaging closer to the time it runs. Keeping the messaging fluid and your audience engaged is the best way to promote your business in a way that shows you are part of the community.
Need ideas or help setting up your next promos? The spaboom team is here to help you get them set up on your website.
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Call us at 800.940.0458 or email support@spaboom.com