Ever hear these buzzwords? "Fragmented promotion" or "consumer-centric camp signs"? You will if you talk to just about any Fortune 500 company executive or promotion agency about promotions and advertising. You'll dive into long conversations about the dangers and dilemmas of designing persuasive promotion campaigns today.



Simply put, fragmentation is the rise in the amount of available methods that you can get your message across to your audience.

One of the foremost dilemmas faced by any executive is that promotion has altered and evolved over the last few years.Not limited to one area of promotion, these complications overflow into the electronic media as well and audio and visual media.

Go to Google and do a search for "promotion" and you will get over 450,000,000 results (that's 1 1/2 times the amount of people in the US) and results like local promotion, prize giveaways and pay-per-click advertising. It's enough to make a person feel awestruck.

Well, what about traditional promotion like billboards, television, magazines and radio then? Are they dead?

Hell no! Traditional promotion methods still work, according to one promotion mogul, so they're still around.

The trick is to figure out who your target market is, what they want, and how they look for that information.

Mark Twain said, "Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of promotion."

By fully understanding your customers, you can avoid wasting your money on useless promotion mediums and focus your money on those mediums that your customers actually use.

If your customers are senior citizens who are not online, then focus the majority of your promotion dollars on the newspapers, magazines, television, and radio that they are reading, watching or listneing to.

If your target market is working parents, you need to know how, when and where they get their information. What radio stations do they listen to? Is it on the Internet? Do they watch television? What magazines are they reading? When? Why? How?

So what are your best ways for designing an persuasive promotion campaign?

Here are a few effective steps:

1. Know your customer. What do they desire? Where do they vacation? What do they read? How old are they? Where do they like to go for fun? Do they want your service or product? Can they afford your product or service?

2. Know the competitors. Be primed to end up doing a bit of investigation. What are your top five competitors doing to advertise their business? Where are they promoting? How often? What types of promotion methods are they using? How long have they been running? Are you reaching the same audience? Is your message different?

Uncover what your competition is doing right and discover original ways to make their promotion slightly more persuasive so that you set yourself apart from the crowd.

3. What are the "top dogs" in your industry doing? See if you can borrow some of their methods and adapt them to your budget and target audience.

4. Get your message across clearly. What exactly are you trying to say? What do your customers want to hear? Why should your customer purchase from you instead of another business? You absolutely have to make every single word count.

Dollars to donuts, your customers are probably more technologically savy than they were even just one year ago let alone five years ago. The World Wide Web has made what seems like infinite amounts of data and information accessible to your customers. However, the #1 problem that your customers now suffer from is an overwhelming overload of information.

Another problem that the web has created is that it has groomed your customers to expect "instant gratification". They want the product and they want it now. Are you giving your customers what they want, when they want it?

A highly persuasive promotion does not try to be everything to everyone. Your promotion should be like you are having a conversation with your ideal customer... not a group of people. You don't want your ads to be a nuisance so, to avoid that, give your customers what they want and they will see the value of your product or service.

Traditional promotion is not dead and you can use it to your advantage if you pay attention to who your customers are and what they want.