Personnel marketing is through the salesperson or salesman to directly meet with consumers, to convey information to them, introduce knowledge of goods and services, to arouse the attention and interest of consumers to promote consumer purchases. This kind of promotion has the advantages of accurate information, pertinence, and timely and accurate feedback information. Its inadequacies are limited by the number of people, professionals, and higher fees. Promotion of personnel also includes invitations, hiring relevant experts and consultants to carry out promotional and promotional activities for consumers, and objectively also includes the phenomenon of purchases caused by mutual introduction and exchange of information among consumers. In addition to promotion of personnel, there are advertising, business promotion and public relations and other indirect means of promotion. Among them, advertisements convey information to consumers through the use of media objects such as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, etc. It is not limited by time and space, and does not require much manpower. It can make up for the limitation of manpower and scope of activities for personnel promotion. Business promotion is through a series of measures to stimulate the consumer's desire to buy and purchase behavior, such as gift samples, price concessions, incentive sales, cheap packaging and so on. Public relations is achieved through public relations staff making friends, establishing corporate reputation, mediating the relationship between the company and consumers, and actively lobbying customers for promotional purposes.
Corporate marketing activities are organized, planned, and purposeful overall behavior. They are not isolated or fragmented. They are a combination of various promotion methods to create a complete system, cooperate with each other, and strengthen the effect. Meanwhile, different companies According to different market conditions, they can also choose appropriate promotions with each other.
The content of marketing techniques is: how to arrange sales plans and distribute sales time, such as how to maintain the relationship with existing customers, how to find and discover potential customers, how to describe the company’s products as the interests of customers, and how to write sales letters And memorandum, how to end a sales and get new orders, how to analyze the customer's purchase motivation, how to deal with and deal with the difficulties encountered in sales work, how to collect customer opinions and competitors' intelligence information, how to use sales tools And equipment, how to pay attention to personal demeanor and so on. And good at understanding the user's difficulties; good at choosing the right time, full business negotiation; good at approaching and persuading users, gaining user trust; dare to break through price barriers, timely quotes and so on.
There are many specific promotional methods, but in general it can be divided into two parts.
1. Consumer-centric promotions (1) Cost vouchers: A vouchers is a price-labeled voucher that a commercial unit sends to a customer along with the advertisement or product packaging, but its value can only be specified by the vouchers. In the store. Usually, customers can use the coupon purchase to get a few percent discount on the price, but there is another kind of “auto-offset coupon†that can be used to convert the coupon into currency after shopping for the coupon. Bigger. At the beginning of the 1990s, some stores in Beijing began to use vouchers, but the scale was far less common than in American stores. Beijing Set Mall has issued a series of "clothing, food, and use" series of coupons. The discounts on coupons are 20 yuan, 10 yuan, and 20 yuan respectively.
(2) Additional transactions: Additional transactions are short-term price reductions. The specific approach is to pay a certain number of free same-type products to customers during the transaction. The common business language for this method is "buy a few and get a few." Additional transactions have also been widely used by fast food restaurants, such as the Pizza Hut in Beijing, where guests can enjoy different free drinks according to different meal rates if they dine in a quieter time at the designated store.
(3) Discount: Discount means that the price of the goods is discounted when the goods are sold. The discount range is generally from 5% to 50%. Too large or too small will cause customers to suspect the authenticity of the promotion. The sign of the discount can be posted outside the store, or it can be marked on the display location of the discounted merchandise.
(4) Rebate: The rebate to consumers is not realized immediately after the consumer purchases the goods, but it takes a certain amount of steps to complete. Usually the sign of the rebate is attached to the packaging of the product or printed directly on the packaging of the product. For example, the rebate symbol of alcoholic beverages is generally set on the bottle mouth. After a consumer purchases a product with a rebate mark, the rebate label needs to be sent back to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then sends a check to the consumer according to the amount of the rebate amount.
(5) Awarded sales: Awarded sales are one of the most attractive promotional measures because consumers are rewarded once they win, and many consumers are willing to try this risk-free winning purchase. activity. In China, the amount of a single award that is stipulated by the law for sales must not exceed 5,000 yuan. In addition to ready-to-buy prizes, in order to increase the credibility of prized sales, the organizers of the lucky draw generally have to invite the notary office to supervise the sweepstakes and publish the results of the sweepstakes in the local newspapers with large circulation.
(6) Sample: The meaning of the sample in the promotion strategy includes two kinds of new products that are presented in small packages and on-site tasting. Many companies are willing to promote products and stimulate purchases by offering small packaged products to consumers when they introduce new products. If they are food products, they will get them directly in the store and invite customers to taste directly. P*G company has given a large number of “Pantene†shampoo samples in Beijing to enhance consumer awareness of this product.
(7) Live demonstration: The live demonstration of the promotion method is also to enable customers to quickly understand the product's features and performance, in order to encourage customers to buy ideas. More and more products have been demonstrated live on the Beijing market, including steam irons, food processors, various cleaning tools and health products. The live demonstration can save a lot of money on the introduction of product mailings, and make customers feel their own way and get emotional recognition.
(8) Contests: There are many ways to compete. Frequently, there are competitions in intelligence and knowledge. Most of the content is related to the company that sells the products or its products. The prizes for competitions are generally physical, but there are also free tours to show rewards. There may be many venues for competitions. Enterprises sometimes complete the competition through television programs that are game-like and use the company’s products in television programs to achieve the purpose of promoting businesses and products.
(9) Gifts: The company can also use some opportunities and occasions to issue the factory's products as gifts to increase the visibility of the company and its products. Of course, sometimes companies only spend a small amount of money to distribute their name-stamped briefcases and pockets on exhibitions or other occasions, but this is also a very economical way to expand their corporate reputation.
(10) Exhibition: The exhibition will be a kind of commercial activity that is very popular in recent years. When the fair’s products are directly sold by manufacturers, their price will be slightly lower than the retail price. Since most of the consumers participating in the trade fair have the desire to purchase cheap goods, if the level of exhibited goods is high, the sales of the manufacturers can reach a considerable level.
2. In addition to promoting sales activities in the form of advertisements and personal promotions, promotional and production enterprises centered on enterprises and organizations also use the means of business promotion in transactions with middlemen. These methods are mainly: commercial discounts, volume discounts, commercial discounts and cost subsidies.
(1) Commercial discount: If a retail unit issues a vouchers to the public, then during the validity period of the vouchers, the manufacturer must compensate the customer when selling products to the retail unit that issued the vouchers. In order to avoid disputes, such commercial discount activities of production companies and sales organizations are generally guaranteed by the signing of contracts.
(2) Volume discount: A volume discount refers to a certain amount of free same-type goods between the manufacturer and the middleman, or between the wholesaler and the retailer, according to the quantity of the purchased goods. For example, if you buy ten boxes of a certain commodity, that is, you donate one box at no charge, that is, a volume discount. The purpose of the volume discount is to encourage middlemen to increase their purchases.
(3) Commercial discounts: In the transactions between companies and middlemen or between wholesalers and retailers, a certain percentage of price discounts are also used from time to time. Such discounts are called commercial discounts because they are discounts within distribution channels. . The basis of commercial discounts is the price elasticity of demand, which means that when prices fall, demand will increase.
(4) Expense subsidy: When retailers cooperate with manufacturing enterprises to carry out promotional activities, they sometimes increase some of the costs. These costs are sometimes spent on advertisements, and sometimes they are spent on the display of goods in stores. For this reason, the production companies generally give Business subsidies. When the intermediaries themselves transport products from the production company's warehouse to the sales location, they can also receive the cost subsidies provided by the production companies.
Promotion types and techniques
Promotions are marketing activities based on distribution. Its mission is to cooperate with the distribution channels and use some special measures to vigorously promote product sales. Its content includes promotional packages, personal promotion, advertising, business promotion, and public relations.