One of the hottest new jobs in recent years is the online version of incentive marketing company. Many companies are training their marketing departments to handle the newest marketing tool on the market, one that takes advantage of an existing trend. The newest marketing tool for many companies is offering special discounts or rewards to the customers who refer a friend.
Incentive marketing has been around for a long time, but it's just recently that companies have started to realize the importance of doing it right. It is still relatively new and still relatively untapped, although it's growing. So how does incentive marketing work? It begins with customers.
Special deals, sales, special coupons, or even gifts are designed to get people to go out and buy. This doesn't always mean going out and buying products that offer special discounts. It also doesn't mean you have to be going out and buying products from those who do offer special incentives. You can also use promotional offers to make the process easier for yourself. That's right; you can take your incentive marketing up a notch.
Using incentives to get people to talk about your business can be simple things like handing out pens. Those who like to write can write down something about your business and pass it out. Those who like to buy will buy, and vice versa.
There are more promotional items than you could possibly imagine, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The more creative you are with incentives, the better. For example, you could hand out barbeque tongs in a small gift bag that contains coupons for a free steak dinner.
Each of the barbeque tongs could contain an advertising piece that features your company logo. Those tongs will then be passed along to the next person who is going to write something about your business and who then gives them to the next person and so on and so forth.
The promotional item in this example would be one of the most cost effective advertising tools that you could ever have, and yet, they are available for a fraction of the cost of purchasing television spots. People respond to incentives just as they respond to freebies and other forms of promotion, and you'll soon see why.
Incentive marketing has the potential to be very expensive. That is the primary reason why companies rarely opt for the use of these strategies.
When people use promotional items to promote themselves, they can use them without having to worry about paying for them. You don't need to worry about someone running out to the store when they've got a coupon to hand out.
The only cost to your incentive marketing company is the amount of time you spend on creating your promotional items. Incentive marketing, however, requires advertising dollars. And the more you spend, the more people you're going to reach.
To ensure that the promotional item you're getting people to use is something that they're going to use, be sure that you're making it eye-catching and interesting. Choose products that are tied to your company name. There's nothing wrong with giving out promotional products that are popular enough that they're unlikely to be duplicated by any other company.
So, if you're interested in making a change to your promotional items, try adding an incentive to the end of your campaign. Promotional items tend to be small and easily identifiable, and that can be just what you need to draw in new customers!
