Know Your Customers to Increase Marketing Promotion Success


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Marketing promotion is synonymous with sales promotion. It is a key element within your marketing or promotional plan for selling your product or service. When developing your marketing promotion you are trying to achieve a specific goal within a specific time period.

In most cases a marketing promotion is trying to increase sales or trial in a short period of time. For example: For a limited time only save up to 25% or Buy One Get One Free this week only.

Whatever your goal you need to understand who you are trying to reach and what you want them to do. Are you trying to move them away from a competitor or are you trying to inform them about a new feature of your product or do you want them to feel good about purchasing your product?

Psychographics Key to Understanding

To send the correct message you need to understand not only the demographics (age, gender, income, location) of your customer but you also need to understand their values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle, in other words their psychographics.

As you know, the demographics will help you get to know who is buying your product or service, while the psychographics will help you understand the why behind them buying your product or service. Why is that important?

Well, I may like to have a discount on a product however I don’t like clipping coupons. If I am your target and you are trying to reach me only through coupons I will probably not react to or pay attention to your promotion. A potential sales opportunity lost.

One national retailer discovered a way to offer coupons and also reach customers like me. They now offer the same discount if you use their credit card, so I react to their promotion and go shopping!

Understanding the common interests of your target customer can also help you develop your marketing promotion.

Customer Psychographics
Values, Attitudes, Interests and Lifestyle Key to Understanding your Customers

For instance, if you are a travel destination and you know your target likes adventure on their vacation then you may want to package your promotion with an adventurous twist.

That way the promotion is speaking directly to your target customer and they will more likely respond in a more position manner – buy or try your product, service or destination.

There many ways to segment our audiences today, but it makes reaching them effectively that much harder. Do you spend some money on media, run a social media contest, develop a point of purchase display, send text messages as they walk past the store, all of the above? None of the above? There are so many options.  How do you choose?

That’s why understanding the demographics and psychographics are so important. “Like” people behave similarly. So if you know that your target customer is a young professional couple (Millennials) with a dual income of $100,000+, live in an urban area, avid pinterest users, internet users, enjoy trying new restaurants & foods, are very tech savvy, read travel magazines, are value conscious and download coupons you can paint a better picture of how to reach them.

Reaching them is both an art and a science. Most marketers recommend you test several combinations of media with various offers to find the more effective and profitable scenario for your specific target.

Don’t be afraid to throw unusual offers and media into your mix, sometimes those are the ones that work best to reach a small segment but those that buy more often.

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