Question & Answer: Answer two of the three forum questions, listed below….

Expert Answer

Factors Affecting Promotion Mix

Product and service promotions create awareness, position products and services and persuade customers to buy. Although advertising is essential, it’s not the only consideration. Instead, an overall promotional mix also includes personal selling, sales promotions, public relations and direct marketing campaigns. Because there’s no set standard or method for creating an optimal mix, each business must consider the factors affecting the promotional mix and create its own custom promotional strategy.

Product-Oriented Factors

The nature of a product or service and where it lies within the product life cycle determines how much information a customer may require before making a purchase decision. For example, customers most often require more information when evaluating a new product or a product such as a computer, a car or a home heating system that is inherently more complex. In these cases, advertising, in-store sales promotions and personal selling will figure more heavily in the promotional mix. In contrast, a promotional mix that includes general advertising and sales promotions is more appropriate for common, everyday items such as groceries and clothing.

Target Market And Direct Competition

It’s critical for a business to know what direct competition is doing in order to create a promotional mix that differentiates its products from the competition. Product differentiation, also called positioning, focuses on creating distinctions about the attributes, price, quality or usage of a good or service as compared to the competition. Positioning can be accomplished using an above-the-line, below-the-line or combination promotional mix. An above-the-line promotional mix often includes public relations, television, radio and print advertising. A below-the-line promotional mix that focuses on direct marketing efforts such as direct mail campaigns can be effective for positioning products within a specific target audience.

Marketing Strategy

A product’s marketing strategy also affects the promotional mix. For example, the promotional mix for a push strategy will be different than the mix for a pull promotional strategy. A push promotional strategy takes the product to the customer in an effort to create demand. With this type of strategy, direct selling and trade promotions form the base of the promotional mix. A pull promotional strategy attempts to increase consumer demand for a product by drawing customers in. With this type of strategy, mass media advertising and product promotions that create product awareness most often form the base of the promotional mix.

Budget Allocations And Resource Availability

Cost is a significant factor in determining the promotional mix. An annual marketing budget, the budget for an individual campaign and the cost of each promotional tool all play a role in determining whether and to what degree a promotional tool can be used. For example, the high cost of producing and running television advertising spots can be a limiting factor for some business budgets. Resource availability is another consideration. Although newspaper advertising may be an appropriate promotional tool, it can be an unavailable option in a small community or ineffective if the newspaper’s circulation rate is too low.

Social media is a phrase that we throw around a lot these days, often to describe what we post on sites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others.

But if we use the term to describe a site like Facebook, and also a site like Digg, plus a site like Wikipedia, and even a site like I Can Has Cheezburger, then it starts to get more confusing. Just what is social media anyway?

The term is used so vaguely that it can basically be used to describe almost any website on the internet today.

Or maybe not. Some people have more of a restricted view of social media, often equating it to mean the same as social networking (a.k.a. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Other people don’t consider blogs to fall under the social media category.

So, What Is Social Media?

To start, let’s look at each word individually.

The “social” part: refers to interacting with other people by sharing information with them and receiving information from them.

The “media” part: refers to an instrument of communication, like the internet (while TV, radio and newspapers are examples of more traditional forms of media).

Social media are web-based communication tools that enable people to interact with each other by both sharing and consuming information.

Yes, it’s a broad definition–but keep in mind that social media is a very broad term. This is likely as specific as we can get without zeroing in too much on a more specific subcategory of social media.

What Does the Future Hold for Social Media?

It’s difficult to predict anything exact, but if one thing can be said about the future of social media, it will probably be more personalized and less noisy. Over-sharing will be less of a problem and filtering out irrelevant information will become a stronger trend.

Snapchat is a social media platform that’s really at the forefront of social media evolution. Rather than blasting out updates for all our friends and followers to see, we use Snapchat more like we communicate in real life–with specific people only at specific times.

If anything, social media is probably about to move more toward ephemeral sharing for quicker, more intimate sharing without the stress of having to blast something out to hundreds or thousands of followers that stays up there unless it’s manually deleted. Instagram has already made the move toward ephemeral content sharing with its Snapchat-like stories feature, so maybe more platforms will be soon to follow.