How to Generate Brand Awareness using Promotional Incentives

So, you want to increase your brand’s reach, and you think that promotional incentives are your best bet. Well, they definitely can be useful – but strategy matters.

A recent survey performed by RetailMeNot found that three out of five shoppers agreed they cannot complete a purchase without first searching for an offer. The same study also found that two-thirds of consumers made a purchase they weren’t originally planning on making just because they were able to find an offer or coupon.

There are many different ways to increase brand reach using creative marketing incentives. Social media contests, exclusive coupons, and events are just a few incentives that can work for just about any company or brand wanting to generate brand awareness and boost revenue. Whatever promotion you choose for increasing brand reach, consider how it will fit into your short and long-term goals for your business.

Consider Your Goals When Running Promotional Incentives

Though the act of giving your consumers a coupon seems simple, you’ll need to take the time to put together a plan for why you are doing this in the first place. Are you giving your customers promotional incentives to increase brand awareness, or are you trying to capture consumers to turn them into lifetime customers? It could be one or the other or even both but consider your short-term and long-term goals when deciding on a promotional incentive.

Using Incentives for a Short-Term Goal

If you are trying to increase brand awareness for your company, you will want to create a promotion that’s almost too good to pass up. Imagine you just opened an ice cream shop. You are currently seeing 30 customers per day, but your goal is 100 customers per day. Your short term goal will most likely be to get as many people to learn about your business as possible. With this short-term goal in mind, a great incentive would be a Buy One, Get One Free ice cream. Not only will this promotion be too good to pass up, but it will trigger a good memory of your business with those customers.

Buy One, Get One Free is one of the easiest ways to encourage customers – not only are they heavily incentivized to buy, but now they get a bonus they can use themselves, or share with another. Never underestimate the power of the word “Free” when thinking of promotional incentives for your company. An article by Forbes states, “Just the sight of the word ‘free’ releases large quantities of dopamine in our brain to make us feel happy, and we end up responding irrationally.” Ice cream already makes people pretty happy. So tacking on free ice cream with their purchase – well, who wouldn’t want to keep coming back?

Using Incentives for a Long-Term Goal

If you want to utilize incentives for your long-term goals, you will want to determine how to continue bringing customers back to your business. Let’s go back to the ice cream shop scenario – a great long-term incentive that keeps customers coming back could be a punch card where on their 10th purchase, they receive a free ice cream. 

This type of incentive would require a customer to make nine purchases prior, solidifying them as a lifelong customer. Of course, this doesn’t mean that incentivized customers will never visit another ice cream shop. Still, the probability of them continuing to come back to your shop is much higher if they’ve made nine purchases to get free ice cream than if they only visited for the short term Buy One Get One Free promotion.

In total, regardless of what creative marketing incentive you decide to use for your business to generate brand awareness and increase reach, you must figure out how it will fit in with your short and long term goals. If you are only looking for how to increase reach and could care less about returning customers, a promotional incentive using the power of “Free” may be the perfect fit for you. But if you’re looking to create lifelong customers, you will want a long-term incentive in place.

Still not sure if you should be thinking short term or long term with your promotional incentives? Get in touch with Serendipit. We’re masters of marketing, executors of engagement, and connoisseurs of conversations, and we have all the tools & knowledge to help you increase your brand’s reach.

Written By: Alex W, Project Coordinator