Within the overall marketing mix is the promotional mix. It covers everything you as an entrepreneur do to communicate with target audiences. It is organized into four general categories of communication tools:

• Advertising

• Personal Selling

• Sales Promotion

• Publicity and Public Relations

Here is an example of a three-stage selling process designed for Virtual Brows and Beauty (microblading bussines in the U.S.). Microblading involves helping shape, color, and improve the look of people’s eyebrows. This is the selling process with individual promotional blends to move the customer to a sale.

Sometimes you may not have real money for marketing at that moment, so those examples are all low-cost promotional tools, such as creating videos for the client’s website or business Facebook page, creating fliers, and having the entrepreneur speak at public forums. Using this kind of strategic approach to promotion, here is a list of the action steps used in implementing different promotional tactics:

• Identify ten forums or venues where she could speak or have a display table/booth --- develop a 2-minute pitch.

• Determine upgrades needed for the FB page and website, and implement

• The brochure is designed but identify twenty places to distribute it

• Create a flier and forty places to hang them

• Identify five businesses to co-market with and lay out an approach

• Script out and produce the educational video --- place on website and FB page

• Design the before and after photo gallery, and where it should be placed

• Map out how the consultation sessions should unfold

• Create a format and schedule for the blog, and help create the first blog

• Study sales closing techniques and help her learn four of these

• Produce three examples of price promotions and approaches for implementing each

Here is a video explaining the promotional mix using as example a brand we all know: McDonalds.

Video: Promotional Mix

The following document provides entrepreneurs with a practical and accessible guide to understanding how advertising works and how to use it effectively when building a new business.

Because early-stage ventures often have little visibility or credibility, advertising becomes essential for introducing the business, establishing legitimacy, and staying top-of-mind with potential customers.

The content walks you through how people process advertising messages and explains why capturing attention, generating interest, and earning trust are critical steps before a customer ever takes action. It also outlines the key communication objectives you should consider for each advertisement and explores the six core factors—objectives, audience, message, medium, timing, and frequency—that ultimately determine whether your advertising will make an impact.

By breaking down different advertising media and highlighting the tradeoffs of each, this document gives entrepreneurs the foundational tools needed to make smart, strategic decisions about how to promote their businesses effectively.

Click here to learn the essentials of advertising for entrepreneurs.

📰▶️ Article and Videos: The Top 15 Commercial Ads of All Time.

Selling Directly to Your Customers

Some of the most important sales interactions happen one-on-one, where you or a representative of your business connect directly with a potential customer. This happens in situations like:

• Calling on local businesses to offer your cleaning, lawn care, or screen printing services.

• Meeting customers at a booth in a farmers’ market, pop-up market, or community event.

• Giving a personal demonstration of your product or service.

These direct interactions give you the chance to explain your product, answer questions, and build trust immediately—something you can’t achieve with advertising alone.

Example Scenario

Imagine you run a mobile car detailing business. You set up a booth at a weekend farmers’ market with a banner, flyers, and a small demo area where you show your detailing process. As customers walk by, you greet them, explain your service, and offer a quick demo or free consultation. One local business owner sees your work and decides to book a weekly service for their company vehicles.

This one-on-one approach not only helps you close immediate sales but also allows you to learn what customers value, refine your pitch, and strengthen your brand reputation in your community.

Encouraging Customers to Buy and Stay Loyal

Sales promotions are activities you use to encourage customers to make a purchase or remain loyal to your business. These promotions can take many forms, including:

• Free samples to let customers try your product.

• Point-of-purchase displays or banners in your store or at events.

• Branded items or vehicle wraps to increase visibility.

• Gifts or perks for key customers, such as tickets to a local event or game.

• Free trials, scratch cards, punch cards, or BOGO (buy-one-get-one) offers.

• Contests, limited-time or seasonal sales, referral programs, loyalty programs, and coupons.

• Sponsorships for community events, like a 5K race for a cause you support.

Example Scenario

Imagine you run a local bakery and want to increase customer visits during a slow month. You create a punch card program where customers get a free pastry after buying ten items. You also set up a small display of free samples of a new cupcake flavor near the counter. A local 5K charity run is coming up, and you sponsor water stations with branded banners and hand out mini cupcakes to participants.

These efforts give potential customers reasons to try your products, encourage repeat visits, and build awareness of your business in the community—all at the same time.

Video: Promotion

Video: Promotion - Engineering Example

Video: Promotion - Microblading Example

Getting Your Business Known

Publicity is when your business gets coverage in the media—for example, a story in the newspaper, a magazine feature, or an appearance on a local radio or TV show—without paying for it. Because it is earned, customers often see it as more objective and trustworthy.

Public relations (PR), on the other hand, is the practice of managing and sharing favorable information about your business with the public. PR helps shape how people perceive your brand and builds credibility over time.

The key to success is combining publicity and PR with other promotional tools in what’s called the promotional mix. This mix moves your potential customers from never having heard of your business to becoming loyal, repeat buyers. It is more than putting fliers on car windows or placing a single ad—it’s a planned communication process.

Think of it as guiding your customer step by step:

1. Awareness – Let them know you exist.

2. Interest – Capture their attention with messages about your products or services.

3. Understanding – Help them see how your product or service works.

4. Belief – Show why your offering is trustworthy or better than alternatives.

5. Liking – Build an emotional connection with your brand.

6. Preference/Intention – Encourage them to choose your business over competitors.

7. Purchase – Turn interest into an actual sale.

8. Loyalty – Create repeat customers who also share positive word-of-mouth.

The secret is to use different promotional tools at each stage to walk customers through this buying process. Your selling process is essentially the reverse of the customer’s buying process.

Example Scenario

A client, Virtual Brows and Beauty, a microblading business, wanted to increase bookings. Consultants helped design a three-stage selling process with specific promotional tools for each stage:

• Stage 1 – Awareness: Social media posts showcasing before-and-after photos and a local radio mention.

• Stage 2 – Interest and Understanding: Free mini consultations and short educational videos explaining microblading benefits.

• Stage 3 – Purchase and Loyalty: Limited-time discounts for first-time clients, follow-up thank-you messages, and referral rewards for returning customers.

By mapping promotions to the customer’s buying journey, the business saw more consistent bookings and stronger engagement from clients.

Most of the entrepreneurs we work with do not have money for marketing when they first start out. They rely on low-cost tactics, social media, and the use of guerrilla tactics to gain initial exposure for their business. If you have begun to establish visibility and a market presence, you now want to build upon this. It may be time to a) become more strategic in your marketing approach and b) consider spending more money on conventional types of advertising and promotion.

As with other aspects of your planning, your choices should reflect your competitors, target market, growth goals for the business, and what you can afford to spend. Becoming more sophisticated in how you market your business starts by establishing goals for different advertisements or promotions. Here are five key goals you might consider:

♦ Create awareness of your business – using advertisements and promotions simply to get your company name in front of people, making them aware, and ensuring the next time they have a need for your product or service category, they will remember you.

♦ Convey information or educate potential customers – with many products and services, especially ones the customer is buying for the first time, or that cost more, or represent more important kinds of purchases, you have to educate the customer. Letting them know how your product or service works, the benefits it provides, or addressing safety issues are examples of areas where customer education may be critical before they will buy from you. Advertising cans serve this purpose.

♦ Demonstrate your capabilities and how you are superior – here you want to highlight a particular capability that differentiates you from competitors. Maybe your quality is superior, you have longer or more convenient operating hours, your customer service if friendlier, you have a better warranty or guarantee, or you provide more value for the money. Advertisements can convey these capabilities.

♦ Persuade potential customers to try your products for the first time – this is advertising that assumes customer know who you are, what you do, and how the product or service works, and you are trying to get them to actually pull the trigger and buy from you.

♦ Remind people to buy – with this goal, you have customers who have bought from you in the past or have decided they will buy from you the next time they have a need, and you are reminding them that now is good time to make a purchase. You are giving them a reason to act now, possibly because of the time of year it is (e.g., back to school, Valentine’s Day), or due to some development (e.g., interest rates or prices are going up, there are supply shortages coming).

Be careful not to try to accomplish more than one of these goals with a given advertisement or promotion. Trying to do too much, or having too much clutter in your messages, causes customer confusion, is giving the customer too much work to do, and can alienate them.

Once you have specific goals for what you are trying to accomplish with your advertising, it is time to consider the message you want to convey and the medium or mechanism for communicating the message (e.g., billboards, online advertising). The goal should drive what the message will be. Good advertising messages are simple, easy to understand, easy to recall, compelling (make the customer want to buy). Ads should be designed to reflect the target audience you are trying to reach. What kind of message reflects their circumstances, addresses their problems and concerns, and speaks to how their life could be made easier or better. If you use humor, or appeal to a particular emotion, or use certain images, does this make sense given the type of customer you are trying to communicate with?

One tool that might be helpful as you consider what you want to say in your advertisements is a library developed by Meta. It will allow you to peruse advertisements being run by a wide variety of successful companies in different industries—the user can search for any kind of business. You can find this resource by going to:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=US&media_ type=all

When designing advertising messages, don’t forget to include a “call to action.” This concerns what you want the person who sees your ad to actually do. For instance, do you want them to:

- Sign up?

- Subscribe?

- Contact you?

- Try for free?

- Get started?

- Learn more?

- Refer a friend?

- Join us?

Examples of effective calls to action for online ads can be found at this address—https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ call-to-action-examples.

The next issue concerns where you should advertise or place messages. Here are a number of media and other possibilities to consider:

• Google paid ads – Google paid ads can be a great way to increase your exposure to a targeted community. However, you may be competing against deep-pocketed competitors who can outspend you and out-rank you in the Google algorithm. To learn more about Google Ads, go to https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/googleads

• Social media paid ads – Social media such as Facebook and Instagram provide relatively less expensive ways of reaching a wider audience. Leveraging a budget as small as a few dollars per week can put you in front of thousands of new potential customers. This medium allows you to be very specific about your target market including age, gender, location, education, religion, interests, politics, and marital status. Social media ads are good for building brand awareness and generating leads.

• Boosting social media posts – For a relatively small fee, social media platforms such as Facebook will send a message or post that you create to audiences that you specify.

• Paid influencers – Is there someone with a substantial following that has an established reputation with their target market? Consider contacting them to try your products. Hopefully, they will feature them and offer a positive review, which will increase your exposure and ideally lead to increased sales.

• Podcasts – Is there someone hosting a podcast you can partner with? Having a spot on a podcast will allow you more time to communicate the benefits of your product or service.

• Local publications – Each community has publications specific to that community and can include church bulletins, local newsletters, and local newspapers. This can be a more affordable way to reach a local market and depending on the publication, can be very specific to your target market. It can also be a good place to put coupons for customers to redeem.

• Sponsorships – Consider what local events might reach uniquely position you before your target audience and consider opportunities to sponsor those events in some way. These can include sports teams, backs of vehicles, disposable placemats in restaurants, local fairs, and entertainment events.

• Direct Mail – Through direct mail you can send postcards, flyers, and samples to specific zip codes. The United States Postal Service provides assistance in developing and delivering direct mail advertising campaigns and offers referrals to direct mail experts. On their site you can assess which zip codes offer the demographics including age, household size and household income that most closely matches your market: https://www.usps.com/ business/advertise-with-mail.htm

• Print Advertising (magazines, newspapers) – Advertising in local newspapers has become more affordable, but newspaper readership has also declined. As a result, you can negotiate some pretty good rates. With magazine advertising, it can be expensive to produce high quality, effective ads, and it can cost more to place the ad in a particular part of the magazine. However, local magazines are less expensive and reach particular target audiences in the local market.

• Outdoor advertising – Here you are putting ads on billboards, digital signs, taxis and buses, bus stops, vehicle wraps, wallscapes, kiosks, and airplane banners).

• Broadcasts (Radio, TV) – Television advertising requires significant capital investment and the cost of advertising spots can be costly. Effectiveness and cost will vary based on the time and frequency of the advertisements. However, you can often get decent ad rates through local cable companies. With radio, it can be expensive (less than television) but you might be able to negotiate decent rates with local stations that reach your target audience.

One of the most important lessons when it comes to advertising concerns the importance of frequency. People are bombarded with information these days, and it is hard to cut through all the clutter. Breaking through the clutter requires that you hit your target audience enough times. Frequency, or how often you get your message in front of people, matters a lot. If you do not advertise with enough frequency, people are more likely to screen out or ignore your messages. In other words, it might be better to not advertise at all in a particular medium than to not advertise enough.

The advertising medium you select, and the frequency you decide upon, will be driven by your budget. For most of entrepreneurs, even after they start to gain traction in the market, their marketing budgets are quite small. Businesses generally try to spend no more than a certain percentage of their annual sales on advertising (e.g., 5 percent). But this depends on the stage of development of your business, how fast you want to grow, how intensive the competition is, and what industry you are in. Companies that sell in business-to-consumer (B-to-C) markets generally spend more on advertising than do companies in business-to-business (B-to-B) markets (in part because B-to-B companies rely more heavily on personal selling).

Here are two sources that provide some help in deciding how much to spend on advertising:

https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/marketing-sales-export/marketing/what-average-marketing-budgetfor-small-business

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2022/04/13/how-much-should-you-spend-on-marketing/?sh=6474643458f9

Finally, how do you determine the effectiveness of your advertising? This is only possible if you set particular goals for the advertising in the first place. You want to translate these goals into measurable targets to be achieved. Here are some examples of types of performance targets that you might set:

- Attract ___ new customers to the business in the next ___ months.

- Generate ___ new inquiries from potential customers (e.g., people asking for more information).

- Increase sales by ___ dollars.

- Increase the average order size (or spending per customer per visit) by ___ dollars.

- Increase awareness of your business among ___ people.

- Increase traffic to your website by ___ visits.

- Increase the number of followers (or likes) on my business social media page by ___.

- Increase customer referrals over the next ___ days by ___.

The point is that you should not just spend money and hope something happens. Know what you are trying to achieve when you spend money on advertising, and attempt to track the results.