Why you shouldn’t base your marketing campaigns on discount offers?
Many marketers and companies base their annual campaign plans around every possible important or socially accepted date and plan promotions around discounts, special offers and basically — sentiment. From Valentine’s, April Fool’s, Labor Day, Independence Day, season discounts to the big Black Friday and Christmas.
Why? Because we know that people spend money on those days, and we want to give them the best offer. We want to stand out from the competition by offering the best deal possible. However, if you do things right, or have a special service or product that people need — discounts often have nothing to do with your success.
“People buy based on emotion, and then later justify it by logic.”
This is something that Tom Stoyan, a world class sales trainer, told me. And it’s true. If I think about the last time I bought a smartphone — that’s exactly how it happened. I basically convinced myself that I need it, then went home and explained that it was a “once in a lifetime deal” which I couldn’t pass up.
Some services and products are such that people don’t buy them based on emotion and whim. Now, don’t get me wrong, people will buy from YOU based on the emotion (trust, competence, awe, quality, integrity…), but this is not related to them deciding that they NEED that product or service. They already decided they need it, or the need presented itself to them, and now it’s just a question from who will they buy it from.
So, if we accept this, then it’s much better to focus your marketing efforts on building a relationship with your clients and audience.
Explainer videos are such a product, for example. They are not cheap, they take time to produce, and then, once you have them— you still need to spend money to promote and use them effectively.
Here’s an example that I got from analysing our last year of business. In 2017, we did 3 major campaigns with discounts. 4th of July, End of Summer and, of course, the Black Friday campaign. In all of these discounts ranged from 15–35%, which is not little when you consider that a project is worth a couple of thousands of dollars. From the total amount of sales in the year, we did only 15% from all of these campaigns. Black Friday discount was available for 20 days and resulted in an astonishing 0% sales.
But then came a surprise. Three weeks after the close of the campaign we sold 9 projects in one week. No discount, no nothing. Nine unique clients, six of them first time customers contacted us for a consultation and we closed every single one. Also, I know for a FACT, they all received the discount offer because they were in our lead list.
Why and how did this happen?
This happened because they did not NEED the explainer video at that moment. They did not finish their marketing plan or product development and they still were not ready to produce a video. However, once the need for the video arose — then it was only a matter of who will be the best company to work with them.
So, with all this I wanted to say —
