Promotional Advertising: How to Create Campaigns That Convert

When you want customers to buy or schedule an appointment immediately, it's time for promotional advertising. An advertising promotion actively pushes your product or service with a message that entices the reader to take action.

To create effective ad campaigns, your promotions need to resonate with your target audience. Ad design, copywriting, and channel selection also help you drive action and get results. We've put together these advertising conversion tips to help you get started, with or without advertising experience.

What Is Promotional Advertising?

Promotional advertising is an outbound message that uses offers, incentives, and action-oriented language to drive sales. Unlike higher-funnel strategies — which are key elements of a brand awareness strategy — an advertising promotion encourages people to buy now.

Whatever else it is, it's not subtle. And that's not a bad thing. 

Promotional advertising creates urgency to drive short-term sales. Thanks to the rise of digital advertising, that short-term can start seconds or minutes after you launch your ad.

You can run promotional advertising through almost any digital marketing channel, from Google Ads to social media. The key is to find sales promotions that resonate with your audience, then convince them that they can't afford to wait.

Types of Promotional Campaigns That Work

Effective promotional marketing ideas combine value with immediacy. Discounts and limited-time offers are particularly effective because they trigger the fear of missing out. They also need to emphasize the value of your product or service. 

High-potential promotion examples include:

• Flash sales and limited-time offers: Significantly reduced prices for a short time, with a defined end date and an emphasis on acting before it's too late
• Buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deals and volume discounts: Sales that increase per-buyer spending by rewarding shoppers for buying more than one item
• Referral incentives and loyalty bonuses: Promotional marketing ideas that capitalize on brand sentiment and help customers identify with a business
• Seasonal and holiday offers: Timely holiday marketing campaigns that incorporate a sale or deal, often with a festive theme to get shoppers excited

If you know your target audience, advertising ideas can come directly from what you understand about their needs. For example, if you run an auto parts store and most of your buyers are garage owners, a time-limited volume discount sale can help you move excess inventory.

Promotional Strategies for Product vs. Service Businesses

Buy-now advertising and promotional campaigns work for in-person, online, and service-based businesses.

If you want your promotional ads to convert better, choose promotions based on how your customers shop. Your advertising and promotional campaigns will differ depending on whether you primarily sell products or services, though you can cover both if you sell both.

E-commerce and product-based businesses:

• Bundles that reduce the price per item
• Cart incentives, such as discounts or giveaways, if you buy above a certain amount
• Free or discounted shipping for a limited time
• Discounts or freebies in exchange for an email list sign-up

If you primarily offer repairs or other automotive services, your advertising and promotion strategies should focus on driving customers through the door. 

• First-time customer discounts
• Special deals for scheduling online
• Money-off coupons for specific services
• Bundles of complementary services, such as a tire rotation and an oil change
• Flash sales for seasonal services, such as snow tire installations

Some product-based tactics — such as seasonal specials and email-list sign-up discounts — can also work well for service businesses.

Discover what your audience responds to by running split testing, which compares two versions of an ad served to similar audiences. If one version gets more conversions, check what's different and use those features in future promotions.

Choosing the Right Promotion Channels

The right platform impacts conversion almost as much as ad design. 

Email Marketing

Ideal for marketing to your existing subscribers. Email promotions are easy to personalize for different audience segments, which increases ad relevance and can make the buying experience more fun. 

Social Media Advertising

Paid social ads expand your reach beyond your existing followers. Plus, they let you target ads to specific demographics and interest groups, which helps you optimize your ad budget.

Say you have shops in Florida and Maine. You're running a promotion on snow tires, but you don't want to waste money advertising to your Florida customers. Instead, you run Facebook and Instagram ads and serve them only to your northern customers. 

Social media ads are also easily shareable, which is great for promoting word-of-mouth. Even if Facebook User Earl doesn't need new snow tires, he knows his neighbor Mark slipped off the road last winter. He forwards your ad, and you get even more attention — with an extra cost of zero dollars.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Ads

PPC ads are great for optimizing ad spend because you only pay when someone clicks. Plus, they appear at the top of the search page. This translates to fast visibility without the lag time of search engine optimization.

Google Ads reaches a massive audience and lets you target your promotions, offering you an ideal balance between reach and personalization. And if your PPC ads do well, you can expand to other types of Google Ads, such as video ads or display ads on Google partner websites.

Landing Pages

According to advertising best practices, all promotional advertising should link back to a landing page. This is a dedicated page on your website geared to a specific campaign. Multiple ads can link back to the same landing page, and you can link internally to it for site-wide visibility.

How to Track Campaign Performance

To optimize your ad budget, you need to know which campaigns get the best results. The best way to measure the success of a promotional campaign is with conversion-focused key performance indicators (KPIs), which track specific elements of consumer behavior. 

The most effective ad campaign metrics to use for promotional advertising are:

• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of viewers who clicked on your ad
• Conversion rate: The ratio of ad viewers who purchased a product or made an appointment
• Return on investment (ROI): The profit per dollar of your ad campaign, calculated by subtracting ad costs from sales growth, then dividing by the same ad costs

Tracking all three metrics across time will help identify your high-converting ads and reveal key friction points. 

Suppose you have local service ads that get significant traction on Google, but don't bring in customers. Looking at your metrics, you see a high CTR but a low conversion rate. That means your ad is doing its job of getting clicks, but your landing page isn't closing the deal. Now you know how to make the ad more effective.

Of course, to make this process work, you need customer data. Some of that data comes from your customer relationship management (CRM) software, which is a must for any small business. CRM systems can track and aggregate customer information across multiple platforms, so you know where customers convert.

To link behavior to campaigns, you'll need to add specific tags to your landing page URLs. Marketing pros call these Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters. They convey information about where traffic comes from, so you know which marketing campaigns are driving the most or least traffic.

Automate and Scale With Optimize Digital Marketing

With CRM data and marketing automation tools, you can get a significant lift from well-crafted promotional campaigns. Optimize is here to help with self-service CRM platforms that can turn your team into effective advertising and promotions managers. Or, let us create and manage your strategy with comprehensive digital advertising services.

Our digital advertising pros can create promotions that align with your marketing strategy. Learn more about how we can create custom digital advertising for your business. Or explore our social CRM to discover how automation and a personalized platform can transform your promotional strategy.