What Is Promotion Mix? Definition and Its Components (Explained)

What is Promotion Mix?

Promotion mix means integration of its components which are personal selling, advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing to achieve targeted marketing goals and objectives.

Promotion mix also can be defined as the combination of several promotional tools, used to promote products, attract customers, persuade them, and create a place for the products in the market.

Since promotion is the fourth most important element of the marketing mix, the promotion mix aims at promoting the company’s products in the best possible and cheapest way.

Components of Promotion Mix

Since every market is different, different elements/components of the promotion mix have different roles. Depending upon the situation the marketer can manipulate one or more components of the promotion mix.

The 5 essential promotion mix components have a great role in the successful promotional campaign of the firm. Let’s now understand these elements individually,

Advertising

Advertising is a non-personal paid form of promotional activity, where the products are promoted over the target market by a specified sponsor. One of the stunning components of promotion is mixed advertising, where a marketer through the means of different media advertises his offerings.

Advertising can be done offline as well as online. Offline means such as newspapers, and magazines, and online means such as social media, websites, etc. As compared to such as personal selling, advertising is a great way to reach a huge population of customers.

For example, in personal selling, the marketer has to visit personally every customer he wants to persuade, but in advertising, with a single advertisement, the marketer can reach a whole country’s population, also internationally.

However, since advertising is non-personal, face-to-face contact is not possible, hence customers’ responses are unknown during the period of advertising.

For advertising, the marketer or firm may choose media like radio, national newspapers, magazines, Television, film advertisements, displays, websites, social media (Facebook, Google, Twitter), etc.

The primary objectives of advertising aim at reaching mass people, supporting personal selling, attracting new market segments, promoting new products, and increasing the sales and profit of the firm, etc.

Personal Selling

Personal selling is when a seller meets his prospective customers face-to-face and persuades them intending to create a desire for the goods he offers.

Personal selling involves personal communication, where both customer and seller have two-way communication between them. As such immediate responses will be given as well and real-time curiosity will be asked and cleared.

Personal selling is one of the best components of the promotion mix that ensures building a very long-term relationship with customers since it is a person-to-person interaction. However, as opposed to advertising, the coverage area is limited and the cost of personal selling is very high.

For effective personal selling, the salespeople require influencing communication skills, and people’s psychological knowledge, and for a huge number of customers, more salespeople are required, which in turn increases the cost of the business firm.

The major intention of personal selling is to persuade people towards the offer of the seller. Besides this, other benefits and objectives are making personal interaction better, building relationships, ensuring flexibility, etc.

To make personal selling successful, one should go through the 7 most important steps. Which begins with prospecting for potential customers and ultimately making real sales with them. The necessary steps involved are prospecting, pre-approach, approach, sales presentation, handling objectives, closing the sale, and follow-up, get a detailed explanation of how these steps work, here.

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion is the third of the important components of the promotion mix on our list. Sales promotion is the marketing strategy, through which short-term marketing strategies, as well as incentives, are used to make cravings for the product in consumers’ minds.

Sales promotions are primarily oriented to customers. One of the best examples of sales promotion is “Buy One Get One Free” which marketers, producers, or retailers are heavily applying all over the market.

The ultimate goal of sales promotion is to draw the immediate attention of potential as well as existing customers, as such it sometimes creates desire in new customers and makes them buy even if they had not purchased before from there.

The effect and offer of sales promotion are only for a short time, it is only a maximum of up to for 3 months. It uses tools to stimulate consumers other than advertising, personal selling, or public relations.

To make sales promotion successful a marketer or retailer may use tools such as special offers, discounts, warranties, coupons, samples, prizes, sales contests, gift items, and so on.

Public Relation

On our list of promotion mix components, the fourth component is public relations. Public relations is the attempt of the business firm to interact with the public, get to know the public, and build a good relationship with them.

The company that considers public relations believes that whenever a company has good relations with the public, the chances of purchasing its goods and services are very high and vice versa.

Public relations is very effective in building the brand image of the company, earning the trust of people, and securing the future of the organization.

The primary objectives of public relations are to develop mutual understanding with the people, build awareness, build credibility, stimulate salesforce & dealers, reduce the promotion cost of the firm, etc.

To build a good public relation with society a company may opt for tools such as event participation, media relations, social media, oral communication, etc.

Direct Marketing

The fifth component of the promotion mix is direct marketing. Direct marketing is a marketing strategy where a marketer is personally involved in the promotion, sales, and delivery of goods to final consumers without using any marketing middlemen.

For this purpose, a direct marketer may use one or media to reach his potential customers but he does not consider using marketing intermediaries.

To do direct marketing, marketers may use telemarketing, personal visits, phone calls, video calls, messages, direct mail, kiosks, websites, catalogs, etc.

One of the major benefits direct marketing gives sellers and buyers is shopping convenience. Since most people are very busy these days, they prefer direct home delivery. They ignore visiting retail stores as there may be lots of consumers.

In this regard, customers prefer to go online shopping where they can easily place their order from home or make direct calls to the seller and place an order. In turn, they receive direct delivery to their home and the seller or producer does not have to pay any cost to retail stores or middlemen.

A Quick Comparision To These 5 Components Of The Promotion Mix

To make promotional exercises successful a marketer has to use these elements, as they are complementary to each other, one can be used to help another or more than one together.

Features	Advertising	Personal Selling	Sales Promotion	Public Relations	Direct Marketing
Mode of Communication	Indirect & Non-Personal	Direct & Personal	Indirect & Non-Personal	Direct or Personal	Direct & Personal
Regular and Recurrent Activity	Yes	Yes	No, short term stimulation	No, short term stimulation, and only or new worthy activity	Yes
Message flexibility	Uniform and unvarying	Personalized and tailored to prospect	uniform and unvarying	Yes, message flexibility is high	Personalized and tailored to prospect
Direct Feedback	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Control over message content	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sponsor identified	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Cost per contact	Low to moderate	High	Varies	High	Varies