An effective promotional strategy can add rocket fuel to your growth. The opposite can kill it

Effectively managing your promotions is the easiest way to grow sales, gain additional runway, and more accurately predict and forecast sales. All brands struggle with this – especially natural brands. There are limited resources to help brands accurately measure promotional effectiveness – for all brands. 

Smaller brands are at a significant competitive disadvantage here. These are skills that are not taught in natural, until now.   

Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to increase sales through promotions when you have deep pockets, but how do you know what the true cost of the promotion is? In other words, knowing the break-even point of every promotion is critically important to being able to properly assess the effectiveness of any promotion. Once you know the break-even point, you can properly evaluate and assess the promotion. Did it achieve its objective?  

This is difficult to properly measure for the large brands and almost impossible for small brands – especially in natural. There are a lot of factors to consider. For example, what were your sales before and after the promotion? What were your sales during the promotion? 

Specifically, the data you buy does not matchup with the dates you promote, among other things. Being able to measure a promotion’s effectiveness is critical when defending against an unauthorized deduction from your distributor or retailer. It’s also critically important for helping you manage your expenditures and get the “biggest bang for your buck”.  

These are just some of the factors that complicate being able to having an effective promotion strategy. You need to do everything in your power to maximize each and every selling opportunity while managing your costs. Remember that retail is a marathon – not a sprint. You will continually get better at this as you work on it. You can not afford to get this wrong and you can not afford to push this further down on your to-do list. 

An effective promotional strategy needs to be the primary focus in your brand strategy. It will determine if you will be around for a month, a year, or decades.