Powerful Promotions: Let Someone Else Toot Your Horn

By Rhonda Campbell

You’ll be off and running as soon as other people start believing in your products the way you do. Once this happens, you can enter the arena of powerful promotions and start letting others toot your horn. But, first you have to develop great products or services. There has to be something about you, your products or services that demands people’s attention.

Promoting to Generate a Buzz
If you don’t know what it is about your business that could work as a magnet, promoting your work to masses of people, consider working with reputable promotion companies. Want to save money? Ask colleagues, friends, relatives . . . you name it, to give you their honest feedback about your products and services, including your promotion ideas and promotional materials.

This is important, because, even if you have a great product or service, consumers may never decide to try your products and services if your promotional materials are weak, if the materials don’t represent your work well. So, first you have to spread the word, start a buzz. Remember, even a small brush fire can, over time, burn up an entire forest.

To spread the word about your awesome products and services, you could offer giveaways, discounts and coupons to loyal customers (once you get these folks in your corner, things can really start to happen). Add promotional codes to coupons and giveaways so you can measure which promotional activities yield the greatest results.

Promotion Companies Don’t Have the Lock Down on Word-of-Mouth Promotions
By letting someone else start promoting you, you could build consumer trust in your products and services. You could also reach potential customers you wouldn’t reach if you advertised your products and services completely on your own.


In addition to the above mentioned step, there are several other action steps you can take toward letting someone else toot your horn. For example, you could:

• Hire two or more influential people who regularly use social media to promote links to your latest website promotion, sales, discounts and special events (let these people post positive comments about your products and services to their followers)
• Partner with a reputable marketing agency to develop slideshows, polls, interviews, videos and images to promote your products and services (consider getting customer references before contracting with a marketing agency, so you increase your chances of working with top marketing agencies)
• Work with freelance writers who have search engine optimization (SEO) experience. Let professional writers create and publish promotional articles, blog posts and articles about your business for you
• Onboard college interns, allowing them to build quality in-bound links for your business website promotion (consider paying the interns as they are working for you)
• Openly ask subscribers to your newsletters to tell 5 or more people about your business
• Gift loyal customers who refer 10 or more buyers (people who actually purchase your products or services) with free products, etc.
• Request that attendees at your speaking engagements tells their family, colleagues and friends about you, especially how much they loved your presentations
• Ask your own family and friends to share your promotional materials with people they know

For example, if you own a restaurant or a catering business, you could ask your family and friends to recommend your catering service to people they know who are looking for someone to cater special events they’re hosting. Or if you own a printing company, you could ask customers to tell others about great deals on business cards, brochures, flyers, t-shirts, calendars, etc. you’re running.

Another way you can start letting someone else toot your horn, adding more bang to your promotional efforts, is to solicit and publish customer testimonials at your business website. You can also survey customers after they purchase your products and services, asking them to rate their satisfaction with your business. After you gather feedback from several customers, consider creating a short, visual report using the data and posting it on your website.

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