What Is The Difference Between Promotion And Sales Promotion?

With the current craze of going digital, it has become crucial to stay connected with your target group and update them regularly with your products and services. We live in an era that is rapidly evolving, and the more unique your business ideas are, the better will be your promotional activities. The more impactful your business strategies are, the more revenues you will earn by sales promotion.

Is it too much to process? First, you need to understand that sales promotion and advertising are major components of a business. Whether you are hiring an advertising agency to develop effective marketing strategies or distributing promotional products, both have their intended impacts on your brand. While we can differentiate between them, we cannot overlook their importance. However, in this post, we will make sure to draw the differences between them so that you, as a business owner, have a clear idea of how to make the most of them. 

A Quick Brief On Advertising Promotion

Advertising promotions mostly help to build up the brand image. The result takes a decent amount of time to show up. Advertising is the process of promoting your services and products.  In most cases, businesses use different advertising methods to express their USP and explain how their services and products are superior to their competitors. The main goal of advertising is to skyrocket sales and build up brand opportunities that can pay off in the future.  You can do this by hiring an advertising agency in Perth to conduct marketing research for you.

A Quick Brief On Sales Promotion

When you compare advertising with sales promotion, the latter one is much more focused on getting instant revenues into the bank account. Mainly, sales promotion is all about short-term sales goals. These are campaigns that mostly revolve around the discounts and offers on trending services and products. 

Often companies focus on sales promotions during the special occasions when consumer demand is mostly higher than normal. For instance, the holidays are the best times for brands to focus on sales promotions. During the festive seasons, customers make impulsive purchases. Sales promotions often come up with exciting discounts, coupons, free deals, and gift vouchers. 

Let’s understand the differences between sales and advertising promotions.

1. Temporary VS Permanent Strategy

Sales promotions have a limited time frame, whereas advertising is a forever strategy that involves long-term marketing and sales programs.

2. Different End Goals

Advertising appeals to the want-and-need of a specific target audience.  These strategies seek to convince the customers that the products and services are worth their attention. The end goal of advertising is not always sealing a product. It is done to set a sales prospect for the long run.

On the other hand, sales promotions are specifically about vending services and products to satisfy instant financial goals.

3. Direct Vs. Indirect Appeal

Advertising often involves several indirect ways to create the desired impact on the target group. While on the other hand, sales promotions are straightforward. For instance,  when a skateboard company focuses on promotion, they can talk about the product’s capacity, longevity, and the different types of jumps possible.  But when the same company focuses on hardcore sales promotions, they focus on the price and the discounts.

4. Costs Involved

Usually, advertising activities are costly because of the dedicated team working behind them. Coming up with a creative ad campaign requires a business owner to hire a high-end advertising and digital marketing agency these days. After all, innovative and genuine ideas are not free. Also, these campaigns are investments for the long run. You won’t get immediate revenue in return for what you have spent. 

While on the other hand, sales promotional activities are quite cost-effective as these are for short-term business goals. Giving out some vouchers, special offers, combo packs, or buy one get one deals requires a quick promotion.  The expenses are well justified when the revenues are much higher.

Advertising promotes the reasons to buy a product, and sales promotions encourage an incentive to buy the same products.