A Quick Story: Magnetic Silent Seller

    As a former real estate agent and broker, sales promotion projects were often part of my marketing plan.

    Sales promotion is part of the “marketing mix” along with advertising, publicity, and personal selling. The marketing mix is a useful “roadmap” for strategic planning. Sales promotion is the use of short-term incentives to achieve specific sales goals. Often it involves offering something of value as a way of enhancing brand identity or immediate sales.

    A common sales promotion tool in retailing is couponing. These both urge immediate use and build brand awareness for the retailer using them. Sales promotion devices also include pens, glassware and mugs, office supplies, computer gadgets, clothing, and cute fun gizmos, all carrying the logo and/or contact information of the sponsoring business.

    In my real estate sales efforts, I used sales promotion along with media advertising. In addition to all of the Flagstaff, Arizona, market, I specifically targeted my own neighborhood to get seller listings. I attempted to contact about 200 homes near me with a marketing communication approximately every four months.

    A variety of sales premium companies sell brand-identified items to the real estate industry. For two years, I distributed new calendar magnets as my end-of-year promotion.

    They needed to be customized with my logo, photo, and contact information.

    Venders often include that customization along with the cost of the items. Like many sales promotion products, refrigerator magnets are relatively expensive, so distribution needs to be tightly coordinated.

    To be most effective, the magnets need to offer something desired and useful to my target. A calendar for the upcoming year met that requirement.

    A lot of my coworkers used kitchen cooking conversions (teaspoons to tablespoons; quarts to gallons) as a hook, but most kitchen dwellers know almost every cookbook has this information in the front.

    To encourage putting my magnets on the side of the fridge and keep them there all year long, I put a list of 32 popular annual holidays and their dates on the 4- by 7-inch magnets along with the next year’s calendar.

    The successful objective of the project was to keep my name in front of potential customers and let them have easy access to my contact information.