30 Marketing Tips in 30 Days: Marketing Tip #28 – Use Online Coupons for Short-Term Promos

Dec 28 2010

Many businesses, especially in retail markets, have been using coupons offline for years to stimulate traffic and sales for very specific offers. Today, especially in tough economic conditions, coupons are one of the hottest phenomena on the Internet.

Coupons are not a marketing strategy, but as a tactic they might be part of your Inbound Marketing program to help your business be found. Generally, coupons will be used to promote a spike in traffic and sales in the short term, for a variety of marketing purposes, including customer acquisition or inventory clearance.

We do not advise using coupons as part of a permanent tactic for a given product or service. This will simply force you even further into price competition, which is all too easy on the Internet anyway. If you do determine that a short-term boost is the thing you need, here’s a few coupon options you might consider (there are many, many coupon sites on the Internet – these are representative).

Google Places. If you have one or more local businesses, chances are you have a Google Places account (if you don’t, set one up before the end of the day). In the very first screen of your Places account, Google invites you to “Attract new customers by creating an offer for your business”. These offers will display with your listing in localized search results, and they will also display on mobile devices (unless you toggle off that distribution). You will have the options to add an offer code and image if you wish. Google will even give you a preview of what the printed coupon will look like.
Valpak. Valpak has been a giant direct marketing firm for a long time. Now they have an online distribution network you can access to promote your business to the geographic areas you choose (note that Valpak is not your only option in this category – a brief search will yield many coupon networks). For a local area, just visit the general contact screen and you will be sent to a form that will be submitted to a representative in your area.
Groupon. This is the 800-pound gorilla in this category. Google is reputed to have bid recently for Groupon, with a purchase price as high as 6 billion dollars, and was rejected. Groupon has a unique business model that incorporates a pricing structure that allows a business to pay only for actual sales and leverages the social networks of participants to reach new customers.

Coupons may not be right for you, but they are right for millions of people online who “clip” them to save. It’s worth a thought.