Promotion comes down to two questions: what you offer, and how you offer it so that people respond. Marketing is a wider process, and advertising that gives nobody a way to respond is not promotion at all. It is an announcement.
That sounds like a matter of vocabulary, but it is a very practical distinction. When a campaign fails, most owners sit in front of the ad and wonder whether to change the headline, the picture or the colour of the button. To know what is actually worth checking, it helps to first be clear on what each of these three words means.
Three words people use as if they were one
The source gives each term its own definition, and two of the three matter directly to anyone running a business.
Marketing is the whole journey of a specific product into the hands of the public: conceiving it, packaging it and placing it on the market so that it brings in the greatest possible potential and return. In other words, marketing covers far more than the ad.
Promotion means making something well known and well regarded. In day to day work it means sending something out that causes people to respond.
Advertising is the odd one out, because the source never defines it. It only describes what advertising gets wrong, and we will come back to that.
Promotion is measured in response, not in looks
The sharpest definition in the chapter narrows promotion down to two questions. In the source's words: “Promotion is the art of offering what will be responded to.”
The first question is what to offer. The second is how to offer it. Both are tested in one place only: the response that came in, or did not.
Suppose a graphic designer whose page simply says he does graphic design for small businesses. There is a what, but no how, and the reader has no reason to respond today.
Now suppose the same designer invites the reader to send in the logo they use now, and promises to say in two lines what is wrong with it. Suddenly there is a what and a how, and the reader has one clear thing to do.
The gap between those two versions is not design and not budget. It is whether the reader has a way to respond.
Promotion is not a department
The second point in the chapter makes the subject much bigger than advertising. According to the source, any action that makes the business, or someone who works in it, visible and well regarded counts as promotion.
So promotion does not live inside the advertising budget. It happens at every point of contact, meaning every moment when a prospective customer comes across you: the way you pick up the phone, the look of your van, the line under your name in every email, and what people say about you when you are not around.
For a business of one, there is something freeing in that. You have no marketing department, and yet you are promoting all day long. The only question is whether that promotion works for you.
Suppose an installer who calls people back on the same day they ring. That counts as promotion, and it costs him nothing. Against him, picture an owner whose voicemail is always full. That is also promotion, pointed the other way.
A third case: a studio owner who sends the client a before and after photo when a job is done. The client passes it on, and so the client ends up promoting her business for free.
When advertising turns into an announcement
This is where advertising comes back in. The source says that today's advertising has drifted into aesthetics and art, and often loses sight of the product or service it is supposed to sell.
Elsewhere it puts the point even more sharply: “Messages do not travel on no line.” A message needs a channel that carries it to someone and lets that person get back to you. An ad thrown into the air with no such channel reaches nobody.
In practice the test is simple. If an ad has no one to contact, nothing to do and no way to reply, it is not promotion. It is an announcement, something said out loud that asks nobody to act.
Suppose a beautifully designed post that ends by asking people to message for details, with no link, no name and no number. It looks professional, and the reader still has nowhere to go.
The opposite is a plain post that asks the reader to send a single word, and promises a reply the same day. It is less pretty, but it has a what and a how, and that is why people can answer it.
If you do not know this distinction, you judge your advertising by how it looks. If you do, you check two things: what you are offering, and whether there is a way to respond.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to spot it and one to test it, followed by a self-check. The booklet as a whole is about the five basics that successful promotion rests on, and this chapter on what promotion is sits among its ten chapters.
The next time you look at an ad that did not work, the first question is not whether it is beautiful. It is whether it has something to offer and a way to respond.