How do you write a promotional marketing plan?

Promotion is one of the four basic elements of marketing. The key to effective marketing promotion is a well-thought plan. Here you should outline the main objectives and techniques that will help you reach your goals, and the KPIs you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Let’s take a closer look at creating a promotional marketing plan.

1. Allocate budget. Analyze your current marketing budget and decide how much money you can spend on promotion. Make sure this sum is reasonable — don’t cut into product development, employee salaries, taxes, or other vital expenses. Remember that your ROI may not increase after the first promotional campaign so spend your budget wisely.
2. Establish your goals. You should cover both short-term objectives and long-term goals. The last one represents your global goals while short-term objectives are the steps that your team should take to reach it. To have a clear picture, consider breaking your annual goal into 6-month, quarterly, and monthly goals. This way, you can easily manage the entire process and take action on the go.
3. Identify your target audience. To better understand your potential clients, create your ideal customer profile. The goal is to find out where your audience is, which problems and needs they have, what your potential clients have in common, and analyze the ways to reach them. With this profile, you can segment your base and create highly targeted promotions.
4. Choose your strategies, techniques, and channels. Every marketing platform works best for a certain objective and offers its own effective techniques to reach them. If your goal is to increase traffic and sales, consider pay-per-click advertising and display ads. If you want to raise brand awareness and recognition, go for social media marketing and influencer marketing.
5. Delegate responsibilities. This will help you focus on each promotional campaign separately taking into account the peculiarities of every channel. Hire specialists in SEO, PPC, content mark

Types of Promotion

Advertising

Advertising means to advertise a product, service or a company with the help of television, radio or social media. It helps in spreading awareness about the company, product or service. Advertising is communicated through various mass media, including traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor advertising or direct mail; and new media such as search results, blogs, social media, websites or text messages.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is a form of advertising where organizations communicate directly to customers through a variety of media including cell phone text messaging, email, websites, online adverts, database marketing, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional letters and targeted television, newspaper and magazine advertisements as well as outdoor advertising. Among practitioners, it is also known as a direct response.

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion uses both media and non-media marketing communications for a pre-determined, limited time to increase consumer demand, stimulate market demand or improve product availability.

Personal Selling

The sale of a product depends on the selling of a product. Personal Selling is a method where companies send their agents to the consumer to sell the products personally. Here, the feedback is immediate and they also build a trust with the customer which is very important.

Public Relation

Public relation or PR is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) and the public. A successful PR campaign can be really beneficial to the brand of the organization.