Business Promotions Plan
Now that you have worked through the 6 major business promotions strategies that a business can use, you will need to know when these promoitons should be used with each other. Some of the marketing and promotions strategies can be self-explanatory – e.g. sales promotions during seasonal periods such as Christmas, advertising promotions etc.
To help with this, there are two approaches you can utilize when planning your marketing promotion activities. These two approaches are referred to as Pulsing and Continuous marketing promotion campaigns.
Pulsing and Continuous Business Promotions
These two terms refer to the way that you promote your business. The Pulsing Approach means that your promotions are carried out in a pulsating way – on, off, on, off, etc. Whereas the Continuous approach is just that – it is an ongoing promotion.Depending on what tool you are using will influence what approach you take. For example, unless you had a lot of money, you wouldn’t run an advertising promotion or sales promotion all the time. However, you would have your phone listing all year round, and your web presence will be continuous.
Pulsing
- Magazine Advertising
- Transit advertising (buses, taxis, etc)
- Seasonal sales promotions
- TV
Continuous
- Classified Ads
- Website
- Directory listings
When these marketing and promotions strategies are combined using these approaches, you will increase the effectiveness of your overall marketing campaign. For example, advertising on a mass medium such as TV or radio can be supported with transit signage, and a directory listing or website.
As the customer finds out about your product or service through one channel, this awareness if reinforced through other promotion strategies, and [hopefully] the customer will then contact you for a sale or enquiry.
You can check out Top Shelf Groceries’ Promotional Timeline. Have a look at how the promotional tools overlap and support one another, with some pulsating and others continuing all the time.
Using a diagram from this example can help to give you a very brief and visual overview of your coming promotional activities for the next 12 months, and when you will be running the campaigns. We have provided you with access to the excel file that this simple diagram was created in, and an image file you can print up and manually fill in yourself. Download your excel template for your business promotions plan .
When you decide to use these strategies will be dependent and influenced by the trends in your industry. If you offered services that were needed at the end of financial year, such as a Tax accountant, then you would advertise and promote your business more heavily around this time.
Likewise, if your business was related to schools, or the holiday seasons, then this would impact on your timing. Using this chart and knowing the trends will help you lay out your promotional campaign in advance.
You must never stop promoting your business. The moment you do, your competition will move in to take your market share, and your customer will begin to forget about you. Even the large companies such as McDonalds and Coca Cola still spend millions on the promotional campaigns just to maintain their market position.
Make sure you assess the success of your campaign against your goals. Take note of the times and the combination of marketing and promotions strategies that brings you the greatest success. Then, plan a way that you can duplicate this combination again in your business promotions