In business, promotional plans are the vital road maps behind effective promotional activities. The plan lays out the promotional strategy, so you can evaluate what you can perform effectively. Without a promotional plan, your promotional efforts run the risk of veering off-course as the promotional team focuses on the details with no concept of the final destination. Yet the biggest benefits of a promotional plan lie in the pre-execution stages.
Putting your plan on paper, in detail, allows you and the other project stakeholders to determine ahead of time whether the overall concept and the individual details all make business sense. This is particularly important for businesses that are just beginning to roll out a programme of promotional activity. Without past experience to inform you as to which ideas work and which are a waste, it is all too easy to find yourself distracted by 'fads' and led into spending money in places that sound good -- but produce very little effect.
A good promotional plan is divided into seven parts:
- Your targets
- The plan's objectives
- The tactics you will use
- How you will implement the plan
- The timeline for completion
- Your budget
- How you will evaluate results
You can of course add and subtract as needed, but these seven provide a good framework for a general plan.
1. Your targets
The first step of any promotion is conducting market research using various research methods. You must identify the customers to whom you want to sell with the promotional plan. Particularly if you are targeting new customers rather than existing ones, a market research firm can be invaluable.
In general, the focus of this step is to identify with laser precision the people on whom you will be focusing your efforts. Marketing to everyone is impossibly expensive and astonishingly difficult, whereas marketing to the client who already wants to buy is child's play, and correspondingly inexpensive.
For this reason, the easiest customers to sell your product to are those who have already purchased from you.
In the first part of the promotional plan, list a detailed description of whom your plan will be targeting.
2. The plan's objectives
For each target, list the objectives you want to achieve. Your objectives should be measurable. This means that, if your goal is to increase repeat orders from existing customers, a suitable objective would not be 'boosting satisfaction and getting them to spend more'.
Rather, a well-considered objective might be 'assess satisfaction among all clients who spend $1,000 or more yearly, and increase those clients' average yearly spend by 30%'.
Measuring whether these customers are in fact spending 30% more is easy, and it provides a clear metric you will keep in mind while composing the rest of the plan. You will be able to ask yourself, 'are these activities really enough to produce a 30% increase?'.
3. The tactics you will use
This step is simple and fairly self-explanatory. Write what you will be doing to promote to each of your listed targets. Start with the objective, and determine which assessment and promotional methods are suitable to achieve them.
One of the most important aspects of this part of the plan is identifying possible snags, and articulating an overall strategy that can be referred to at any stage of the plan. In even the best promotional exercises there can still be new problems and unforeseen circumstances, so having a general sense of the tactics and the focus can be invaluable for handling those issues quickly and effectively.
Let’s say you’re launching a campaign that features a TV advert. You spend months devising, planning, recording and producing the perfect advert, and have it scheduled to run, but at the last moment you’re told the station doesn’t have enough time to fit the entire advert into its allotted slot. If everyone on the team has a good understanding of the underlying tactics of the plan, it’s entirely possible to refine the advert down to the most essentials, retaining the most important aspects of your promotional message and hard work.
4. How you will implement the plan
In this section, flesh out the steps and people involved in implementing the tactics to achieve the objectives. Most important is to decide who will be responsible for each task, so there is no confusion about who will do what.
Ensuring that everyone who is involved with implementing the plan has a thorough understanding of their tasks, as well as an easily-accessible and well-communicated reference for everyone on the team to use is crucial. It’s the difference between individual parts of the team wasting time on unnecessary tasks that either overlap with others, or are incompatible, and having a cohesive team that is all synchronised towards the same goal.
5. The timeline for completion
Little happens without deadlines. Not only do they provide motivation, they provide a benchmark whereby you can determine, 'is this plan actually going to plan?'. Timelines can be tricky to get right – too little time and the results may be rushed, incomplete, or not up to standard; too much time afforded can turn into wasted time that would have been better spent in other areas.
Timelines can also be extremely useful as references for future projects. Understanding how much you can get done in various amounts of times to a certain level can make for even better plans the next time you’re required to co-ordinate teams of people.
To this end, develop a timeline which lays out your ideas. It need not be complex, or extremely rigid. If you’re unsure, give a rough idea of a deadline by simply allocating projects to a given month or week. It can also be extremely useful to have some tasks that you can allocate to teams and tasks that are finished prematurely, and it can be a great for employees to have some breathing space should they need it for more difficult projects.
6. Your budget
Using your timeline as a starting point, estimate how much each activity will cost in each time period. This will give you an estimated cost of implementing the whole plan.
At this point, weigh the benefits of achieving your objectives with the estimated cost of reaching them. It may well be that your plan costs more than you can hope to earn through your promotional activities. Unfortunately, many businesses (that work without a promotional plan) pursue unprofitable promotions because they simply haven't worked out that the returns cannot possibly justify the costs.
7. How you will evaluate results
The ideal evaluation of a promotional plan lies with the accountants -- did the plan produce a jump in profits that was larger than the cost of implementing it?
Nevertheless it is not always possible to directly trace each dollar in sales back to the promotional activity which produced it. Therefore, this section of the plan describes how you will measure your progress towards the plan's objectives.
In conclusion
Once you have some practice, producing a new promotional plan may take no more than a few minutes. When you are new to promotion you should however put in however much time it takes to get it done right. Spending an extra hour on the planning stages won't simply increase your understanding of the task you're about to undertake, it may bring you thousands or more in money saved -- or money earned!