Creating a Coordinated Promotional Campaign

 You can use a suite of coordinated promotional items to help create a promotional campaign that will build your business in the direction you want it to grow.

Planning ahead and designing a coordinated promotional campaign is important if you want your advertising and marketing to be as effective as it can be. When you plan ahead, you can more easily target your market, choose promotional items and strategies that are appropriate for that market and know that your promotional budget is being spent where it will do the most good. In order to make the most of your budget and help you choose the best promotional items for your needs, you should sit down with your project staff and work through the following questions:

-          Exactly what is our marketing goal?

It’s difficult to choose effective promotional items if your marketing goals are vague. “Increase sales” is a vague marketing goal. The more precise your goal is the more easily you can create a marketing campaign that will address that goal. Increase sales of what product to whom by when and by how much is a far more workable goal than the vague “sell more stuff”.

-          Who is our target?

Whether it’s the people to whom you want to sell or the group whose support you must enlist, knowing your target is the single most vital part of creating a coordinated promotional items campaign. The target is the “to whom” part of the statement above. If you’re selling a product, you have to know who will be buying it. Your goal may be engage a new market – your traditional market is young men, but you want to increase your sales to young women as well, for instance. Once you know your target, you can start designing a campaign to reach them.

-          Where is our market?

Once you’ve defined the people that you’re trying to reach, you can decide on the best venues for reaching them. If you’re promoting a message of awareness to teens, for instance, it makes little sense to advertise in newspapers because most of your market doesn’t read newspapers daily. Instead, you might reach out to schools or find advertisers with a youth market. Your choice of market will also help define the promotional items that you choose.

-          What do they like?

Promotional items that no one wants are useless. You need to choose promotional items that will inspire your target market to respond to your marketing message. That doesn’t necessarily mean choosing something expensive as a giveaway item or marketing incentive. Even something as small and silly as a £0.16 logo bug can have a big impact in the right market with the right target.

-          How will they be delivered?

Delivery/fulfillment is a major part of any promotional items campaign. You need to know what the expectations are from your customers. What do they do to earn the promotional items that you’ve chosen? Is it enough that they belong to the target group (for name visibility campaigns) or do they have to make a purchase? Is the promotional item delivered with the purchase, or must it be requested from a fulfillment company? Do they have to sign up for a mailing list? Apply for a credit card? These are all conditions that might trigger the delivery of promotional items.

It’s not uncommon for companies to simply decide that they’ll give out promotional items to their customers to increase sales without going through any of the planning. Most of the time, they see an increase in sales – but those items could be used so much more effectively with just a little planning.