How to Create a Promotional Plan (with Examples & Strategies)

Updated July 2023.

You can elevate your business to new heights with a stellar promotional plan. In an increasingly competitive world, this tool has become indispensable for businesses big and small.

From identifying your target market to choosing a catchy promotion name, from selecting an effective promotion type to deciding on key messages and promotional products, we’ll journey through the creation of a powerful promotional plan.

Get ready to excel with our comprehensive guide and downloadable promotional plan template. You’re one step away from transforming your business goals into a reality!

How to Create a Promotional Plan

I’ll use the example of a fictitious London restaurant participating in this campaign to demonstrate how to create a promotional plan of your own in the following step-by-step tutorial.

1) Define Your Target Audience

No promotional plan can ever be successful if you don’t know who it is you’re promoting to. This is why it’s so important that you start this process by defining who your audience is and what they want.

In the free promotional strategy template included with this guide, you’ll see that the target audience doesn’t have a specific audience, as the campaign was essentially an appeal to the entire country.

That may be fine if you’re a national government with a bottomless budget, but let’s face it: The products and services produced by most businesses were never designed to appeal to everyone.

Whether you sell classy-but-comfortable business shoes to female executives or performance monitoring watches to marathon runners, practically every business has a specific ideal customer they want to reach.

So, before you do anything else, determine who that ideal customer is for your brand.

If your business is brand new, you’ll benefit from learning how to develop buyer personas, a process that can be invaluable for helping you think about the type of people your promotional marketing strategies are aimed towards:

If you’re already well-established, think about your long-term customers:

• Who are they?
• What do they like?
• What would appeal to them from a promotional stand point?

These insights into your target audience will make a world of difference when it comes to making informed decisions about the kind of promotional message that is most likely to hit home with your customers and the best approach to deliver that message.

To show you what this might look like, we can refer to our fictitious London restaurant, which might come up with the following:

Our target audience is young executives working in the nearby business complex. Most of our existing customers fit these audience demographics and we know that they value fast, efficient service. We also know that the majority of bookings and enquiries from this demographic are made on social media.

2) Name Your Promotion

Now that you know who your audience are, you need to give your promotion a name that will appeal to them.

“Eat Out to Help Out” was a great name for this campaign because it was catchy, memorable and appealed to people’s sense of patriotic duty in the aftermath of major crisis while also answering that fundamentally important question: “What’s in it for me?”

You mean all I have to do to help out my country is go to a restaurant for a hugely discounted meal? Sure, I’ll do that, sign me up!

To give a more recent example from here in the United States, Taco Bell’s “Freeing Taco Tuesday” campaign is fast gaining a lot of attention partly because it’s such a unique idea, but also because it genuinely engages the curiosity of its audience.

Why does Taco Tuesday need freeing? Who from? I don’t know! Tell me more Taco Bell, and tell me how I can help!

LeBron James was featured in an ad called “Taco Bleep,” which emphasized the campaign message: the absurdity of “Taco Tuesday” being trademarked:

This is what you’re trying to do by naming your promotion. Come up with something that grabs the attention of your audience, sticks in their mind, and compels them to want to take action, whether that action is signing a taco-related petition, eating at a restaurant, or buying a pair of shoes.

3) Determine Your Promotion Type

Next, you need to determine what type of promotion you’re planning for.

Some of the most effective promotion types include:

• Discounts (percentage off or dollar off)
• Loyalty schemes
• Referral rewards
• Free shipping
• Spend a set amount and get a free product or service

To determine which promotion types are bested suited for your campaign, it pays to think about what your goals are.

With Eat Out to Help Out, restaurants were offering customers £10 off (almost $13 USD) per person:

This type of promotion would be classed as a discount and is the right approach for our restaurant, as it aligns with the business goal of getting more paying customers through the door and increasing profits.

However, for the aforementioned Taco Tuesday campaign, a discount would be less effective as the main goal of this campaign is essentially boosting Taco Bell’s brand reputation and visibility by presenting themselves as “the good guys” who want to liberate the Taco Tuesday trademark from the evil clutches of their competitors.

If you were selling shoes, you might also run with (pun intended, of course) a discount promotion, while a company selling performance monitoring watches might run a promotion in which customers who upgrade to their newest device get an additional product for free.

4) Craft Your Key Messages

Your next task is to come up with a compelling marketing message that tells your audience what you want them to do and how they’ll benefit from doing it.

Again, the Eat Out to Help Out campaign did a good job with their message: Support your local restaurant by eating out with a 50% discount on food or non-alcoholic drinks.

This one has it all.

It provides a clear call to action to eat out at a local restaurant and answers the “What’s in it for me?” question by telling people that they’ll benefit by enjoying a half-price meal.

Here, the word “support” lends this promotional message added gravitas as it subtly tugs at our emotions and appeals to that part of human nature that makes us want to help others.

Your message should be equally as clear, concise and compelling as this one.

If you’re struggling with this, here are a couple more examples to get you inspired:

• Upgrade your TechX Performance Monitoring Watch to the latest new model and get a free pair of headphones.
• Save 50% on this season’s most popular shoes when you shop at Big Foot’s Shoe Store.

Both of these messages contain all the vital components.

They make it clear what action the audience should complete (upgrade their watch or shop at a certain shoe store), and they outline a clear benefit (save 50% or get some free headphones).

Each example also appeals to the audience’s emotions in different ways. The word “free” triggers a certain level of excitement in all of us, while the promise of a discount on “this season’s most popular shoes” appeals to customers who love staying up-to-date with the latest styles.

6) Create Your Promotional Products and Swag

Promotional products serve as a kind of distribution channel which help draw attention to your current campaign and your business as a whole.

What’s great about branded merchandise is that it can be almost anything, through the closer your swag ties into your campaign, the better.

In my hypothetical promotional campaign, I’m using promotional t-shirts to convey my message and promotion name:

Promotional hats are also among the most popular branded products, so why not include them as well?

Both the t-shirts and hats can be worn by members of restaurant staff, but also be given to customers as a “thank you” gift.

Elsewhere, our shoe store might create high-quality, reusable bags that customers can take away their purchases in, while our company selling performance watches for marathon runners would naturally opt for branded running apparel to help boost their campaign’s visibility among their key demographic.

You might even choose to create a swag box in which you put several useful items relating to the promotion and your brand:

When it comes to creating products of your own, keep the following tips in mind:

• The more useful your promotional items are to your target audience, the more they’ll be used, and therefore the more effective they’ll be at increasing brand recognition.

• Use your company’s logo and usual branding colors across your items. If your logo, website, and storefront all use a blue and white color scheme, don’t suddenly start giving away yellow and black t-shirts.

6) Take Notes

Creating a notes column in your promotional plan template will be a huge help when it comes to keeping track of new ideas or other relevant details that could help you run your campaign more effectively.

I’ve definitely used the notes column in my promotional plan template to write down a few additional ideas for promoting my campaign.

For example, I thought promotional banners outside the restaurant, alongside digital banners posted on social media platforms, would significantly help me bring more awareness to my campaign.

Work With Us

A Promotional Planning Template to Help You Get Started

After having broken down the components of a promotional plan, here’s the promotional plan example I promised I’d give you.

👉 Click here for access to the Promotional Planning Template 👈 (be sure to save a copy to your own computer first):

The columns are as discussed above and include all essential information about the promotion. Make sure to copy/download it first and then start using it to build your promotional plans!

Related Content: Just Do It: What We Can Learn from Nike’s $39B Marketing Strategy

Promotional Plan Examples

Marketing

1) Johnston County 2022-2023 Marketing Plan

Johnston County in North Carolina put together a comprehensive marketing plan outlining how they plan to increase visitor numbers:

The plan outlines the challenges faced by the tourism board: “In year two of recovery from the pandemic, travel seems to be on the rise, however, new challenges continue to plague the tourism industry.”

To overcome those challenges, Johnson County first defines its target audiences and then sets forth a list of clearly defined marketing goals.

The plan then outlines the strategies they’ll use to achieve those goals, such as increasing email marketing efforts and upping the game in online paid advertising.

2) Viral Spiral Marketing Plan

Viral Spiral (VS) is a Taiwanese biotechnology company that used its marketing strategy to promote at-home covid testing kits:

Containing everything from an analysis of current market trends and the company’s competitors to a thorough SWOT analysis and detailed information on their promotional strategy, this is an excellent marketing plan example for those going to market with a new product.

Advertising

1) Unicef PPC

An excellent example of a promotional strategy focused on advertising comes from Unicef:

The charity frequently uses pay-per-click advertising on YouTube and social media as part of its fundraising efforts.

If you read our round-up of multi-channel PPC case studies, you may recall that one campaign served display ads to around 5 million people, resulting in Unicef tripling their anticipated fundraising total.

2) Boston Red Sox Media Campaign

The Boston Red Sox had an image problem:

“Despite coming off two straight division titles, there was an inexplicable yet palpable “ho-humness” among the team’s fanbase that not even a new manager or a $100 million slugger could fix. We needed to find a way reignite the city’s passion for the team.”

Since a disengaged audience can harm brand reputation and sales, the Red Sox launched a new advertising campaign to foster a personal connection between the team and their fans:

“’More’ became a foundation for our work: the idea that to the city of Boston, baseball is more than just a game. And those who play for the team are more than a collection of names and uniform numbers. They’re our family. It was a deliberately intimate campaign that provided snapshots of the team and players, thereby giving fans a more personal connection with the team.”

The Opening Day spot earned over one million impressions within the first two weeks of airing.

Additional content by David Borgogni.

The post How to Create a Promotional Plan (with Examples & Strategies) appeared first on Single Grain.