Promotions are subject to business objectives. Therefore, before planning promotional activities, it is necessary to clearly define business objectives, including long-term and short-term objectives. All of these should be carefully understood and deeply understood before planning promotional activities to ensure that the promotional activities are carried out around business objectives. As the cost of promotion is getting higher and higher, many businesses implement total control of promotional budgets. Planners should understand the promotional budget and plan promotional activities within the budget. The key points of planning independent promotional activities include:
(1) Clear promotional objectives, such as creating a hot-selling item.
(2) Clear promotional products, including single products, several single products, single product combinations and full categories, should be set according to the promotional objectives and the opinions of relevant personnel should be sought. Note that the more promotional items there are, the greater the sales promotion, but the sales growth rate of each single product is different, and the unit promotion cost may vary greatly. Multi-item promotion helps to create a hot-selling item.
(3) Clear customer targets, including new customers, old customers, potential customers with specific profiles and all customers, should be set according to the promotional objectives and the opinions of relevant personnel should be sought.
(4) Clear promotion timing, including event day, new product launch, first X customers, off-peak season, target sales volume, etc.
(5) Clear promotion methods, such as buy-one-get-one-free, discount, coupons, etc.
(6) Clear promotion period. Promotion must have a time limit, otherwise it goes beyond the scope of promotion (it may be a pricing strategy). Note that the marginal benefit (effect) of promotion decays over time. The change curve of sales volume throughout the day of “Double Eleven” deserves careful study.
(7) Clear trigger conditions, for example, you can get coupons by attracting new customers, purchasing, sharing, paying in full, etc., and the use of coupons requires a single consumption of 100 yuan, etc. Promotion innovation is largely focused on the design of trigger conditions.
(8) The dissemination of the promotion itself. The promotion itself has a reach problem. Sometimes, we need to reward the dissemination of promotion. “Traffic Pool” shares a promotion practice – two-way coupons, that is, if you send out a coupon worth X yuan, you can also get a coupon worth X yuan. This promotion practice has achieved great success, which is related to timely rewarding communication behavior.
(9) Clear promotion budget. Promotion must be carried out under a limited budget. The higher the promotion cost, the lower the marginal benefit, so the budget should be carefully controlled for each promotion activity. In order to leanly control the promotion budget, in practice, promotion costs are usually included in sales expenses rather than marketing expenses. If they are charged to the sales team, it will affect sales commissions.
(10) Clear promotion results. When planning promotion activities, the promotion results should be predicted. After the promotion is implemented, the difference between the actual results and the predicted results should be compared. Only in this way can we continuously accumulate experience and improve the promotion effect. The above 10 items are collectively referred to as the “Ten Elements of Promotion”, which include examples of the ten elements of promotion. Quickly formulate a promotion activity plan that meets the basic standards, and the output of a high-level plan requires the accumulation of long-term practical experience and continuous reflection.