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How Marketing Plans Work

Promotion Strategy

The fourth and final P is promotion. This is the communications strategy of your plan. Here you'll plan not only the message you want to use, but also the tools you'll use to spread it to the world. Your promotion section should actually have six categories:

  • advertising
  • public relations and publicity
  • direct marketing
  • promotions and events
  • product/company marketing materials
  • premium items
  • sales force

Basically, it should cover every communication mode that would appeal to your target market and help drive them to not only be aware of, but also to act on your offer. This would also include other things like client/customer newsletters, a company Web site, etc. It is in this section of your plan that you should make certain you are following an Integrated Marketing Communications plan. This means that each of these tools must follow the same rules and spread the same message. Having separate PR groups and promotions groups and sales groups makes the job very difficult unless you make sure they are all in agreement about what you are saying and how you are saying it.

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