There are many choices to get your message out to find new customers (social media, direct selling, content marketing, webinars, traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) and online advertising, so ensure you’re spending your marketing budget money wisely.
A promotional budget plan serves as a roadmap for your advertising and awareness efforts to increase sales, improve brand awareness, or launch a new product.
To complete your promotional plan timeline, have in mind:
- A specific audience you want to reach.
- The combination of marketing and advertising tactics you know works to reach this target audience.
- An amount of money you can commit to spend.
- The timeframe for implementing each promotional activity, including start and end dates.
- How to measure the success of these activities, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, or sales revenue.
A promotional budget plan is an essential tool for companies to ensure that their promotional activities are aligned with their business objectives and that resources are allocated effectively. It also helps companies track their spending and measure the effectiveness of their promotional activities, enabling them to refine their strategies and improve their return on investment over time.
Completing the Promotional Plan template
The template is designed to help you plan out a targeted promotional plan and budget for 12 months, in six-month blocks. It’s relatively easy:
- Enter the promotional idea in the first column, such as Google Ads.
- Under each month add the dollar amount you have budgeted, for example $400/month.
- The list will self-calculate, enabling you to check the budget as you go.
- Then repeat with another tactic until your promotional ideas are finished or you’ve run out of budget.
Chances are on the first attempt there will be either a budget surplus or deficit. Go back to step one and adjust.
Promotional plan tips
- Do what worked last time
- It sounds obvious, but if you know certain advertising ideas always work, use these ideas in first.
- Identify what customers pay attention to
- Conduct as much research as you can about their buying behaviour such as what they do online (to decide where to advertise), the social media platforms they use (to help you participate) and when they buy (to help schedule timing).
- It’s increasingly possible to position your advertising especially online, to appeal to individuals by tracking their online activity.
- Finally, evaluate the results
- Measure which promotions are working by asking, surveying and tracking as many sales as you can to confidently predict which promotional methods were successful. Then simply repeat what worked best and stop the tactics that didn’t. Once you’ve completed your plan, regularly review each step each year. You may find new customers to target, new ways of reaching them and new tactics to adopt as technologies, needs and wants change.
Use our template to plan out a targeted promotional plan and budget for 12 months, in six-month blocks.
