Welcome

, welcome to your Promotional Planning Guide!

Our goal with this guide is to help provide the techniques and tools that will help you build an effective and meaningful promotion for your customers. And, in turn allows you to meet or exceed your sales goals for that period. This Promotional Course helps you with a seasonal Promotional Period – a shorter burst of time.

We define a well-planned Consumer Promotion, or Promotion for short, as:

Marketing and operational activities and programs, created to meet or exceed a specific measurable objective, that run for a specific period and are built to deliver something “newsworthy” in a meaningful way to your customers.

There are a bunch of qualifying words in that sentence. Let’s take a closer look…

• Marketing and operational – 99% sure any marketing program will involve your front line employees. We rarely consider any program strictly a “marketing” program.
• Created to meet or exceed a specific, measurable objective – just like it sounds, you’re engaging in marketing activities to meet a goal you’ve set. It could be sales-based, customer service score based, to build your brand, etc. The point is; you’ve got something you want to achieve and want to measure.
• Newsworthy – what is it that you’re doing that your customers will actually care about? This is different from what may excite YOU… What will a customer find worthy of paying attention to?
• In a meaningful way – LSMGuide is all about thinking through the details. Similar to the “newsworthy” idea, what are you doing or providing that will positively affect your customer? While you may be excited to offer 25¢ off or “buy one get one free on Tuesdays between 2 and 3 pm,” if that isn’t meaningful to customers then it’s not worth doing.

For this Guide, we’re going to use the example of a local hamburger restaurant prepping for the Christmastime / Holiday season.

The key steps we’ll follow for building a Promotion include:

• Review Goals – What do you need to accomplish?
• Assess Challenge/Ease – Will it be easy or hard?
• Determine Strategic Focus/Hero – What is going to be the strategic focus?
• Develop Programming – What activities and programs will you use?
• Choose Theme/Participant Take-Away – What customer-relevant theme will make the promotion most interesting?
• Select Your Tools – What tools will you use to build awareness and excitement?
• Write It Down – Put plans on paper so it is (a) all together and (b) sharable with those who will support you in getting it done!
• Get It Created – From signage to employee speaking bullets, these are the elements that bring the promotion to life.
• Implement & Track – This is putting your plans into action, tracking progress as you go, and making adjustments as needed.