Your marketing plan should demonstrate a promotional approach that embraces integrated marketing communications (IMC). This includes a clearly stated message that is consistently communicated to your stakeholders.
Your promotional effort should:
- Demonstrate an appropriate mix of advertising, public relations, sales promotion, direct marketing, and personal selling. You should include the internet and social media, too, as appropriate to your promotional effort.
- Describe your primary objective for your promotional approach. Outline this in terms of measurable tasks that you want to accomplish. What is the advertising goal to which you will measure success for your advertising expenditures? This is a complete description of your proposed promotion plan.
- Describe each of your promotional activities that you envision as essential to ensure an integrated approach to promoting your product or your service. Describe your execution (i.e., your rollout plan) in accordance with the following format for any and all expenditures (the dollar figures will go into the IMC promotion budget). For example:
- Weekly /4-page ads in the Sunday Ledger @ $5,100 for each edition. Ads run each Sunday for two months, followed by publication during alternate weeks through Week 52. Total Cost: $153,000.
- Thirty-second radio spots on WBAL-AM, with two ads during morning drive time and one during evening drive time; ads to run five days each week for first month and alternate every other week for five months; ads to run once each morning every other day during months six through 12. Total Cost: $117,451.
Consider what constitutes the most appropriate promotional mix of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and personal selling that gains you the most “bang for the buck.” Who is your target market and what do you see as the cost per customer to reach them and to have them contract with you (i.e., purchase) your product or service? For instance, if you choose social media, which platforms will you select and why? How will you post relevant and interesting content? Videos? Sponsored content? Explain exactly what you will do, when—during the week/year—you will do it, and why.
If you plan to use personal selling or direct marketing and have previously discussed these in your distribution section, reference that here and be sure you have fully covered the communication aspects of these tools.
You must show a clear understanding of what you want your IMC promotional strategy to do for you in terms of measurable outcomes. Ensure your IMC approach makes sense, given that you could easily spend millions of dollars (in theory) to promote your product or service.
When all is done, your IMC strategy will provide an executable promotional plan that indicates the what, where, when, and how much.
Submission: APA, 3 pages