Advertising and promotion

Creating advertising and promotion plan
The advertising and promotion function of the marketing department describes how the unique selling proposition will be delivered to the prospective customers. The advertising and promotion plan offers a range of advertising and promotional opportunities that will allow to address the advertising message and the product concept to the target audiences throughout the market. While there are many different promotion methods available to the department, what distinguishes an effective advertising and promotion plan from an inefficient one is a focus that the unique selling proposition provides. The advertising and promotion plan may consist of the following parts:

• Advertising. This part is oriented towards selection of mass media that will be most effective in achieving the target market. The marketing department makes decisions about how much of advertising budget will be spent on each mass medium.
• Sales promotion. If it's appropriate to your business, the marketing department can arrange incorporate sales promotion activities into advertising and promotion plan by such measures as free samples, coupons, product demonstrations and purchase discounts.
• Marketing materials. Each business includes some of these materials in their promotion plans. The most common marketing materials are business cards, brochures, leaflets and service sheets.
• Publicity. Another part of advertising and promotion plan is publicity. This assumes arrangement of such measures as product launches, special events, including community engagement, writing articles, and receiving and using customer testimonials.
• Tradeshows. This is not obligatory part of the plan; however, it can be incredibly effective promotion and sales opportunities.

The structure of the plan can be built in Task Tree view of VIP Task Manager. In the task group "Advertising and Promotion Plan" there can be created subgroups "Advertising", "Sales Promotions", "Marketing Materials", "Publicity", and "Tradeshows". In each of the subgroups the brand manager and product manager can add tasks and to-do lists and then assign them to the staff of the marketing department.

Keeping the plan under control
Control over the implementation of the advertising and promotion plan is kept by the marketing department, often in cooperation with PR department. The department tracks and monitors the course of advertising campaigns and controls tasks performance of promotion specialists, sales agents, marketing researchers, and advertising copywriters. As a coordinator of advertising campaigns and promotion activities, the brand and product manager should be informed about current campaign progress and outstanding issues the employees face in their work. For example, it is necessary to check whether the campaign is running according to the plan. In VIP Task Manager the coordinator can use Filter Bar to track the campaign status by columns "Status". Tasks can be grouped and filtered by columns "Due date" and "Complete" so that the coordinator could see uncompleted tasks. Besides, the coordinator can get notifications on task changes.

Building task reports
At the end of promotion and advertising activities the marketing department creates reports on the tasks and activities that have been done. If you plan sponsor a community event, or conduct an email campaign, you'll want to include it in your advertising and promotion plan. The reports include task progress and attempts to promote the product so that marketing director or the coordinator can analyze achievements and failures of undertaken campaigns. The reports are also a great opportunity to accumulate knowledge and experience. It will be applied to planning a sequence of next promotion activities and advertising campaigns which will help to communicate with potential customers.

In VIP Task Manager the coordinator can create task reports in HTML format and graph view. HTML format may include scheduled dates, assigned resources, task history, links to attached materials, and other. As the software converts task report into HTML format, such reports can be published on website so that all concerned people can watch the reports online.
Graph reports are an easy way to create status charts that show campaign progress in Pie diagram, Bar diagram and other. The Chart Panel allows to print out visual task status reports. The printable copy can be used by the coordinator on the meetings and briefings.

• Marketing department staff
• Marketing department functions
• Development of marketing goals and strategy
• Conducting marketing researches and monitoring customer needs
• >> Advertising and promotion