So, you have been assigned the task of buying promotional items for your company's sales events and give-away promotions this year and you are stumped as to how to begin. If you have never done this before, this is not surprising.



So, the first thing you need to do, if you are not the boss, manager, or a supervisor where you work, is to go talk to whoever assigned you to head up the purchasing of promotional items. When you talk with her you have three things to ask: 1) what are her goals or what does she want to have the promotional items do for the company, 2) what is the budget and 3) what kinds of events are the promotional items going to be used for? Each of these questions will help guide you in the selection of the right promotional items.

OK, so what do you do if the boss, manager or supervisor says, ?I don't know, you make it up?? Well, then you do just that and you do it by developing a marketing plan that you show them when it is through and before you actually make any purchase of promotional items.

Doing this is going to do several things for you. It is going to show that you are a planner and want the company to get a benefit for the money they spend on promotional items. It is going to show that you have a mind for business and that you are a self-starter. All of these characteristics are what employers are looking for in employees. You are killing two birds with one stone. Making sure you are successful in completing the assignment of buying promotional items and letting the boss know you are a good employee.

So, what is a marketing plan, you ask? A marketing plan is writing a simple document (maybe 2 - 4 pages long) that starts with goals, moves to strategies and ends with you thinking about activities, deadlines and responsibilities for reaching implementing the strategies.

Writing a goal or goals means you decide what you want to get from the money you spend on the promotional items. An example is ? I want 100 new customers to come into the store and buy something when we give the promotional items away. Another goal might be ? I want the company to sell 25% more products in November than it did in October.

With your goals written you can now decide on your strategies. You already have a strategy because your boss told you to buy promotional items. Promotional items are a very effective strategy for getting customers to come to your place of business.

You may want to add a couple of other strategies like taking an and out in the local newspaper or working with the local schools to get them to send home flyers about the sale or promotional event because you are going to give them a percentage of the money taken in..

The final part of the plan is to take each strategy and write down all of the steps that need to get done to be sure the sale or promotional event goes off without a hitch. You want to put deadlines for each step and who is responsible. If you do this level of planning, your promotional item give-away events will run smoothly.