Advertising is both an art and a science and without it most businesses would not survive. You have to get your name, logo and what you do out in the public eye for people to know you exist and what you can do for them.



Many companies take advertising to heart and spend a good percentage of the annual operating budget on marketing. The companies who really know what they are doing develop annual marketing plans to help them organize and evaluate the success of the funds they have spent on advertising. The rest of this article is going to discuss how to develop a marketing plan and it will use promotional umbrellas as the example of a promotional give-away that can boost your visibility tremendously.

The first part of a marketing plan is setting the goal or goals. If you don’t have goals defined, there is very little chance that you will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing plan using promotional umbrellas. A couple of goals that might be appropriate for a marketing plan are: 1) We want to increase sales 25% during the month of March by giving away promotional umbrellas, 2) We want to have 200 new customers come to the store to get their promotional umbrella during the spring sale. Do you see how stating your goal like this let’s you be able to evaluate whether the promotional umbrellas helped you reach the level you wanted?

When you have defined your goals for the promotional umbrella give-away, it is time to develop strategies that will help you reach your goal. One of the strategies has already been talked about – using promotional umbrellas as a give-away. A few other strategies that might be helpful include: 1) organizing a spring sale, 2) ordering in a large amount of dealer samples to be sold as a part of the sale, 3) making sure you have enough inventory and promotional umbrellas to meet the need, 4) advertising your sale and 5) getting your place of business ready by decorating (if appropriate) hanging lots of sale signs, having coffee, soda, popcorn or, whatever kind of food or snack fits with the theme of your sale.

Don’t stop yet, having goals and strategies is not enough. Many people stop here and have a terrible time getting ready for the event. When you have each of your strategies developed, assign some person or persons in the company to be responsible for each one. This helps dole out responsibility so no one can say, “No one told me to do it or, I didn’t know I was supposed to do anything." When you assign responsibility for each strategy, also assign a deadline. Deadlines are your best friend. When you have given everyone a specific date to have their responsibilities completed you have ensured you will not have chaos going on the week before the event.

It is a good idea to assign the responsibility of selecting and buying the promotional umbrellas to someone who understands the promotional items industry and who understands that quality is important. Cheap, low quality promotional umbrellas will scream that your company does not value quality. This is a yell you don’t want to have happen.

If you go through each of these steps talked about in this article, you should get to your big sales event prepared and ready to reach your goal.