Promotional marketing term is used to describe the various means of communicating with the target audience and prospective ones. It is one of the key elements in marketing mix, which helps a company to create awareness of its products and services to gain a better ROI.

The main purpose of marketing it to inform, persuade and influence. As stated a campaign should deliver the right kind of information at the right time at the right place in a convincing manner that would influence the customer to purchase a product or a service. This is most commonly referred as an AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Before arriving at the correct promotional marketing mix for your small business, take time to carefully plan the incentives and objectives. There are several parameters to consider

• Are you planning to collect leads to gain a larger customer base? Determine the base for promotion.

• Identify who is your target customers for your promotional campaigns and try to analyze the purchase habits of your target customers.

• As there are many incentive types such as sweepstakes, sampling or coupons etc, so decide which one would best suit your business.

• The main things that need to consider is budget allocation. Choose the best advertisement campaign such as mail, in store or direct mail etc which would helps to minimize your budget.

• Decide whether to run the promotional campaigns on your own or to hire professional promotional agency. Both the ways have got their own set backs.

• Clear goals as to be set to measure the success of the promotional campaigns.

• Promotional marketing incentives should obey with the law of federation.

A bad promotional marketing might do some irreparable damages to products and overall reputation of the company.

Ultimately, even a message might get through wherein the consumers end up guessing that the brand is not good enough for their needs. This type of situation could be avoided by a better promotional staffing that tends to generate the promotional staff with a sense to carry the message and brand image effectively.