Sales promotion describes promotional methods using special short-term techniques to persuade members of a target market to respond or undertake certain activity. Sales promotions are often confused with advertising.
Sales promotion involve finding target market, determining objective and tasks, budgeting for promotion, selecting promotional media, evaluating promotional effectiveness and controlling he promotion elements. Promotion, one of the major variable with which the marketing manager works, in communicating information between seller and buyer to change attitudes and behavior.
Sales promotion aims directly at inducing purchasers to buy a product. It involves demonstration, contest, price-off, coupons, free samples, special packaging and money refund offers. Sales promotion activities are designed to encourage re seller and sales people to sell the product. It is different from personal selling and advertising in the sense that sales promotion is non-recurrent in nature and is for a short period.
Sales promotion is an action which increases the volume of sales. In a broad sense, the term ‘sales promotion’ refers to promotion because all the activities of personal selling, publicity, advertising and sales promotion led to the enhancement of sales.