More often than not sales promotions agencies are small and more expertise and are some what quite comparable to advertising agencies or ad agency dedicated to planning, handling and creating advertising clients.  An advertising agency is an autonomous organization from the clients and provides its services or products to them. These agencies would also provide overall marketing and sales promotion and branding strategies for its clients.

Sales promotions or term it as sales and promotion, together makes one. These promotions include quite a lot of communication activities that would help in adding value or advantage to the customers, retailers and wholesalers and others to kindle the sales. These things would help in rousing interest in having a trail or purchasing the product or a service. Samples, premiums, contests, point of purchase displays etc are some of the techniques that you can use.

There are some agencies having their sales promotions divisions, where they wholly depend only on promotions. The functionalities for both the sales promotion and ad agencies are alike up to some extent, but these sales promotions, promo staff are more consumerist. These promotions are vital for proper marketing of services or products of a company. There are three categories of strategies namely push strategy, pull strategy and combination of both.

A push strategy engrosses the intermediary channel members to push the product through the distribution channels to end consumers through promotions.  Companies promote the services or products though the resellers who in turn promote it to another buyer or to the end customer. These are the people who carry the brand though out the channel to reach the end consumers. Buy-back guarantees, contests, discounts, premiums, and free trials are some of the tactics that were employed in push strategy.

In pull strategy, consumer requests the products and pulls it through the distribution channel.  The company concentrates on its marketing communications efforts on end consumers in the wish that it kindles interest and demand for the product at the end-user level.  The tactics that includes in this strategy are coupons, cash refunds, loyalty programs, and premiums etc.

Automotive dealers would be the best examples for the combination strategy. You often find these dealers providing dealer incentives and cash back offers.

Finally, Promotion in itself is not expenditure; it is an investment; which would pay rich Return on investments.