1. Activities, materials, devices, and techniques used to supplement the advertising and marketing efforts and help coordinate the advertising with the personal selling effort. Sweepstakes are among the best-known sales promotion tools, but other examples include special displays, coupons, promotional discounts, contests, and gift offers.

2. Casually, combined activities employed to sell a product or service.

The use of sales promotion is not limited to consumer products marketing. In business-to-business markets sales promotions are also used as a means of moving customers to action. However, the promotional choices available to the B-to-B marketer are not as extensive as those found in the consumer or trade markets. For example, most B-to-B marketers do not use coupons as a vehicle for sales promotion with the exception of companies that sell to both consumer and business customers (e.g., products sold through office supply retailers). Rather, the techniques more likely to be utilized include:

* price-reductions
* free product
* trade-in
* promotional products
* trade shows

Of the promotions listed, trade shows are by far the mostly widely used sales promotion for B-to-B marketers.