The strategy you use to advertise your promotion plays a vital roll.
Identifying your target audience is the start of your advertising strategy. The roll and the scope of your advertising will be determined by the marketing strategy that was established.
It is best described by Marketing experts, Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, define “marketing management” as
“…’the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering,
and communicating superior customer value”.
As your aim of your advertising strategy is to drive high quality traffic to your website, and to collect lead information that you can convert. These leads will then be retargeted on the same channel or other social media channels.
The advertising budget is crucial aspect of your of your advertising strategy planning. As the budget will influence your advertising objectives and how you will execute these objectives.
The advertising strategy will also also have to indicate how each of the objectives would be accomplished. Your advertising medium and media will be noted in the programming schedule that is important points to highlight is the creative strategy.
You will only see the effectiveness of the strategy that you have implemented, when you do the evaluation of this strategy. The advertising strategy that you use will determine if you will make money, or waste money on advertising.
You may also combine your advertising and promotion strategies, depending on the company. Some companies these strategies should be handled separately.
Before you start your advertising or marketing campaign, you need to know your goals and objectives, because you need to measure the effectiveness of the strategy. If you do not have the number value, you can not measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
Your advertising strategy should fit into your marketing plans. As advertising strategy is the plan that you use to reach and persuade a customer to buy your products or services. This strategy of advertising your products or services requires that you should be creative in the planning. And you should test the efforts against the results.
To have an excellent advertising plan you should do a practical product assessment of the distinctive attribute of your products or services. You should also consider the competition in the market and how your marketing plan can excel over the competition. You should have a proper media analysis as to measure the the effectiveness of your efforts to ensure the best return on investment.
Your budget is very crucial to any marketing campaign, and more importantly is the choices that you make in spending that budget. Your advertising plan that part of your marketing plan consists of the following; assessing your product, defining the market, analysing the media, and the choices on how to spend the budget must all be documented to ensure that you can measure compare and test through the advertising campaign.
You should also map the buyers journey to ensure that you have the best sales cycle, as this forms part of your creative advertising strategy. As the potential buyer needs to get familiar with your products and or services, the advertising campaign might not result in first time sales. But the aim is to retarget the potential customer till there is a sale. And later on for a reoccuring sale. This is why you should map your sales cycle.
When you develop your advertising strategy it should include the following;
The target audience should be identified
In your promotions you should determine the roll of the advertising
Setting up advertising objectives and clearly break down the budget size
Adopt a creative strategy that will set you apart
You media management should be defined, and scheduled
The advertising plan should be implemented
And determining your effectiveness is measuring all activities.
To eliminate the ineffective marketing programs you should determine the impact that the advertising has on the potential buyer. This will help the marketing management to decide the roll and scope of the advertising. The marketing managements perception of the advertising and the roll it plays in the promotional objective as an important influence in the retention of potential customers.
The advertising strategy of a well established company is different from a small start up company, especially when it comes to using marketing automated software. One of the reason is that there is a difference in budget, and the other is the established market sector that is available.
The smaller companies will us a small percentage of the budget on advertising, while a more established company will us a very large percentage of the budget on advertising. When a company is having a higher ratio of advertising to sales, the following point will be noted;
The products is standardized.
Have a big clientele
There is services that is added on to the product
The company has a small purchase amount
There is sales through the companies channels and partners
The product range will be from low cost till high ticket sales
The manufacturing cost will be margina
They have a medium size market share
They have a higher ratio of sales from new products.
The study is based on established relationships between company and customers.
Setting the objectives for advertising in the budget.
The advertising objectives
It is vital for a company to know what the impact is of the advertising aim on the sales generated. As the adverting will be firstly displayed current customers, it is vital for any company to target and retain new customers. And to determine the purchasing behaviour of client is vital for the companies growth.
Customers that is more aware of brands and products is more likely to by from thse companies. The exposure and awareness of a product or brand can be measured, whereas the sales and profit impact of the advertising efforts is difficult to measure. When you you have set up your attitude change measurements, you will have a valuable and feasible measurement system. Although attitude is very difficult to measure.
All the major brands know that brand awareness will lead to an increase in the market share which will return greater profits. When a company has industriel products on offer, they will have a direct link between brand awareness, sales and profit.
The companies measures of exposing is visible in the advertising effectiveness. This is useful when deciding on the media channels to use and the engagement with customers.
Determining the budget
The budget guidelines indicate how certain factors are related to advertising and sales promotion expenses of a company. THose factors are:
The market share
Regular new products
The growth in the market
How a company utilize its capacity
The price of a product
What a customer have to select to have a complete product
The quality of the product
The product price compared to the value of the product
The life cycle of the product
Standardized or customized products
Using diagnostic tools is vital when a company is setting up the advertising and promotional budget.
How the creative strategy guides the advertising campaign, as it has an impact on the advertising budget, and will have an effect on the market share.
There is two factors that will have an affect on the strategy that you sellect;
The advertising campaign will either change or maintain the market conditions
The advertising campaign will communicate information, that is either in image or symbol form.
The maintain and the reinforcement strategies is used in the support of an established brand
How the advertisement strategy may change the market condition;
It can reposition a brand
Expand the market of the brand
Launching new products on the market
With the digital environment of today, the easy part is to set up a Facebook ads campaign or Google Adwords campaign. You will see the results of your creative campaign. The difficult part is to develop creative sales funnels to support the advertising campaign.
While creativity will enhance the effectiveness of the advertising campaign, it is best to adopt a unifying concept that will binds all parts of your ad campaign. Digital advertising agencies that use creative strategies in their marketing campaigns, will have about 20% of their clients from the corporate industries.
The advertising agency might design a unique theme to position a product of the company, or use a comparison with the competition to enhance the company's brand. Using the right creative theme for a marketing situation is a major contributing factor in the success of the ads program.
You may use multi - variant tests and experiments to evaluate your creative and online advertising approach. These tests and experiments is more of an art than it is of science. The data that is collected from the advertising platforms is more detailed and when analysed correctly will give value o advertising strategy.
The ad program strategy on social media
The digital marketing agency should guide the media and program decisions, as they have the experience and the technical ability to connect the media and programming
to the target audience.
Choosing the media, the timing and program is influenced largely by the following;
The access to the target audience
And the cost of reaching the target audience.
Two of the many platforms that might be used for example is Facebook ads and Google Ads. The cost is determined by search traffic volume, competitiveness of the keyword, and the quality of the score. The higher the quality score the lower the cost per click.
The company should also evaluate the cost of exposure to their desired audience or subscribers, or users.
Before implementing the advertising strategy it is important to establish the criteria for measuring the effectiveness, as the budget can get depleted if the advertising cost is spend on the wrong media. Therefore measuring is a useful feedback and can help with future advertising decisions. The results of the advertising campaign is directly related to the effectiveness of the advertising.
Can you track the performance of your advertising?
When determining the impact that your advertising has on the sales is difficult because of other factors that also influence the sales. Most of the measurement objectives is to focus on things like attitude change, awareness, and exposure. When comparing objectives and results, the company might decide to stop or alter the advertising campaign.
Methods to use when measuring advertising effectiveness
Regression analysis is a great statistical technique to use when identifying the relationship between advertising expenditure and sales.
You might also send questionnaires to people asking if they can remember a specific advertising, which is recall test measure. While longitudinal studies track your advertising spend and sales results, before, during and after an advertising campaign. A/B testing is a longitudinal study which is measured and controlled during the test. Test marketing can be used to evaluate advertising effectiveness.
When using the effort or results model, it analyse data to build a mathematical relationship between sales and advertising efforts
Because it is vital for any business to determine the user experience of their customers, you can use certain ways to obtain the information through various media.
How to measure the effects of your advertising.
It is appropriate in certain industries to determine the effects of the advertising, to ensure that users have a satisfying user experience.
Advertising strategies are developed in the following steps:
Identifying the target audience
Determining the role of advertising in the promotional mix,
Indicating advertising objectives and budget size,
Selecting the creative strategy,
Determining the media and programming schedule,
Implementing the advertising program
Measuring its effectiveness.
Advertising objectives may range from audience exposure to profit contribution targets.
The PIMS study indicates useful guidelines for Budget analysis.
Digital marketing agencies offer specialized services for developing creative strategies, designing messaging copy, and developing media and programming strategies.
You need a system and dedication to reach your sales goals.
Do you want an outside view of your advertising strategy?
Then leave a comment below, or send us a mail, and we can help setting up a plan for you.