Advertising
There have been a lot of useful and well-known marketing models over the years. Like the “four Ps” of product, place, price and promotion. These help with the positioning of your company and message. And while they’re great at strategically positioning your Go-To-Market strategy, they don’t usually talk about the specific steps of how to get your message to the right people, at the right time, for the lowest possible cost and for the highest possible return. The team at Usterix will now share a few components your company needs to follow to get their advertising message to market.
First, the word advertising means different things to different people. I’m using it in the context of any communication you have with prospective customers and current customers. The simplest way to think about the process is a series of decisions that you need to make. The most basic are:
- Who are you talking to?
- What are you saying?
- Where are you saying it?
- How are you measuring it?
First, define who exactly is your audience. Who are you talking to? For the purpose of creating advertising, you need both quantitative data, for example; “How many people and where are they?” and qualitative data, for example; “What do they like to watch, or to read?”
The more specific the profile of your audience, the better you can craft your advertising. Next, what do you want to do? This stage is about setting objectives. Again, specific is better. The two biggest objectives are sales objectives and brand objectives. The first is about selling your product or service and the second is about making people more aware of who you are and what you stand for. Great communication can have both but more often than not one objective will override the other. Your objectives need to follow the SMART philosophy:
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
Another important thing to consider is how can you connect with them. This next step of creating your strategy is often a step that’s missed, especially by small businesses. An advertising strategy is one that you can express simply, that encapsulates both the customer experience, the placement and the messaging strategy.
Producing a customer experience map at this stage can be helpful. Now, you need to decide what you want to say. Crafting your message is not something that’s left to the creative people of the world. Having clarity about what you need to say comes from your objectives. If you need to sell 100,000 widgets before the end of Q2, you’re going to have to have a highly targeted, heavily promotional, sales message. If you have a competitor that’s stealing customers from you, you may need to reinforce your brand or differentiate the benefits of your product in your advertising.
So, how do you bring the message to life? With the rise of digital media, advertising can be produced faster and cheaper than ever before. One thing to consider, the cost of media will almost always outweigh the cost of production. And if you cut corners to put something in the marketplace that looks bad, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, what your customers see is something bad.
But remember the adage, you can never have fast, cheap and good, you have to choose two of those.
Finally, you need to think about how you go to market. The placement of your ad can be the most expensive piece of going to market. The cost of media is one element to consider, but right along side the cost, you must consider the potential effectiveness. Putting a tiny or short ad into a popular publication, or site, may actually be more effective than a large format ad in a less popular medium. Now it’s important to note that this is not a linear process but a circular one.
If you’re not measuring what you’re doing, you’ll never know if what you’re doing is working or not. An important idea to bring into the process is the addition of:
Test – Learn – Optimize
If you begin an advertising campaign with the idea of Test, Learn, Optimize in mind, you’re more likely to succeed. Especially because every single stage of the process can be tested, measured and optimized. Usterix is ready to communicate your message to your audience the right way. Get in touch with us to see what kind of solutions we can offer you, we’re always in the mood to have a conversation.