Advertising Strategy

Advertising Strategy

How to create a winning advertising strategy.

The best advertising strategies are based on consumer insights that isolate a message or idea that is so compelling that it immediately connects with both existing customers and prospects in an emotional and rationale way.

Why must the advertising appeal to both existing customers and prospects?  Because any advertising you run will be most noticed by your existing customers.  Research on ad recall shows this over and over again.  Existing customers want to confirm that they’ve made the right brand choice and learn of anything new about a company/product/service that they’ve purchased.  Be sure any advertising you develop will make your existing customers look good for choosing your brand.

Why must the advertising strategy be compelling in both an emotional and rational way?  Because people first buy with their heart and then look for rational reasons to buy.  That's true for advertising to consumers and advertising selling business products/services. 

TIP:  you may want to read these MarketingZone articles before developing your advertising strategy

 

How to develop a winning advertising strategy

 

An advertising strategy is how you as the client paying for the advertising set your expectations for what you want the advertising to achieve and what key message you want to focus on.  It defines your scope of work and success measures.  An ad agency will want to work with you to create the ad strategy.  They may call this a creative brief.

 

Each agency has a different way they prefer to document the advertising creative strategy. Here’s what an advertising strategy or creative brief typically includes

1.  Who is the ad intended to reach/influence?

This is where you identify the demographic and psychographic information about who the ad must appeal to.  Be as specific as possible.

You may have several different segments of customers and so you’ll want to create different ad strategy documents for each segment if you want to tailor the ads to be most relevant to these different groups of customers/prospects.

TIP: the major cost for advertising is buying ad media space, not creating or producing an ad.  Instead of creating one ad that tries to appeal to different types of customers (and probably doesn’t), create and tailor different ads to reach different types of customers/prospects.  Link the media placement with the most contextually relevant advertising message and visuals.

 

2.  What media is planned?

TIP:  Figure out where the ad will run before giving the creative assignment to an agency or freelancer. They need this context to help them create the best ad(s) for you. Is this a TV and radio campaign? What shows will it run on? An effective ad on sports programming is very different than the local news or a cable show on home improvement. The ads will work best if they are appropriate for the media they are placed in. Same for print ads in newspapers and industry journals. And for online ads – what sites will the ad run on?

TIP:  Start with the target audience; next develop the media plan and budget and then engage the creative people to develop the ad.  This way you will not be swayed by an ad agency creative person who wants to do TV or radio ads when it would be more effective to run ads online and in magazines.

 

3.  What is the accepted customer belief about (the company, product or service) being advertised?

This is to identify any hurdles, preconceived perceptions, sales obstacles the prospects may have that will need to be addressed and overcome in the advertising. It may be that they don’t know about this category of product.

4. What is the accepted customer belief about (the product category, service or type of business) being advertised?

It’s important to understand how much the people viewing/reading the ad may know about what is being advertised. Is education needed about the benefits of the category before you can persuade someone to buy the product or service you are advertising?

5. What is the key message that will differentiate the product, service, and/or company?

Notice this is “key” message. It should be one thing, maybe two at most.  This isn’t a long list of features to convey.  Advertising is like an elevator pitch not a sales presentation or brochure.  What’s the emotional hook that will immediately connect with the prospect?

6. Substantiation of claims

List facts, data, information that will be included in the ad that is either legally required to substantiate any claims made or necessary to persuade someone to buy.

7.  Brand guidelines

• Is this ad part of an existing campaign?
• Are there any brand visual guidelines to follow?
• Is there a tagline to be used?
• Is there a brand personality to adhere to?

8.  Timing and approval process

• Document who will approve the ad and if ad pre-testing will be done.
• Document the ad placement deadlines for the media it will run in.

On MarketingZone, when we talk about advertising strategies our advice is focused on paid messages (ads) from a sponsor (advertiser) that appear in media (TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, websites, billboards, buses, mobile phones). We just wanted to clarify that upfront since many people often refer to any promotional activities (advertising, direct mailers, PR) as advertising.

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How to develop effective advertising strategies

1.  Start with defining who the intended customers are you want to reach and persuade to buy or do something

Be as specific as possible about who you want to reach using demographics (age, gender, income, family members, age of children, highest level of education, etc.)  A lot of these demographics will be the criteria used to select and buy advertising media.

Add psychographics – psychological attributes these people share in common.  For the teen driving service that might be things like parents involved in their student’s school and sports activities; working parents without as much time to drive with their kids. These psychographic insights help you tailor your message and offer and help with brainstorming creative ad media to select.

Make this more specific by creating “personas” of your ideal target audience.  For instance, if you are selling to moms, then this is giving a name to a segment of customers like “Molly Mom” and making the demographic and psychographic data and insights “come to life” as if they were applied to a specific person.  Some companies go as far to add a photo and make a stand-up “person” that they bring to brainstorming and customer service meetings to ask, “Would Molly Mom like this?”  “What would Molly Mom think of this?”

Cluster and segment your customers.  This will help you tailor your advertising and other marketing to be more relevant to these different groups of people. 

An example of what not to do:  use a generic description like: people who live in (this town) between 35 and 65 years of age or businesses who buy office supplies and products.

 

TIP:  Collect customer information. Do you know who your best customers are?  Most companies generate the most profitable business from just 20% of their customers. These are the people you want to replicate as prospects! Once you understand who they are, how they learned about your company/product/service/non-profit, it will make it much easier to find people like them.

Helpful articles at this step:

• How to Define your Target Audience
  
• How to Identify Your Most Profitable Customers (so you can clone them)
  
• Customer Segmentation
  

 

2.  Conduct a competitive audit of ads

Know this:  Don’t assume your competitors, and similar businesses across the country if you sell locally, are doing it right. But they may have some ideas you like and can leverage.

Collect and gather their ads and post them up on a wall so you and your team can look at them.  What do you think they’re doing well?  Poorly?  What words are they using that “work”?  Any offers that are compelling?

TIP:  if you're spending a lot of money on advertising, you'll learn a lot by paying to test what you think are the best ads from your competitors.  Those ad test results will help you identify what they are doing and saying that works well and what doesn't.  Those ad test scores can then also become benchmarks for your ads to beat in future ad testing. 

 

• Ad Testing