SUCCESSFUL ADVERTISING STRATEGIES - PART 2

Make some decisions

Decide when people are most likely to buy your product or service. If you advertise when people are resistant to buying, you may not be able to convince them. If you advertise too much when they're eager to buy, you may be spending money to encourage people who would have bought anyway.

Either way, you'll be wasting money. Almost every business has strong and weak seasons, whether dictated by weather, the proximity of the holidays, or any of many other factors.

If you need help charting peak and slump periods, try calling trade associations, watching business magazines for relevant stories, and combing through your own research. Effective advertising coordinates with these business cycles. Ideally, you should spend most when your potential customers are ready to buy and least when they're not.

Decide which media are appropriate for advertising your product or service. This isn't a simple decision. How much you can afford to spend, where your buying public lives and works, and numerous other factors come into play. At this point, make a preliminary list of advertising vehicles you believe might work, such as local newspapers, radio spots, and direct mail.

If you previously used an advertising form and got poor results, don't necessarily eliminate that vehicle. Poor timing, bad ad copy or graphics, or many other possible problems may have contributed to its ineffectiveness.

The single most critical element of your advertising plan is defining your purpose. To coordinate ad copywriting, visuals, media buying, and other elements of your campaign, you need clearly defined objectives. First, decide what you want to achieve.

You might wish to:

Create awareness of your product, service, or store
Develop a distinctive image in the marketplace
Stimulate sales leads
Increase store traffic
Acquaint customers with new products
Promote a special event, such as a new location
Tell customers about special services, such as credit plans or delivery
Tie in with manufacturers' promotions of brand-name merchandise
Offer customer incentives to "get acquainted" with your business

Now state exactly what you want to achieve. Be precise. State the name of your product, service, or idea. Name a selected sales item, if you've chosen one. Establish a time frame. Define a target audience. The point is to create something specific and measurable.

For instance, a new clothing store might have as its objective "to create awareness of our Super Style boutique among women aged 18 to 24 in the first six months of operation." You also may want to include budget information. The carpet-cleaning company might state as its objective "to develop 500 residential sales leads within three months, at a cost of not more than $5,000."

Think in terms of quantity and quality. Approximately how many people are you seeking to reach? If you plan to operate an instant-printing business, you'll limit your audience to people within a certain geographic radius of your sites. Based on your customer research, try to define the number of people and/or businesses you realistically can expect to use your services.

Next, decide whether you're attempting to reach sheer numbers of prospects or whether the quality of those prospects–that is, how much they use your product or service–is important. An instant printer might choose to appeal only to businesses, on the theory that commercial customers generate 90 percent of sales in the target radius.

Establishing a budget

Once you've set your advertising goals, you can begin working on a budget. Budgeting options range from simple to elaborate. You may choose any of them, but however you allocate your advertising dollars, use them. Treat your advertising as a fixed expense, much like rent and utility payments.

Experts agree that advertising isn't a luxury you can afford to give up in lean times. To be effective, your ads always must be well-conceived, well-executed, and consistent.

Planning an advertising campaign

With a budget in place, you're almost ready to contact media. First, however, you must create a media plan. Such a plan is a detailed, specific document that helps you choose which media to advertise in, when, and how often.

To construct a media plan, compile the the following:

Your statement about why you want to advertise and what you hope to achieve
Your budget for the designated period, such as one year
A statement of where and when major competitors advertise, including clippings of their ads
A chart projecting your monthly sales for at least the forthcoming year, and preferably for three years, showing percentages of annual sales expected each month
A similar chart showing your projected monthly advertising expenditures for the forthcoming year (and a list of media to be used each month)
Information on which media and type of ads have been the most successful for competitors
A contingency budget in case markets suddenly change, sales-forecast data prove inaccurate, or a competitor cannibalizes your market
A definition of the geographic boundaries of your trade area
The profile of your target market: demographics, special interests, and research on buying habits
Media kits, which you can obtain by calling the print and electronic media you've decided to use. Kits include reader or viewer demographics, ad rates, deadlines, circulation coverage statements, and similar information

Later, you can expand your media plan to include sections on the ads you're planning to run, including information on how large they are (in the case of print media), what they say, and how and where they appear. You'll end up with a coherent, concise summary of your media program. And that will be a boon when it comes to monitoring results.

Evaluating your advertising

The effectiveness of a campaign is judged before you begin advertising, not after. It should have met the goals you set. As a campaign gets under way, measure its success against those goals and, if necessary, refine your objectives as the campaign progresses. You also can measure success with the following:

Sales "signals" - from ads that include a request to call a particular person or repeat a slogan
Surveys: from questions asked as people visit your business or call you
Customer count
Volume of orders
Contests
Coupons
Direct-response cards
Comparisons of sales before and after ads appeared

In conclusion...

You've now learned a little about advertising: the differences among advertising media and approaches, the formulation of a media plan, and the methods to keep your advertising costs in line. With some careful planning, you can now make your advertising dollars go far and be more effective.

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