With the average small business now devoting at least $75,000 a year to digital marketing, advertising spending is going up in every sector. With all that spending comes some serious competition.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re able to create a seriously impactful advertising campaign.
A great advertising campaign needs to do more than just talking about a great product.
Lots of companies make a great product. What an impactful ad campaign does is to put the product into the context of a client’s life, becoming a part of what is most important to them.
If you’re looking to make a great advertising campaign, you need to make a plan to reach out to your customers.
Follow these 6 steps to success to ensure your campaign connects with customers at the deepest level possible.
1. Define The Customer With Your Advertising Campaign
If you don’t know who you’re trying to sell to, you’ll have a tough time knowing where to even begin with your ad campaign.
Your business should have started with some definition of your ideal market. Use that as your guide to understanding who you’re trying to reach.
If you skipped this step, it’s time to break out the pen and paper. Start by writing down the problems that your products or services solve. For each problem, list the types of people who face that issue on a regular basis.
Look for commonalities. If you’ve listed the same kind of person a few times, make a note of that. Try to distill your customer to as specific of a figure as possible.
Figure out superficial issues like gender, income level, or education level. Then start digging into the types of activities and beliefs your customer should have. If you find a very specific kind of person, you haven’t hit a dead end; you’ve hit the goal.
If you define a unique type of person, make sure you’re hitting them as directly as possible and then work backward. The rest of your work is to figure out how to snatch up the types of people close to your base and how to convert them to your brand.
2. Choose A Medium
In the 50 years since Marshall McLuhan declared “the medium is the message,” the concept still rings true in the digital era. The format for your ad campaign will define both the audience for it and how it is received.
If you take out an ad in print media, you need to engage the visual sense in a powerful way. If you’d prefer to run a radio advertising campaign, you need to think deeply about how people listen to ads and what they expect to hear.
If you’re running a digital video campaign, you have the opportunity to engage audiences in a broader way, on the internet and television. Look at other ad campaigns for products like yours and list the things you like about them.
Go back to your ideal customer and put yourself where they are.
3. Find a Target
Once you decide on your medium, figure out exactly which sites and venues customers should find your ad on. If you’ve accurately defined who your customers are, you can get a sense of where they will be and what is valuable to them.
Find websites where products like yours are marketed and see if advertising there is in your budget. If your competitors are already flooding that site with ads, you should see if you can find another site where you can be the only product of your kind advertising there.
This is difficult territory however because you want the site you advertise with to have products that are somewhat related to your business.
Buying advertising on social media isn’t a bad idea if you’re able to target your market carefully. If you have a tough time figuring out who your market is with a great deal of accuracy, you might miss the mark and waste ad dollars.
4. Set A Budget
While this could be the first step of your journey, without doing some research, you might not be able to figure out what numbers are realistic. You could create a budget that might not consider the kind of reach you’re going for.
Once you’ve listed all of your targets, number them in order of priority. Figure out how much an ad at your top priority websites, magazines, or tv channels costs. Remember, everything is negotiable so don’t be afraid to haggle.
See what kinds of returns they can promise you if anything at all. Get to know the pricing of several different competing potential targets. Quote prices between targets and see if you can get a better deal.
5. Make Great Content
Marketing, especially online, needs to have a tight focus. You should have one or two points that you need to get across.
When you’re creating an advertising campaign, you should only be selling one product. While it can be tempting to try to sell multiple things when you have the attention of your audience, you need to respect their time.
You also need to be selling something more than the product. If you’re selling soup, you’re doing more than pouring hot chicken water into a bowl. You’re selling good health, you’re selling home cooking, you’re selling nostalgia.
Creative content rules over everything else.
6. Analytics Are Key
Whether you use Google Analytics or another tool, you’ll need to make sure that you follow the success of your ad. Otherwise, you won’t know what kind of return you’re getting on your spending.
Additionally, you’ll be able to see how your advertising campaign resonates with your audience on each venue. Perhaps you thought your customers were mostly on Instagram but you get more clicks from Snapchat.
Whatever the specifics are of how your ad performs, you’ll need to have that data to make decisions for your next campaign.
Your Advertising Campaign Should Be Memorable
The most important goal of your campaign should be that it’s not easily forgettable.
Even if you’re a new company, after seeing your ad, potential clients should know the name of your company and what you do. If you’re successful, customers will start associating with whatever core value your ad focused on.
If you’re ready to start your next ad campaign, contact us for tips on how to make your content pop.