Marketing 101

Advertising Planning Basics

If you’re new to marketing and advertising, the thought of getting started can be a bit overwhelming. But it’s not that difficult if you take it step by step. There are two components to an effective marketing plan, determining what to say and where to say it.

When determining what to say, you want to find the intersection between what your customers want or need, and what you have to offer. For what you have to say to have an impact on your target customers, you’ll need to say it in a compelling way, possibly appealing to the target’s emotional side as well as its rational side. You have to find a way to make what you say matter to your customer. Tell them what’s in it for them, not just what you have to offer. If you need help figuring out what to say, we have a great team of creative professionals who can help you build anything from a message strategy to an individual ad to a bigger campaign. To learn more about this team and their work, click here.

The process of figuring out where to say it is commonly referred to as media planning. We’ve provided a basic outline of the process with some tips to help you prepare a media plan to get the most for your efforts. If you follow these nine steps, with a little bit of work, you’ll give yourself the best chance of succeeding in your marketing efforts.

1. Determine Your Objective

Seems easy enough – you probably want to increase your business. But in what way? Do you want to sell to more people? Do you want to sell more to the people you already sell to? Do you want more people to know about you, because if they know about you, they will probably try you? Aim to zero in on the specific behavior you want to cause with your advertising. The more defined it is, the more the message can direct a person to do what you want and the better you can measure your success. Some common objectives are:

• Awareness: Create recognition of a product, business or service, in plain language – get people to notice you
• Education: Help your target better understand your product, business or service, communicate some of the facts about what you have to offer your customer
• Direct Response: Spur a customer to take action, encourage trial, purchase, repurchase or referral
• Image: Maintain or adjust a brand’s positioning in the consumer’s mind, enhance or adjust the market’s perception of you

2. Understand Your Target Audience

The better you understand your prospect, the more effective you can be in reaching and connecting with him/her. Building a demographic profile (things like age, gender, residence, income, etc.) is helpful in determining where they live and where to reach them. Demographics are often the language of media partners. It’s how they define their audiences and how they’re able to tell you how effective they can be at reaching your target customer.

Getting a glimpse of your customer’s psychographic profile (what do they like, what do they do, what is important to them, what are their values, etc.) will also help you determine where to reach them, as well as help you figure out how to speak to them in a compelling way. What’s important to a 34-year-old single woman is likely different than what’s important to a 34-year-old single mother of two.

3. Understand Your Business Environment

Your business is part of a community or several communities. When something happens in your community, it affects you. If another one of you opens up next door, it gives your customers a choice and will likely have a negative impact on your business. When another business like yours closes in your community, it will likely have a positive impact on your business because your competitor’s customers will need to find a replacement. When the weather is bad, people stay home. When the economy is good, people spend more.

4. Determine Media Choices

You can use what you learned about your target’s behavior and interests to identify media they consume and points in their life where your message will most effectively be received.

When thinking about which media (e.g., print, outdoor, broadcast) make the most sense for the target you’re trying to reach and what you’re trying to get them to do, you want to consider two key factors: reach and frequency. These two should work in tandem with each other.

• Reach: How many people will a particular advertising vehicle reach? How many people will be exposed to your ad through a given media? When considering reach, keep quality in mind. It won’t matter if you reach 300,000 vegetarians if you’re selling meat.
• Frequency: It’s been said that most people need to be exposed to a message at least three times for it to sink in. The first time they hear it, the second time they understand it and the third time they act on it. Running the same ad in the same vehicle a number of times can be more effective than using a number of different vehicles once, unless there is a strong overlap in audience where the same person may be exposed to your ad three times through three different vehicles.

When selecting a specific set of media vehicles, you also want to think about the fact that different media are more effective at different tasks. For example, radio can sometimes deliver a higher level of emotion than print because of the use of music, voice inflection and sound effects. Print, when done right, can deliver a greater level of detail or information and has a longer shelf life, including pass-along. If your goal is to influence your target’s lunch choice, you might want to use radio during the midday period while they are out and deciding what to eat. If you want to get someone to buy an airline ticket or reserve a rental car, you might advertise online where they might be searching airfares.

As a starting point, consider the following media vehicles for the sample objectives given earlier:

• Awareness: Newspaper, Internet, radio, outdoor
• Education: Newspaper, Internet, direct mail, magazines
• Direct Response: Internet, direct mail, newspapers (coupons), radio
• Image: Internet, newspapers, magazine

5. Allocate Budget

There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules about the minimum amount you should spend on advertising. You don’t need a million dollars to make an impact, although it can help. How much you should spend all depends on a number of things, including what you’re trying to accomplish, how narrow or broad your target is, how involved the purchase decision is, to name a few. If you’re not sure what to spend, you may want to talk to one of our Sales and Marketing Consultants about what you’re trying to accomplish. He or she will give you a great sense of what is possible.

6. Develop Media Plan

This is the fun part, building the right mix of vehicles you need to reach your desired target, timed to deliver your message when it will matter most. If you’ve done your homework up to this point, you should be equipped with the information to make solid choices.

7. Execute

Place your ads and watch your business to see what happens. Do you notice a change in the volume of customers you have? What about a change in the type of customer that is coming in? Are the customers that come in buying more or differently than in the past?

8. Evaluate

Remember in the first step we suggested that you make it measurable? You want to see if your efforts worked. Did the advertising have the desired result? If you run coupons, add a code to them that can help you determine where each coupon was distributed and therefore which distribution method gave you the best results. You can do the same if you’re asking customers to call in. Ask them where they heard about you or your offer and keep track of their answers. If you’re using online advertising, look at your tracking results to see where site visitors are coming from.

9. Circle Back

Take what you learned in the evaluation stage and put it to good use revising your plan and refining your message to have even greater impact.

Even with all this information, the process can still be a bit tricky. For example, is it better to spend less money to reach a smaller audience with a direct email effort or to spend more money to reach a larger audience with a newspaper ad. The answer – in every situation – should be “it depends.” It depends on whom you’re trying to reach. It depends on what you’re trying to say or asking the target to do. It depends on the accuracy and quality of the email list you have. It depends on how else you’re reaching out to your audience. Well, you get the idea. Our team of Sales and Marketing Consultants can help you answer that question. They can help you through this entire process, or any particular step you might want help with.