Build an image, make yourself known to your potential consumers, and increase sales, profits, and your brand’s reach. Regardless of the type of business, advertising will be necessary to make you sustainable over time.
Now, how to make an effective advertising strategy? While there is no single recipe for a successful advertising campaign, we know that these are the ingredients that cannot be missing from any of them.
These are the steps to follow to create your advertising strategy
Define the product or service that you are going to offer
Keep in mind that this definition goes far beyond giving your offer a name. It is about knowing what needs it satisfies, what raw materials you use to make it, where and how you can get this raw material, what your competitors are doing similar to you, and what advantages or differences you have compared to your competitors’ offers.
The complete knowledge of the offer helps you understand your limits and learn how to overcome them.
Study the target market
When you are already clear about the needs that your proposal responds to, you should make a more detailed study of the person behind the said need, in other words: of your target audience.
Determine what type of person you plan to approach and think about their characteristics. Use geographic criteria (region), demographic (age, gender, income…), psychographic (cultural patterns, lifestyle…) and all that are necessary. As we get to know our clients, we will have the ability to better communicate with them and develop a successful advertising strategy.
Once you have a good vision of your target market, think about how to reach them. What inspires you that can inspire them? What means are you going to use to achieve them? What message do you want to convey?
Create a value propostion
By now you already know the two pillars to make a good advertising strategy. What follows is to go to the bottom and fully know what your proposal consists of. It is to create an offer of value for your customers.
Any advertising strategy is based on a promise that a buyer can and expect to benefit from. And a value proposition is nothing more than a promise that talks about the benefits of your offer. Therefore, a good value proposition must make the following aspects clear:
- How do you propose to solve your client’s problem or need?
- What benefits people should expect to get from you.
- Why they should choose you over your competition.
Focus on branding, not selling
We know that sales are essential, but there is a better way to achieve them than by doing a door-to-door monologue of your offer. And if you want to develop a good advertising campaign, you must brand your marketing.
The latter, we can say that it is the process of building a brand, where the priority is to show its qualities, values and vision to make it easily recognizable through them.
This is how your advertising strategy should focus on telling the story instead of selling the product directly. In the long run, this will help your customers understand your brand better. And how do you achieve this? You see, these are some essential guidelines to include in your advertising strategy based on Brand marketing:
Create a corporate identity. In addition to making you recognizable, building a distinctive personality achieves an emotional and practically immediate response from consumers, especially if the message you want to convey or the functionalities of your offer are designed to move people’s senses.
Establish a connection with consumers. For this, it is essential to treat customers as people who live and experience sensations when interacting with our brand from the first moment. One tool to make a good and memorable impression is storytelling: the art of telling a story that conveys a message that your clients can identify with and gives them a sense of belonging that they can associate with your proposal.
Create a complete experience. For people to prefer you and keep your proposal in their memory, you must captivate them with an unforgettable experience. Appeal to people’s emotions and feelings, do something new that allows them to differentiate themselves, involve them in your idea and make them the centre of your proposal. If you can leave a mark on your consumers, you are guaranteed success.
Apply the variables of the marketing mix
Initially we talked about the 4Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place or distribution and Promotion), but today, trying to give more prominence to the client than to the company when creating a successful advertising strategy, we talk about the 4Cs: Consumer, Cost, Communication and Convenience.
- Consumer: think about the customer to create a product and service based on their actual needs, thus guaranteeing their acceptance in the market. By knowing what your audience wants, it is easier to create and bid.
- Cost: Compete for a lower cost, not a lower price. Establish the time and effort that your clients will have to invest in acquiring your product or service and contrast it with its economic value. Are you being competent?
- Convenience: See where and how your customer’s shop and make their work easy: save time and money, enjoy the environment, have easy access, choose between several options… all of them have to do with the comfort that your customers feel when making a purchase
- Communication: make your strategy geared towards communicating a value and not just selling a product. Think about what means you can use to reach your potential customers more efficiently. Try to carry out interactive campaigns that guarantee communication with each person, inform something and invite them to learn more about your proposal.
By the way, do not stop informing yourself. The world is constantly changing and at the same time, people and their needs. And remember that “customers buy for their reasons, not yours.”