Before you create an advertising message or decide where you’ll run it, you must know whom you’re targeting. Determining the exact audience for your product or service is the first step in developing an ad campaign. Once you know that, you can effectively develop your message, choosing media options that your target customer will watch, read or listen to.
Target Audience
Some companies create a product or service, then fine-tune targeting the exact customer who wants or needs it. Other businesses decide who they want to target first, then tweak their product or service to make it more attractive to that audience. Whichever path your company takes, you must learn the demographics, or personal characteristics, of your audience. This includes traits such as age, sex, income level, parental status, race, geographic location and educational level.
Benefit
Knowing the demographics of your target audience helps you when choosing advertising vehicles, but it is not enough to help you craft your message. You might know that your target audience is affluent single women between the ages of 25 and 40 with college educations, but that is not why they are your target customers. What makes your target audience similar, in terms of marketing, is their need for a particular benefit. Benefits include reasons to buy, such as affordability, quality, status, excellent customer service or convenience. You build brands, advertising campaigns and ad messages around a benefit your target audience wants.
Message
Once you know what you need to say and to whom you’re speaking, you can create your advertising message. This will affect your choice of graphics, color and copy. Women, for example, respond better to stories and can process more detail more than men do, according to researcher Melanie Yarborough. Men prefer blocks of simple information that solve problems. Use softer colors, rounded shapes and pictures of women who look like your customer when you advertise to women. You might be more successful getting the attention of men if you use modular layouts, geometric shapes and pictures of attractive women.
Media Options
Using your knowledge of your target customer and benefit message, you select media options for placing ads that not only reach your audience but also protect your brand. For example, if you have a choice to reach your upscale audience for the same price using a local newspaper or regional glossy magazine, you would choose the glossy magazine to align your upscale image with that of the magazine’s. Even if the magazine advertising costs a bit more, one of your advertising goals is to include a specific image message about your product. Advertisers choose media options using the information found in each magazine’s, website’s, broadcast station’s or outdoor-signage company’s media kit. A media kit provides facts about an advertising vehicle, including a detailed demographic description of the audience who is reading, watching, visiting or listening.
References
Writer Bio
Sam Ashe-Edmunds has been writing and lecturing for decades. He has worked in the corporate and nonprofit arenas as a C-Suite executive, serving on several nonprofit boards. He is an internationally traveled sport science writer and lecturer. He has been published in print publications such as Entrepreneur, Tennis, SI for Kids, Chicago Tribune, Sacramento Bee, and on websites such Smart-Healthy-Living.net, SmartyCents and Youthletic. Edmunds has a bachelor's degree in journalism.
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Steps for Developing an Advertisement Program | Marketing Management
Home/Advertisement/Steps for Developing an Advertisement Program | Marketing Management
Steps for Developing an Advertisement Program | Marketing Management
Marketers must make the following important decisions while developing an advertising program: 1. Setting Advertising Objectives 2. Setting the Advertising Budget 3. Determine the Key Advertising Messages 4. Media Decisions 5. Evaluating Advertising Campaigns.
Step 1: To Set Advertising Objectives:
An advertising objective is a specific communication task to be achieved with a specific target audience during a specified period of time.
Advertising objectives can be divided into three main categories:
(a) To Inform:
Informative advertising aims to create awareness and knowledge of new products or new features of existing products, e.g. tell customers about a new product policies, promotional schemes, availability of products etc.
(b) To Persuade:
Persuasive advertising aims to create liking, preference, conviction, and purchase of a product or service. Some persuasive advertising uses comparative advertising, which makes a clear comparison of the attributes of two or more brands. E.g. encourage customers to switch to a different brand.
(c) To Remind:
Reminder advertising aims to stimulate repeat purchase of products and services.
Secondary Objectives of Advertising:
(i) Stimulate an increase in sales
(ii) Remind customers of the existence of a product
(iii) Inform customers
(iv) Build a brand image
(v) Build customer loyalty and relationship
(vi) Change customer attitudes
Step 2: Decision on the Advertising Budget:
It is the estimation of expenditure on various components of advertising. It should match with the objectives of a business firm. The amount spent on advertising should be relevant to the potential sales impact of the campaign. Advertising budgets is finalized by marketing manager and media agency.
Factors to be considered while setting the advertising budget:
(i) Stage in the Product Life Cycle:
New products typically receive large advertising budgets to build awareness and to gain consumer trial. Advertising budget for a new product may be different from a product in maturity stage, new products tend to need a larger advertising budget to help build awareness and to encourage consumers to trial the product. Established brands usually are supported with lower advertising budgets as a ratio to sales.
(ii) Market Share and Consumer Base:
High market share brands usually require less advertising expenditure as a percentage of sales to maintain share, it is due to popularity and awareness of customer about brand. It is less expensive to reach consumers of a widely used brand than to reach consumers of low-share brands. If a new company wants to increase its market share it will need high investments on advertising campaign.
(iii) Competition in Market:
Advertisement budget depends on level of competition in market competition can be seen more in the field of automobile, electronic appliances, telecommunication, banking etc. products which are having close substitutes in market needs more expenditure on advertising. In a market with a large number of competitors and high advertising spending, a brand must advertise more heavily to be heard.
(iv) Advertising Frequency:
The number of repetitions needed to put across the brand’s message to consumers has an important impact on the advertising budget. Higher the frequency higher would be budget.
(v) Product Substitutability:
Brands in a commodity class require heavy advertising to establish a differential image. Advertising is also important when a brand can offer unique physical benefits or features.
Stage 3: Determine the Key Advertising Messages and Deciding the Copy:
Research suggests that the clarity of the advertising message is often more important than the amount spent. The advertising message must be carefully targeted to impact the target customer audience.
A successful advertising message should have the following characteristics:
a. Meaningful:
Customers should find the message relevant, easy to understand.
b. Distinctive:
Capture the customer’s attention.
c. Believable:
A difficult task, since research suggests most consumers doubt the truth of advertising in general.
Message evaluation and selection of a good advertisement normally focuses on one core selling proposition, messages should be rated on desirability, exclusiveness, and believability. Message execution can be decisive for highly similar products, such as detergents, cigarettes, coffee, and soft drinks. Advertising does not overstep social and legal norms.
Copy writing is the next step of advertisement programme it is a specialized form of communicating ideas that are meant to serve the requirements of modern marketing. It helps in establishing link between advertising and their prospects. It may also use to promote the acceptance of idea and utilized words to convey message having commercial information.
The term copy includes every single feature that appear in the body of advertisement, copy – is an all-embracing term covering all that appears in an advertisement the written matter, pictures, labels and design. Developing copy is a creative process copy development is mostly done by professional advertising agencies.
Stage 4: Decide which Advertising Media to Use:
There are a variety of advertising media from which to choose. A campaign may use one or more of the media alternatives.
The key factors in choosing the right media include:
(a) Reach:
What proportion of the target customers will be exposed to the advertising? It is the number of different persons or households exposed to a particular media schedule at least once during a specified time period.
(b) Frequency:
How many times will the target customer be exposed to the advertising message? Frequency is the number of times within the specified time period that an average person or household is exposed to the message.
(c) Media Impact:
Impact is the qualitative value of an exposure through a given medium where, if the target customer sees the message – will it have most impact? For example, does an advert promoting holidays for elderly people have more impact on Television if so, when and which channels or in a national newspaper or perhaps a-magazine focused on this segment of the population.
Another key decision in relation to advertising media relates to the timing of the campaign. Some products are particularly suited to seasonal campaigns on television like advertisements of durables on Diwali whereas for other products, a regular advertising campaign throughout the year in media such as newspapers and television.
Stage 5: Evaluation of the Advertising Campaign:
Success of advertising depends on planning and control of advertising campaign it should be evaluated by the advertisers. Most measurement of advertising effectiveness deals with specific advertisement and campaigns. A proposed campaign should be tested in one or a few cities first and its impact evaluated before rolling it out nationally.
Most advertisers try to measure the communication effect of an advertisement that is, its potential effect on awareness, knowledge, or preference. They would also like to measure the advertisement sales effect.
The evaluation of an advertising campaign should focus on two key areas:
1. The Communication Effects—is the intended message being communicated effectively and to the intended audience?
2. The Sales Effects—has the campaign generated the intended sales growth. This second area is much more difficult to measure.
Bases for the measurement of advertisement success:
(i) Number of enquiries from advertisement
(ii) Number of enquiries converted into sales
(iii) Test customer awareness both before and after the advertising campaign
(iv) Number of enquiries
(v) Test customer awareness
(vi) Number of requests for further information
(vii) Test customer awareness of brand recognition and perceived values
(viii) Levels of repeat purchase
(ix) Levels of customer retention
(x) Measure demographic profile of purchases
(xi) Measure type of goods ordered by new purchasers
(xii) Increase in sales by comparing with previous data.