Why develop advertising strategy and how?

Why develop advertising strategy and how? 

Advertising helps in creating awareness about a product and its advantages. In order to advertise a product and to convince the buyers one has to develop a strategy, an advertising strategy. Developing a campaign to communicate ideas about products and services in the most simple and interesting way to the potential customers is known as advertising strategy. Before developing advertising campaign one needs to think about the campaign in a rational and logical fashion. Developing advertising strategy will also reflect other business considerations like overall budget, brand recognitions efforts and objectives like public image enhancement, market share growth as well.

According to Alexander Hiam and Charles D. Schewe, authors of “Portable MBA in Marketing”, a business’s advertising strategy “determine the character of the company’s public face.” If you have a small business with limited capital and can’t spend much to advertise your product or brand as a large corporation, still with advertising strategy you can develop a highly effective advertising campaign. Creativity and flexible planning, based on an in-depth knowledge of the target consumer is the key to effective advertising strategy.

image courtesy:  marcelo nunes on flickr

Steps in Formulating Advertising Strategy:

Objective: First you need a clearly defined objective which you wish to achieve through the advertising campaign. Clear cut objectives are essential for advertising strategy development.

Define your Customer: While formulation/developing the advertising strategy you need to define clearly who are your customers? Are you selling in urban, rural or suburban market? Ages, preferences, choices, are they from middle or upper strata of the society? To identify the target consumer, and the forces acting upon any purchasing decision, it is important to define three general criteria in relation to that consumer.

Demographics: It is about considering age, gender, job, income, ethnicity, and hobbies.

Behaviours’: When considering the consumers' behavior an advertiser needs to examine the consumers' awareness of the business and its competition, the type of vendors and services the consumer currently uses, and the types of appeals that are likely to convince the consumer to give the advertiser's product or service a chance.

Needs and Desires: Here an advertiser must determine the consumer needs- functionality and self image and the kind of pitch/message that will convince the consumer that the advertiser's services or products can fulfill those needs.

image courtesy: asyrafhamzah on flickr

Communication Media: Next step is to decide the media through which the message or the content will be reached. Here, media acquires importance equal to the message development. A very strategic and creative message needs appropriate and well placed media to reach out to the target prospects. Media includes the entire media environment, both offline and online

Kaavin Communications develops advertising strategy before approaching any communication project. To know more log on to www.kaavincom.in