There are many ways in which advertising and promoting your business can be achieved, and with more opportunities and channels through which your message can be communicated, the choices and options available are wider than ever.
There are many decisions to make in terms of media and advertising for the successful promotion of your business. Should you employ an advertising agency? When is the right time to promote your business? What should you promote,
how and to whom? What are the best ways of reaching the target audience? Effectively, this all comes down to one thing - how can you achieve best value for money in order to increase sales?
There are many ways in which advertising and promoting your business can be achieved, and with more opportunities and channels through which your message can be communicated, the choices and options available are wider than ever. This can make the challenge of deciding on the best route to follow for the promotion of a product or service much harder, but at the same time, very exciting.
One of the things to bear in mind is that the world we live in today is far more cynical and skepticall than it was only a couple of decades ago. We have all become familiar with the constant bombardment of messages, promotions, advertising and offers, that we have become adapted to this culture. Part of that adaptation involves being able to filter out those messages, forms of media and advertising which we do not find immediately relevant or of any importance to us personally.
This is perhaps the biggest challenge which any business faces when considering running an advertising campaign, or actively promoting goods or services. In a culture flooded with advertising, how is it possible to ensure that your messages get through?
The key to creating a successful form of advertising is to know five things:
a) What are you promoting?
b) Why are you promoting it?
c) To whom are you promoting it?
d) How will you reach them?
e) What are your criteria for success?
These five questions are, if you like, the five rules to which you must tie any advertising campaign, for without rock solid answers to each of these questions any promotional campaign is destined to, at best, fail entirely, and at worst, also cost you a fortune.
What are you Promoting
The first of these questions relates to considering specifically what it is that you are going to promote. Certainly if your business has a very small number of products or services, this may involve promoting the business as a whole, but generally, people aren't interested in the business - it's the products and services which will be of more relevance. Remember, if the media and advertising do not strike people as being relevant, they'll be filtered out. Keep your promotion specific.
Why are you Promoting It?
The second question might seem odd, but is often ignored. Once you know what it is that you are promoting, understand clearly why you are promoting it. This could be to increase sales, or it could be to help you balance the business more in that direction, to counter a competitor's product, or to promote an entirely new product or service. Understanding why you are promoting it will help you to understand the how.
To Whom are you Promoting It?
Now you know what you're promoting and how, you need to think carefully whom it is that you need to reach. It is very rare, if indeed it ever happens, that your message is destined to be heard by everybody. There will always be a group that you need to reach more than any other. Perhaps this could be based on age, interests, needs, financial position, employment position, geographical location, educational level, health condition and so on. Try to be as specific as possible in determining your target audience.
How Will you Reach Them?
Knowing to whom your promotion is targeted allows you to consider the best way to reach them. If you're targeting the unemployed, then how will you reach that kind of person most effectively? If you're targeting children, then clearly offering free coffee mugs on the street corner is going to be as effective as trying to reach city executives by placing adverts on bingo websites.
With all forms of media available, from website advertisements to flyers, from glossy color adverts in magazines to television and radio advertisements, and from billboards to email marketing, there are a tremendous number of options from which to choose, and each will help you to reach a specific audience type.
What are your Criteria for Success?
With all four of these questions clearly answered, you may well think that you are on the way to a successful advertising campaign, but there is still one very important question that remains. How will you know if your media and advertising has been successful or not? Having performance criteria allows you to determine whether the tactics chosen have, in that particular combination, worked. If not, then perhaps you need to reconsider the answers to the first four questions. But no race was ever won that didn't have a finishing line, and no sea ever crossed with land on which to plant the flag of success.
All media and advertising has a goal, a means of attaining that goal a means of measuring how successfully it has been attained. If you are unsure to do all of that yourself, there are professionals available to help you. Many of the most successful businesses contract out the more specialized aspects of what is not their core business: media and advertising.
