Get ahead in advertising - Advice

Badly planned communications can be the quickest way to waste a lot of money. To avoid losing money on ineffective ads, think about:

1. What exactly are you trying to achieve?

• Usually sales, but of what, to which customers, where, and at what margin?
• Are you also trying to raise awareness? Of your company? Your products or services? Your Brand?
• Are you responding to competitor activity such as advertising or a price reduction?

• Remember, different types of customers might see very different benefits in the same product or service, and the central message of your advertising needs to communicate a major benefit to each type.

• All the different types have different strengths. You will usually need a mix.
• A short, snappy message about a forthcoming event works well on local radio, but a complex description of a specialist product works much better in a trade journal. You may need one type for the middleman (wholesaler, dealer), and another for the end user.

• People often need reminding several times. This has been proved to work best in most cases by communicating a message in several different media. For example, TV ads usually work better when they are shown less often but backed up with a targeted magazine campaign than by using the same ad spend to show the TV ad more times.

• People may not react immediately. They may file your communication or pass it on to someone else.
• People may respond to a mailing because they heard an ad on the radio two weeks earlier and they remember your name.
• Therefore keep records all of your campaigns to ensure you know what works best for you.