How to Develop a Marketing/Advertising Strategy
If you happen to be a business owner and you are looking to set up a marketing strategy, then you need to know what steps to follow if you want to make sure that your marketing campaign is going to be successful. Setting up a marketing campaign is never an easy task, and no matter how well you know your business or your target market, you always have to find a new and interesting way to approach them.
It happens all too often when companies pick the cliché and run of the mill options for their advertising and marketing campaigns. Whenever you see that, you will often find that they have little impact on the people looking at it and the money spent on the whole thing just goes to waste. When you need to make the most impact for the amount of money you are planning to spend, you have to be smart about where and how you spend it.
The Best Place to Start Is With Your Budget
Your budget basically determines everything you do for your campaign. You need to know exactly how much you can afford to spend on the whole thing, and you need to know where you are going to spend it. Each medium you choose with have a different cost and each medium will have a different reach.
The reach of a medium is the number of people you can communicate with at any given time of the day. Television and radio will normally give you your highest reach, because just about everybody watches or listens to them. Prime time spots would be a lot more expensive than your off-peak hours for example, however if you are going to be using print instead of the television, you can still get the same kind of reach if you were to use a billboard as an example.
Placement Means Everything in Advertising
You could have the best advert in the world, but it won’t do you any good if the idea is never seen by the right people. If a person isn’t looking for your business, there is a good chance that they will just ignore you when it comes to viewing your advertisement. That is why you need to be able to target the right audience, if you want to have the right kind of impact.
Billboards, radio and television all give you the opportunity to communicate to a very large and broad number of people at any given time, however all of those people will be different, and you can never be certain that you will reach each and every one of them; but you can be guaranteed that at least some of them will have some kind of interest, and that kind of advertising can only be done on affordable budget.
Cost-effective Ways to Market and Advertise
It is still possible to get the right kind of reach you are looking for without having to spend that kind of money on your campaign. The trick is to focus your campaign in the right places so that you can narrow down your message, so that it reaches specific people. That way, you can cut out the need for mass advertising via expensive advertising channels and you can personalise your message for the people that are actually looking for you.
To give you an example, you could create a display stand for an exhibition somewhere. An exhibit that has a single purpose in mind would attract the people you are looking for because they are there for something specific. In other words, a homemaker’s expo would have stall holders with display stalls that are relevant to the house and home, and the people attending would be looking for things for their own homes.
Develop a Marketing Strategy That Works
What that all means is you have to be able to work within an allocated budget for your entire marketing plan, and you also need to be able to do so with the highest possible impact for the money you are spending. The only way to do that is by making use of targeted channels that draws the people that are actually looking for you.