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.

What Is Branding and How Important is it to Your Marketing Strategy?

Business is all about branding and making your mark on people so that they remember who you are and where you come from. In the same way a cattle brand leaves a permanent mark on a farmers cattle, so too does company branding on the minds of people. The only difference is the branding is mental and not physical, so instead of seeing the image stuck on your body somewhere, you vividly remember it in your mind without any question.

Essentially that is all that branding is as mentioned on https://www.scandisplay.co.za; a way to create a lasting impression on people so that they always see you in the places that they expect to see you and they think about you when the time is right. If you take coca-cola as an example, when you sit down at a restaurant and you are unsure what to drink when the waiter arrives to get your order, the first thing you usually think about is a coke.

As strange as that may sound, it is often quite true and people generally have no sensible explanation why they do it. The answer to this great mystery lies in the branding of coke, and how they have managed to get themselves positioned and advertised in just about every corner of the globe. In fact, you’ll be surprised to know that Coca-cola doesn’t even make coke anymore, they outsource all of their production to other companies and then they focus entirely on marketing the brand.

How Branding Fits Into Your Marketing Strategy

If your potential customers don’t know about you or where to find you for that matter, you are going to have a hard time trying to generate business. You will effectively spend most of your time trying to get the people to come to you, instead of letting them come to you on their own. Not only do you give yourself much better awareness, but you also have a much easier job trying to sell stuff when the people are coming to you for your products and services.

The whole purpose of marketing is to give people the necessary information they need to make an informed buying decision before or during the process of purchasing your products or making use of your services. If you want to be the first thing people think about when they need a product or service like yours, then you need to have created enough awareness and impact on the people that would most likely be paying attention. You need to create informative and effective marketing communiqués that will stick out when the time is right.

The process of developing a marketing strategy usually entails defining who your potential customers, how they think and what makes them decide to buy a particular product. That usually falls under consumer psychology and understanding the decision making process in people, but at least it is usually included in most business management training courses so the people dealing with it will know exactly what to do.

When you are formulating your strategy you have to keep all of that in mind, so that when the time comes for you to start creating your marketing messages, they will have the impact necessary.

Create a Brand for Yourself So You Can Get Recognised

A brand is just a name that differentiates your own company from all the rest. You need to be able to show people that you are different and you have nothing to do with all the others on the same bandwagon. You need to place yourself in places where you can get noticed and you need to do it often enough for people to realise who you are and that you actually mean business.

Instead of just sitting around and hoping for people to notice you, or actively going out to find business you can work on getting people to find you instead. That means that you just have to put in a bit of effort in the beginning to make sure that you are visible and that you stay visible, and you can sit back and watch as all the new sales and new clients start rolling in to your doorstep, looking to do business with you.