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Business Review 2006 from
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Define your aims
Jon Allo
managing director, Advertising International
Last year was quite a year for action in the advertising and marketing industry.
There was the unstoppable march of the iPod and all things mp3, we all celebrated the 2012 Olympic win for London and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, with his issues about school dinners, had his contract renewed with Sainsburys and revived his credibility when the public were perhaps starting to get a little tired of this cheeky chappie.
The latest long-term advertising expenditure forecast, compiled by the World Advertising Research Center on behalf of the Advertising Association, suggested a rise in advertising expenditure between now and 2017.
The report concludes that although the fortunes of the individual media will be mixed over the next decade, the general pattern for the industry is one of growth.
The UK is the largest advertising market in Europe - source: Advertising Association's Advertising Statistics Yearbook 2005 - and is a major centre for creative advertising.
And Jersey has a proven pool of professional and creative agencies that produce a very high standard of work for local, national and international clients.
Advertising is sometimes perceived as an arduous business overhead and can be the first budget that is cut when businesses are looking to save costs if sales are falling. However, cutting the ad budget can have a detrimental effect.
Encouraging
Advertising is the link to your customers and the answer lies in not cutting the budget, but spending it wisely and changing your message.
But when your business advertises, does it do so effectively? Are you encouraging customers and sales, or are you throwing money away?
A number of businesses spend money on placing advertisements that are ineffective or prepared without any thought to the aims or the target audience.
It is vital to test and measure all your advertising and not just allocate funds to an adverting budget and have a vague idea how the response is working.
If you measure the response you can put more into the ads that work and stop the ads that do not and put the money towards other worthwhile marketing strategies.
Contrary to popular belief, advertising is not always just about increasing sales - although that is usually the long-term goal. Some businesses run different advertisements with different aims over a period of time. Your agency should be asking what your aims and objectives are - if not, tell them! By knowing what your aims are, you will help them to produce better and more effective work.
Apart from increasing sales, advertising can be employed to increase knowledge of your company by being designed simply to increase a potential customer's knowledge or awareness that you exist. Alternatively, your advertising may aim to increase interest in your product or service.
This type of advertising is commonly used for new products or for large items where the customer will want to take their time over the purchase.
Or the objective for a campaign might be to create a different image designed to give customers a different view of your company.
Whatever the objective, the purpose of any advertisement is to produce a desired response. As a starting point, ensure your ad has a headline. It is the word or sentence that grabs attention. If the word at the top of your ad is the name of your company, you are missing out on a huge opportunity for response by not having a real attention-grabbing headline.
Your ad needs to be a personal communication to the individual reading it and it needs to be about them and communicate the benefits of what you are offering. Everything in the ad should be designed to meet your customers' needs, wishes, desires, hopes, fears or dreams. At the end of the ad you need a call to action. Tell people exactly what they need to do to follow through and make it easy for them to do so.
Your agency can help you to achieve your advertising objectives. Be wary of standard off-the-shelf solutions. Your company is unique and different from your competitors. If you went to the dentist and he said that you needed an extraction and after your asking why he replied: 'Well, my last patient had one and he felt much better after,' you would run screaming from the surgery.
Maximum
It takes around three to five exposures for consumers to remember the details of an average advertisement. With this in mind, you should not expect to get maximum results from running an ad once or twice, but should plan how you can get the best exposure and value in the medium that is most suited to your target audience.
And you do not have to employ Jamie Oliver or invest huge sums of money to produce a successful ad campaign.
Work and communicate clearly with your agency and allow them to create ads that will achieve your objectives.
A good agency knows its business and will want to understand yours to enable it to produce creative work that will stir emotion and create demand for your product or service.
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