You’ve got the product, you’ve launched the big idea, now comes the hard part – selling.
Despite the expense, marketing your brand or product is absolutely essential if you are to try and grow your business. If your marketing is done effectively you can tap into brand new audiences, make massive inroads into gaining market share and boost your overall sales.
However, if you get your marketing strategy wrong, it could be an expensive cost exercise and could end up doing more harm than good.
Before you decide how you want to market your brand or service there are several key things you may need to consider.
With lots of different moving parts, in this article we will talk you through the things you need to consider as well as the different ways you can deliver and distribute your ads.
Let’s dive into it.
The key things you need to consider
Before deciding how you want to market your product there are several things you need to consider.
Pick your audience
Most goods and services are aimed at a particular segment of the public. The product could be weighted towards one gender over another, it could be for kids, teenagers, young adults, parents or the elderly.
You need to ensure that before you advertise your product you have your audience defined. Ensuring you know who you are talking to is essential as it will enable you to create a message that should be suitable and should determine what advertising vehicle you choose to adopt.
If for example we are promoting a new children’s board game, we will need to ensure that our message is suitable and will resonate with children as well as their parents. Trying to advertise on TV would be a good tactic as children are far more likely to be watching TV then surfing the web or social media.
Define your budget
Marketing and advertising doesn’t come cheap and depending on your budget, it can determine how you choose to market your product.
The world’s biggest brands often have the resources to hire agencies to help with their creative advertising and media spend. By taking a look at the proposed audiences, agencies can work on creating a hook and can ensure that the creative message is perfect for the chosen media.
Not every company has the luxury of being able to hire agencies and may need to create any marketing messages themselves. Those with smaller budgets need to be more tactical when it comes to choosing where to advertise.
Let’s take an example of a local taxi firm. Wanting to keep the messaging relevant to the local area where the firm operates, taking out a billboard next to a busy junction, flyering letter boxes or advertising via local radio stations would all be a better use of funds rather than creating a big television campaign.
Some of the most effective marketing can be done at a local level and even if your budget is small, there should still be effective and efficient ways that you can promote your business.
Choosing your medium
With your audience and budget confirmed, the final stop is choosing how to best advertise your business. Here are some of the different mediums that are available.
Television
Despite the ever changing nature of our increasing digital society, the one advertising medium that still rules them all is TV advertising.
Having the capacity to reach millions, if TV advertising is done correctly it can enhance your marketing beyond recognition. However, despite its vast potential, only those with deep pockets tend to be able to afford to advertise on a national level.
Buying television advertising slots can be expensive, take the Super Bowl for example, advertising during half time will cost a business millions and with no guarantees as to how the advert will be received, spending millions on an advertising campaign can be sometimes seen as a risky thing to do.
In order to keep costs down, most brands tend to avoid prime time and instead run adverts during programmes where the businesses prime audiences may be watching.
Take Bitcoin betting sites as an example. It would be far more effective to advertise a Bitcoin betting site during a sports game as those who are more likely to bet on crypto sites are more likely to be watching the game than other shows.
Clever targeting can make television advertising more effective but it is no guarantee. With the public being drowned out by the sheer volume of ads that they are exposed to, in order to stand out from the crowd, a great blend of messaging and fairly deep pockets are required.
Digital banners
With more and more people moving away from traditional mediums, the most increased advertising platform has been through digital advertisements.
Appearing across the internet as well as on social media, digital banners can be highly targeted and can be a great and cost effective way in reaching your target audience.
Media companies specialise in serving up ads to your required audiences but they can also be created and served via other platforms such as Google Ads.
Using cookies from previous web searches, banners can be served up based on digital profiling. Depending on the volumes that you want to get served, the level of costs can vary dramatically.
Often a go-to for businesses all over the world, there are some drawbacks. People across social media and the internet have become slightly immune to the amount of ads they see and in a cluttered space, standing out from the crowd can be expensive and hard to do.
If a clear strategy isn’t locked down, you may find that your digital strategy might not result in the levels of success you thought it might reach.
Local press and radio
Alongside TV advertising, advertising via local press and radio has been an effective way to promote brands.
Local press is often flooded with adverts from a variety of local and national companies and some of the savviest businesses may even choose to take over a publications front page.
Printed daily, there is the opportunity for consistent and frequent messages but the risks of advertising via local press are increasing.
With print becoming a thing of the past, the overall readership figures might not be as high as they have been in the past. Depending on where the ads are positioned you can’t guarantee that people will notice your ads, if situated in a cluttered environment it might be difficult for an advert to really stand out from the rest of the crowd.
The same challenges exist on local radio. Whilst advertising via the radio waves can be effective, with the digital rise of mediums such as Spotify and Apple Music, as well as digital radio stations that allow people to listen to stations all over the world, the amount of people tuning into their local stations is gradually dwindling and an effective ad has to be produced in order for there to be any significant reach.
Testing and learning can be important
Unfortunately when it comes to marketing and advertising there is no magic wand when it comes to finding the perfect solution.
Many of the world’s biggest companies have had to adapt their messaging depending on how an ad has previously performed. New channels and new messages are conceived almost on a weekly basis, and what was considered good in the past, may no longer be the case.
It can often take a few attempts to get the marketing blend right, so if results don’t take off immediately, there is no need to panic. The most important thing about your marketing is tracking its performance, you can track any usage gains or sales you have made since the subsequent release of any marketing materials to guage whether it has been successful or not.
If your marketing has resulted in satisfactory gains, it’s important to identify what has worked. The channel could have worked as could have the messaging. Future campaigns could be based on both of these key factors.
If the activity has failed to fire it could be for several reasons. Was the hook strong enough? Were we on the right channels for our audiences? Was the ad seen by enough people?
Regardless of whether your ad has met or failed to meet expectations, a detailed analysis of the campaign and spend needs to be done.