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Why Your Company Needs an Effective Advertising Campaign to Raise Marketplace Awareness for Your Company’s Products and Services and Brand Name
All of these elements should be a key part of your advertising plan. You should regularly review your advertising campaign to ensure that your advertising strategies are helping you to achieve your business, marketing and sales goals.
The main benefit of paid advertising in any medium is the immediacy and the guaranteed placement of key marketing messages that will be delivered to a carefully selected target audience of future customers and potential business partners.
Basic Steps in Planning Advertising/PR Campaigns
Considerations for planning advertising campaigns:
- What is the main mission of the advertising campaign?
- What goals and objects will the campaign have?
- Roll out new products
- Increase sales
- Enter new zip codes, states, or international markets
- What strategies will be used?
- Place ads adjacent to editorial stories
- Readership studies
- Rent subscriber mail or email lists
- Place ads in digital marketing networks
- How much money will be in the advertising budget?
- What audience demographics/psychographics will be targeted?
- What types of advertising should be considered?
- Digital Media advertising
- Social Media Networks
- Retargeting Campaigns
- Radio/TV advertising
- Magazines, Business Journals, Newspapers, Trade Pubs
- Outdoor billboards
- Transit Advertising
- Trade Show Sponsorships
- How will the advertising campaign’s success be measured?
- Landing Page Statistics
- Google Analytics
- Sales Funnel Conversion Rates
- 800-Number Phone Calls
- Qualification Card Response Rates
Most PR firms would not recommend spending any money on advertising campaigns, but in the real world all media outlets make a significant portion of their revenue from advertising. But in reality marketing is all about reach and frequency. Combining advertising, PR and social media into an integrated marketing communications campaign will be much more effective than picking one or the other.
For companies that can afford it, spending money on advertising to fill in the gaps between PR placements is a very wise and prudent decision. The reason being is that even though it is an unspoken rule, media publishers are much more likely to go the extra mile for a company that supports its editorial news coverage with advertising dollars.
For example, STB Systems was a video card maker for personal computers that led the industry in moving from monochrome monitors to color monitors needed to display Microsoft’s Windows and IBM’s OS/2 operating system back in the 1990’s. Being a great PR firm, we successfully placed their leading-edge video cards in all of the leading trade pub product roundup stories, but could never seem to win an Editor’s Choice.
We when signed our PR contract with STB, we made a deal with the CEO, Bill Ogle, to reward every dollar we generated with PR with one equal dollar to be placed into an advertising budget. Mr. Ogle only agreed to this because we put together a research report that showed the winners of the Editor’s Choice also were also consistently the largest buyer of advertising in their respective publications.
The following year we started placing video card advertisements six months prior to known video card product roundups. And guess what? We suddenly started winning Editor’s Choice awards. This example would and will be rejected and denounced strongly by all trade publication publishers and their editors, but you have to remember that advertising dollars pay for 80% of their editorial pages.
And when clients begin winning awards and selling more products and services, it is a very common knee-jerk reaction for the same companies to spend twice as much on advertising the next year. Everybody wins.
With that said, spending large amounts of money of advertising will never be successful for products that cannot compete against the competition with a standard list of features, benefits, price and strong real world performance. But for very products that are neck and neck with the competition, sometimes advertising dollars can make a big difference in who wins.
Front Page PR can help its clients research, plan and execute advertising campaigns via Google pay-per-click (PPC), digital display advertising networks, national or spot radio and TV media campaigns, business journals and trade publications as well as traditional print advertising in local newspapers and business journals.
Please contact Front Page PR for a free 30-minute consultation!
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