What are steps in developing advertising program?

Every business needs an advertising plan. Think of it as your guide to promoting your business. Your plan will tell you who your targets are, how to reach them – and most importantly, it will point out what you're failing to do. This allows you to correct your course and improve your business's marketing, which leads to increasing sales.

Time to get started planning an ad campaign.

How to Create an Advertising Plan

Once you go through these steps the first time, you'll have the groundwork already laid out for subsequent campaigns. Thus, each new campaign will be easier to plan out.

1. Start with Your Goal

Simply put: what do you want your advertising plan to accomplish? Are you trying to attract new customers or are you trying to encourage previous customers to come visit? The best goals are specific: what kind of increase in customer traffic are you looking for and in what time period?

2. Develop Your Budget

Know how to build an advertising plan to fit your budget. How much are you willing to spend on promoting your business? If you have some ideas already, how much will these ideas cost to implement?

3. Define Your Audience

When you're focused on increasing sales, it helps to figure out who's most likely to buy your product or service. What is your target demographic? Are you catering to affluent seniors or teenagers who are finding money beneath couch cushions?

4. Determine What Products or Services You'll Feature

The more specific you can be, the better. That's why fast food chains will advertise particular products instead of a general advertisement that says "come eat here." Are you launching a new product you want to feature or are you offering a discount on an old one? What are you highlighting?

5. Complete a SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. What is your business's core competency? What do you do well that provides you with an advantage? If you sell clothing, and winter is around the corner, that's an opportunity to launch new winter gear. Likewise, what are your competitors doing that might hinder your business?

6. Use the SWOT to Articulate Your Key Differentiators

When you're promoting your business, you want to focus on what makes you different from your competition. Look at your competitors and use your SWOT analysis to find the mismatches – do you offer lower prices? Better products? You'll want to exploit those differentiators in your advertising plan.

7. Build Your Advertising Plan

You need to answer three questions: what, when, and where. What type of advertisements are you going to run? When are you going to run them? And where are they going to appear? Are you putting up a billboard in a mall for all of September or running a radio campaign throughout the holiday season? Running display ads on the web? It all comes down to a great advertising strategy!

8. Consider Other Low-Cost Methods

The best advertising is word of mouth – and few things are capable of generating word of mouth like a well-run social media campaign. What kind of social media campaign can your business run? Could you sponsor a local event or run a contest of some kind? Make a list of low-cost actions your business can take that naturally support your advertising plan.

9. Launch Your Advertising

An advertising plan won't help in promoting your business if no one follows through. Now it's time to take all of your ideas and put them in action. Create the social media campaign, produce the television spot, and broadcast the radio commercial.

Keep everything consistent, no matter the medium or channel. Consistency is crucial when running a multi-faceted campaign. Be consistent in both messaging and brand. It's one thing to use the same logo and colors. But the messaging itself should be consistent as well. Billboard copy should mirror social messaging copy, which should be the same as any radio or television ads, which should mimic what's on your website's homepage.

10. Analyze Results

The last step in developing an advertising strategy is arguably the most important: The results! Did you do what you set out to do?

This is likely the first of many advertising campaigns for your business – so pay close attention to the results. Did you reach the goals defined in step one? If so, what worked best? If not, why not? For your next advertising plan, go back to step one and do it again – but keep these results in mind.

Bringing it All Together

If this was your first ad campaign, it was probably a lot of work going through each step in detail. But guess what? Now that you've done it once, the second, third, and hundredth times will be easier and easier. Since you've taken note of what worked and what didn't, every subsequent campaign will be that much more successful. Learn from your mistakes and double down on the successes. As George Santayana so eloquently put it:

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Want additional steps? Sign up for our blog and receive fresh marketing advice throughout each month.

Have you ever seen any advertising program? Yes, you have seen. You have seen it on TV, between youtube videos, social media etc.

It only takes 5 to 10 seconds to see it but do you know what is an advertising program and how much time, money, energy, and effort it takes to design?

Advertising is a part of promotion or communication. After making a good product or service we have to communicate our product or service’s quality and benefits with customer to aware them.

So here I will discuss all about the advertising program, and that will help you to design your advertising programs, and by implementing them you can grow your business.

What did I get to learn from here?

After creating a good product and service, then the marketer’s next duty is to communicate that product’s benefit and value to potential consumers or general people.

And one of the communication channel is an advertising program, through advertising, we can communicate with people. Don’t know about positioning? Check our blog.

Advertising plays an important role in communicating effectively with people and also building a strong brand.

Before designing an advertisement program you have to know about your target audience.

After that, you have to follow five major processes to develop an advertising program.

Which is also known as the five ‘Ms’ of marketing.

These are, selecting the advertising objective, deciding on advertising budget, developing the advertising campaign, choosing media and evaluating advertising effectiveness.

Selecting the Advertising Objectives (Mission) for Advertising Program:

To selecting effective objectives we have to know clearly about our target market, and brand positioning strategy.

Advertising objectives is, what we have to communicate with people. So it can only decide when we know, about our customers.  

We can create four types of advertising program according to our agenda. These are informative, persuasive, reminder and reinforcement

Informative advertising –

This process we choose when our product or service is new and we want to inform people about our new product.

We can also use it when we developed a new feature on our existing product. It can be used to create brand awareness.

Persuasive advertising –

This advertising we can use to convince people that our product is the best in the market and you can buy it without any hesitation.

And here we can also make comparative advertising, we compare our product with a competitor’s product and tell people about our speciality.

Reminder advertising –

In this type of advertising, we can remind people about our product or service again and again, so that they can purchase repeatedly.

Reinforcement advertising –

This type of advertising is, especially for our current purchasers. When they purchase we have to convince them that you have made a good choice by buying our product.

If the brand is old, which has been present in the market for many years then the company’s objective should be influencing people to use more by reminder advertising.

And if the company is a newcomer then the company’s objectives should be to inform people about their brand through informative advertising.

Deciding on Advertising Budget (Money) for Advertising program:

How much to spend on advertising? It is very important for a company to find this answer.

Because spending on advertising is a current expense for the company at the same time spending is also important to building a brand.

So we have to decide the budget by considering these factors:-

Stage in the product life cycle –

If a company launches a new product then they have to spend more on advertising to aware people of the brand.

If the brand is well established then they don’t have spent more on advertising to inform people.

They can spend a little amount of money to remind people to repurchase their products.

Market share and consumer base –

If a brand is a newcomer then also they have to spend more on advertising to gain market share by increasing market size.

But an older brand spent less because they already have a market share. They spent only to maintain market share.

Competition –

Where competition is more than Companies have to spend more on advertising to sustain and to be in people’s minds.       

Advertising frequency –

How many times a company needs to show its advertising? According to that, they have to spend on advertising.

Product substitutability –

The brand that has less differentiate products, that means all brands who present in the market have same type of products then they have to spend more on advertising.

Developing the Advertising Campaign (Message) for Advertising Program:

It has three steps: message generation and evaluation, creative development and execution, and social responsibility review.

Message Generation and Evaluation:

To generate an effective message we have to find an idea which connects customer emotionally to the brand and that creates a different image of our brand.

We have to see all the factors, what the brand wants to say, where it wants to position itself, who is the target market, and what is the objectives.

We have to consider all the factors and according to that, we have to design a message.

Creative Development and Execution:

Creative development means how creatively a company says its messages.

There are many mediums available to communicate a message and every medium has its advantages and disadvantages.

 We can communicate our message through social media, website, Television ads, Print ads, radio ads, etc.

In today’s world social media and websites play an important role to communicate.

In television ads, we can communicate our product’s attributes and the benefits dramatically.

Print media like magazines and newspapers are also effective for the brand but the pictures, headlines, and copy must be engaging.

In the radio media, the spoke person plays an important role.

social responsibility review:

We have to make advertising messages by staying in a boundary between social and legal norms.

We don’t have to over-promise to customers, we have to always promise what we should give.  

Choosing Media (Media) for Advertising Program:

After designing a good message next we have to select a media to carry this message. There are various steps to choose cost-effective media, these are:

Reach, Frequency, and Impact:

We have to select media by our desired reach, frequency, and impact. Reach means, to how many people can see our message.

Frequency means, how many time our message reach to a person. Impact means how our message impact on those people.

When we launch a new product then reach is very important for the brand.

And if the competition is high then that time we have to increase our frequency also to maintain a position.

Choosing Among Major Media Types:

We have to choose the media according to our target audience and to define through which media we can reach our audience effectively in a low coast.

Some major media are newspapers, television, social media, direct mail, radio, magazines, brochures, telephone.

These are some major media that carry our message to the customers. But all the media have some advantages and disadvantages.

Like if we choose the newspaper then it is very good to capture the local market and people also believe it but its lifetime is very short.

If we choose television then we can present our message more dramatically but that will cost us a high.

By telephone, we can give customers a personal touch but it is also a high coast.

Today’s social media are very effective to communicate. By this, we can reach more people and it will be cheaper for us.

 Some popular advertising options are available like we can make our brand beautiful billboard and placed it in a public place.

 We can print our branding in public places where most of our customers spend their time. Like in a washroom, and place a brand name in different product’s body.

 We can place our product or brand name in a popular movie by giving a small amount.

Selecting Specific Media Vehicles:

The platform through which a company shares its message to the customer is called media vehicles. To choose a good media vehicle is very crucial.

Suppose you have a digital marketing agency, you do marketing for startups. Then you have to choose your media vehicle according to the target market.

We have to choose a platform where our customer choose their time must.

You have to choose a media vehicle for your digital marketing agency as an online, and social media platform rather than radio or television.

Selecting Media Timing And Allocation:   

At the time of choosing media vehicles, we also have to choose the timing.

If our business is seasonal, and our product’s sales occur more in January to April then we have to spend more on advertising in that season.  

How to Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness (Measurements):

Just as to develop a message and a channel is important, the measurement of advertising effectiveness is also important.

We have to measure how our advertising program impacts on our target audience by indirectly questioning them.

Whenever we run an ad campaign then we have to measure that’s effect by asking the target audience about that advertising.

Like whether they recognize or recall our message or not, how many times they saw our ads, and what point they recall from it.

And most important we have to measure how many products they buy before and after that advertising.

Conclusion

If you have a small business, then you can communicate your product and services’s benefits through online media like website, social media etc.

If you don’t want to do it yourself then you can hire a digital marketing agency like lapaas.com.

And if you want to do it your self then first you have to communicate your audience about your product or services to aware them about your business by using informative advertising.

After a certain time, you have to convince peoples to buy or trail your product. And then you have to remind the buyers to repurchase the product by Reminder advertising.

FAQs

What is an advertising program?

After developing a good product and service, we have to communicate that value or our product or service benefits to consumers.
That means we have to tell about our products to customers. And that communication process is called an advertising program.

How to develop an advertising program?

To develop an effective advertising program we have to first decide what we want to say, after that, we have to decide how can we say that message, by creatively shaped.
Then we have to select effective media channels who carry our message to customers. Then we have to measure the result of that advertising.