Creating and distributing advertising is one of the most important things you can do as a business. It does the direct job of telling potential customers about a specific product, and at the same time helps to build your brand: good marketing can create a seed of brand recognition that pays off in future even if it doesn’t drive a customer to purchase the product you’re advertising there and then.
If you want to achieve the desired effect, you need to take care with your advertising: if it’s poorly considered it could undermine your brand or fail to communicate the virtues and values of the product to your customers. Today we’re taking a look at some of the things you need to think about if you want to release advertising that works.
The Creative Side
How your advert looks and what it says are perhaps the most important things about good advertising. You need images and copy that clearly communicate the key details about the product you’re selling (what it does, and why your customers should want it), that are also consistent with your brand values. If your customers think of you as a luxury brand, your products and services as status symbols worth investing in, then focusing your advertising on the value for money a new product provides might undermine your brand significantly!
Creative testing helps to take the guesswork out of this. A market research company can help you understand the effect your adverts could have on potential customers, and quantify that, to help you make decisions about whether your plans are well chosen and are likely to be successful.
Targeting Your Adverts
Good targeting is, if anything more important than the creative elements of your marketing. If you make good adverts but target them poorly so your customers don’t see them, they won’t stimulate any sales or benefit your brand!
Good targeting requires data: you need to know who your customers are, what stimulates them to spend their money, where they live and where they spend their time online. Again, market research can help you here, by building a detailed profile of some of your most detailed audience segments so you know how to appeal to them, and where to put your adverts to reach them persuasively.
Interaction
These two areas are not (or shouldn’t be) isolated from each other. Targeting data should feed back into your creative process so that adverts can be written specifically for where they will be placed, taking advantage of both the specific formatting and the conventions of the platform the ads are intended for. For example, Twitter and Instagram are both app-based social media platforms, by Instagram is focused on images, so picture heavy adverts will thrive there, whereas Twitter privileges words, memes and playful jokes, and an advert that takes account of that will see more conversions and sales.