The new year is a time when many businesses put their latest advertising strategies to work. After the difficulties of 2020 planning for the uncertainty of the coming year is more important than ever. Developing your 2021 advertising strategy is the best way to increase your sales and revenue for the coming year.
Objective
A successful advertising strategy starts with a clear objective. What is it that we want our target audience to do? If we are looking to increase sales, then a clear understanding of the sales process or cycle for our business is necessary. The process for every business is different. You need to be clear on how your prospects learn about you, engage with you and then convert.
The path to conversion is critical to your advertising strategy. How a person executes an online purchase of a ten-dollar toy is very different from how a business purchases a hundred-thousand-dollar software platform. Awareness of the products could come from similar advertising tactics, such as a web banner. However, the engagement and consideration phase of the purchases will be quite different. The ten-dollar purchase could be completed on a single web visit while the software purchase might take months and dozens of touch points.
Client Avatar
With a firm grasp on the conversion process thoroughly knowing your target audience is the next critical step in creating a successful advertising strategy. The better you can describe your target audience the more easily you can build and direct messaging to resonate with them. Your goal is to construct a client avatar – a profile of your ideal customer. This is less of a creative process and more of a discovery effort. It involves learning all of the traits held in common by your best consumers. It will go beyond age, gender and geographic location and could include things like job title, interests etc. Depending on your product or service each avatar will be different, but the goal is to have a complete picture of the client. It makes targeting much easier.
Advertising Budget
Far too often businesses engage in strategy development without a clear picture of their advertising budget. Failure to budget responsibly can lead to wasted or inefficient spend. The media you choose should be directly tied to your advertising funds. If you don’t have sufficient money to properly use a media outlet to its’ best advantage, then you should not use it. Your budget must allow you to get both reach and frequency with your target audience. If your budget is small, start with a single well-chosen media and grow from there.
Media
Think about media and how it will feed your sales process. The business selling a ten-dollar toy will have many less touchpoints than a business selling expensive software. The toy seller may only need to advertise on social media to a parent of young children to get plenty of visitors to their e-comm site. The software company may need to reach CTO’s or CIO’s in very targeted media, then use an email drip campaign, retargeting and other outreach to schedule a demonstration. The software company will need to consider how to use media to nurture interest, increase engagement and then move to the sale. In each case the advertiser uses their knowledge of the sales process to implement the right media at the right time.
Measurement
As soon as the media begins running the process of measurement begins. Every media plan must have KPI’s, the Key Performing Indicators that demonstrate progress towards your goal or objective. KPI’s are determined in advance. If this is not the first advertising campaign, then use KPI’s from your previous campaigns as benchmarks for improvement. Measurement is how you learn what works and what does not. Sometimes, a single step or communication in the process hurts results. Often, there is an easy fix. Careful measurement will identify that weak link.
Develop Your 2021 Advertising Strategy
Like many business operations advertising works best when process driven. Think of your advertising strategy as a series of steps. We first need to have an objective and a plan for getting our prospect to take that action. A clear picture of our prospect helps us create effective messaging and deliver it to the right target at the right time. A budget will let us know what media we can use and the scale at which it can be implemented. Media is then selected based on our budget, target and ability to move the prospect through the sales funnel. We measure to learn what works and what needs optimization.
Each step leads to another and they progress in sequence until you have a complete advertising strategy. Why not develop your 2021 advertising strategy now?
