Advertising and Marketing
As a company owner, you’re probably scrambling to find the perfect advertising strategy to promote your brand. While there are many channels and methods available for you to smoothly carry out your campaign, there must be one thing that’s keeping you from acting out right away: your advertising budget. Because of this, it’s important to be wise when choosing the right marketing strategy to avoid wasting any valuable resources.
The Top Advertising and Marketing Examples to Help Boost Your Campaign
Surprisingly, there are a lot of companies that spend thousands and millions of dollars on poor, ineffective ads, despite their extreme efforts to make a proper marketing plan.
Where did they go wrong?
Building an advertising campaign involves a thorough process of trial and error. While there’s no guarantee of achieving success over night, you can still work on developing the right marketing strategy to suit the business you run. To make the most out of your company’s advertising budget, consider the following advertising and marketing examples:
1. Product Demos
One good marketing goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of a given product or service for consumers to see. While TV commercials and advertising flyers already do a good job with presenting these benefits, there’s nothing like seeing a given product in action. Demonstrating products is pretty common inside stores and shopping malls, as it allows store employees to interact directly with customers. This method can help you carry your message across by providing ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ of why your products are as good as you say they are.
However, keep in mind that product demos are only effective if they are conducted at the right time and in front of the right audience.
2. Good Brand Image
A good brand image plays a significant role in marketing for a number of reasons.
For one, strong branding represents the identity of a given brand. Companies that present themselves as a trustworthy business that produces high-quality goods are likely to draw in the most attention. This can be achieved through the right marketing strategies. But building a good brand image does not happen over night. It’s a grueling process that requires patience, determination, and commitment. The key is to develop a reputation that customers are likely to be attracted to.
One common example for this is how retailers take a customer-friendly approach with the way they sell their products or services. In an attempt to create an appealing brand image, retailers strive to establish a reputation for offering the lowest prices for their products, along with the best service in the market.
3. Low-Cost Print or Digital Media
Fortunately, for small businesses that are on a strict budget, advertising doesn’t always need to cost you a large sum of money. There are many alternatives that can deliver a relatively significant impact in the marketing world, without forcing you to break the bank.
Aside from simple marketing flyers, you can start various digital marketing campaigns using different channels, such as TV, radio, and online marketing. Not only do local radio stations and TV networks charge reasonable prices for their services, but they also help you deliver a clearer message to a targeted audience. If you’re lucky, your community may have one of those “penny-saver” publications that are delivered to a small group of individuals for free. This ensures you reach out to the customers who may benefit from your services.
4. Internet Marketing
The internet is a vast universe that marketers can take advantage of. Many marketing campaigns are conducted online due to its high response rate. Considering how we basically spend most of our time online, it’s not hard to see why.
Email marketing and social media marketing are just some examples of smart internet marketing campaigns. Here, marketers are given the opportunity to interact with potential buyers in the virtual world through blogs, articles, videos, and emails. But remember, internet marketing is about creating content that will interest consumers and give them something to talk about. It must be appealing, thought-provoking, and worth remembering to garner effective results.
5. Powerful Headlines
The truth is, as consumers, we encounter so many advertisements each day that we no longer pay attention to every single one of them. Sure, we may have scanned through a few, but we hardly ever devote our time to actually reading what it has to offer. This is why you need to make sure that your advertisements are both captivating and engaging enough to communicate effectively with its audience.
There’s no denying how compelling headlines have the ability to grab a person’s attention almost immediately. These headlines can be newsworthy, beneficial or specific. The main objective of creating a powerful headline is to capture an individual’s undivided attention and encourage an interaction of any form. Take note, you only have a few seconds to make an impression before a person gets distracted by something else, so you need to make the time granted to you count.
6. Call To Action
It’s not enough to just inform potential customers what your company has to offer, as you must create a sense of urgency that will force them to act immediately.
You can take different approaches with your call to action. For example, you can ask customers to click on your ad, pay for your service, order your product or sign up for a weekly or monthly subscription. It needs to be exciting and persuasive enough to prompt an immediate response.
7. Feedback or Testimonials
These days, people have grown more and more concerned over the quality and credibility of company offerings, especially when transactions are done online. Because of this, it is important to develop trust in your business. This is usually done by showing past experiences that former and current customers may have had with you through the use of testimonies and feedback. Today, most customers rely on online reviews when shopping. That’s because we tend to trust other customers and their respective opinions about a company.
8. Irresistible Bargains and Benefits
Although explaining the features of your product or service is a great way to attract customers, showing how they may benefit from it is really what it’s all about.
Clients are always curious about a how a given product works. A product demo may be fitting, but you also need to explain why it is something that a customer needs. For example, there are many companies that sell microwaves apart from yours, so why should a buyer purchase specifically from you? To convince customers that you’re the best choice out of every option they have, you can make a list of features that your product does and how customers may benefit from it. The secret is to emphasize special features that other brands fail to offer. You may also provide special offers and discounts to persuade customers even more.
9. Advertorials
An advertorial is a type of ad that comes in the form of a news article.
These days, advertisements have become pretty predictable in form. So in attempt to defy the norms of advertising, there are some companies that go as far as making an advertisement that imitates the standard editorial. A popular example of this ran in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. The headline “What Everybody Ought to Know About This Stock and Bond Business” was followed by a 6,540-word article, which generated around 10,000 inquiries in a single day!
5 Tips to Achieve the Perfect Marketing Strategy
Business owners have to be realistic with their advertising campaigns. Naturally, they would seek for effective, low-cost solutions that will help them obtain the best results. But forming the right marketing strategy can be a tricky process, which is why it is important to look into every aspect of your campaign intently. Given your need to optimize your marketing efforts, here are some useful tips that can be of help to you and your team:
- Know your target audience. Who are your target consumers? Are they a part of a particular age group, income level or location? Although it would be nice to think that anyone could benefit from your products, focusing on a targeted group of individuals will help you determine the direction of your marketing campaign. After all, you wouldn’t want to end up with nothing but wasted efforts and resources. By studying the buying behavior of your customers, you can easily identify the right strategies to raise brand awareness and generate better sales.
- Set a budget. Advertising does not come cheap. While there may be marketing strategies that are more cost-efficient than others, it will still cost you some amount. This is why it is important to set aside a budget for whatever marketing campaign you wish to launch. For example, commercial advertisements that feature Hollywood celebrities come with a hefty price tag. But if the social impact is what you’re aiming for with this campaign, then you need to make sure your company can afford it. Refrain from developing campaigns that are too expensive and unreasonable to commit to.
- Brand well. Can your customers instantly recognize your ad from just looking at its colors, typeface, imagery or logo design? If this question seems rather absurd and difficult for you to understand, then take a look at how other brands have been marketing themselves. A good brand strategy is essential in marketing, as it helps increase brand recognition. If you think about it, recognition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to loyalty. If buyers recognize your brand while shopping online or at a store, they are more likely to purchase from you rather than another brand they have never heard of.
- Use the right resources. Apart from creating your website, using various social media networks to promote your brand is a great way to reach a wider audience. However, you need to make sure to use these channels wisely. Creating content that optimizes website traffic would be an economical choice, but you may also take advantage of services like Google AdWords and Bing Ads if you have the budget for it. It won’t make sense to create expensive business magazines if you can’t afford it, so it would be best to consider other available alternatives.
- Measure and track outcomes. Most businesses make the mistake of launching a marketing campaign without sticking around to analyze its results. You see, it’s always a hit or miss in the industry, despite your efforts to make it as powerful as possible. With that being said, you may want to measure and track each strategy to see what was done right and what could still be improved. To avoid wasting too much of your resources on a failed ad, you may want to think about testing and experimenting these strategies out at a smaller volume first.
A lot of companies struggle to create an eye-catching ad that will help them stand out from the competition. But it’s important to remember that a good ad doesn’t always need to cost much, as its impact would depend on the approach you take and the manner of which it is conducted. So instead of investing on the wrong strategies, do your homework first. With the right understanding of your target customers, you’re bound to attract more leads to your business in no time.