Advertising Strategy: How to Build an Advertising Strategy

An advertising strategy is the sum total of a company’s outreach efforts to build brand awareness and drive sales; these goals can include introducing new products, priming sales conversion rates, gaining social media subscribers, accessing a target market, and engaging existing customers.

Startups, small businesses, and large corporations build strategic ad campaigns using a blend of traditional marketing channels and digital marketing channels. Traditional advertising includes television ads, print ads, billboards, direct mail, and street teams. Digital advertising tactics include digital advertising, SEO-based content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing campaigns.

Instead of launching into ad buys based on instinct, successful companies begin their outreach by drafting detailed advertising strategies—which are usually contained in a formal marketing plan. An effective advertising strategy aligns a company’s marketing strategy with its business objectives. The objective is to optimize the company’s advertising budget so that every expenditure serves a common purpose.

An advertising strategy helps define every team member’s role in achieving company goals—whether that’s connecting with a target audience, luring new customers, or hitting new sales quotas. Most of the work will fall to a company’s marketing department, but everyone from the product team to support staff can play a role in helping the company reach its goals and boost its bottom line.

Use the following template to develop an advertising strategy tailored to your company’s specific needs.

1. 1. Assess the competition. A clear-minded view of the competition can help you better define the niche for your own product. It can also help you learn how competitors sell products. Do they emphasize online marketing or traditional advertising? How much do they charge? What does the landing page on their website look like? Such research provides a competitive analysis, allowing you to compare your new product to products already on the market. It also helps you assess what unique value proposition your company's product can offer customers.
2. 2. Conduct price research. Pricing research and case studies help a company find an acceptable price point for a new product. Gleaning price information from the current market will help you craft your own pricing strategy. Perhaps the market is hungry for a low-cost disruptor. Perhaps it’s ready for a prestige brand. Your research will guide your marketing tactics.
3. 3. Use customer research to create a buyer persona. A market research team can study your company’s existing customer base to identify demographic trends and customer pain points. You can then use this information to create a buyer persona for your target audience. A buyer persona is a fictional representative of the target customer base your company seeks to engage. Buyer personas feature an intersection of demographic information, including factors such as age, gender, race, income, family size and marital status, occupation and job title, political views, personal values, hobbies, and attitudes toward current trends. This information helps you tailor your company’s marketing to the potential customers who fall within your target market.
4. 4. Begin creating advertising content. Once your company has established its buyer persona, the content creation teams can craft inbound messaging language to appeal to that target audience.
5. 5. Choose your marketing channels. Digital marketing teams can launch a campaign to reach target customers on websites and search engines, and then direct users to a landing page on the company website—often an e-commerce page. Many of these digital marketing tools operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, where you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. If your budget allows, you may use traditional media sales teams to purchase short-term ad buys on TV and radio.
6. 6. Pursue influencer marketing efforts. Influencers can help you cut through the noise on social media platforms. Others take to blogging and provide in-depth written reviews. If you can forge partnerships with either professional influencers or simply influential people, you can reach audiences in ways that automated advertising algorithms cannot.
7. 7. Solicit testimonials and product reviews. A testimonial from an existing customer offers social proof of a product’s value and efficacy. Person-to-person referrals carry a lot of weight, as can reviews on a product website.
8. 8. Create organic traffic. A combination of content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) can bring customers to your site via organic reach. This is also known as pull marketing or inbound marketing. Examples of content marketing include maintaining a blog on your website and hosting a podcast. Through steady content marketing, you can drive organic traffic and develop relationships with both potential customers and existing customers. Over time, these relationships can lead to more sales.
9. 9. Link up with advertising professionals. To perfect your marketing strategy, consider enlisting the services of a product marketing manager or an ad agency. At the very least, use online advertising tools that can help you reach your target customers. Various services can help you establish and maintain an email list. Take advantage of online targeted ad services as well.
10. 10. Audit your results, and keep adjusting. Launching an advertising campaign is only the start. The next step is analyzing and refining your various types of advertising. You can try A/B testing, where you show different types of ad messages to similar customers and see which message leads to better click-through rates. Regularly convene with your marketing team to review campaign metrics. Then, engage in relevant retargeting to reach an even wider span of new customers. You will be assessing and refining your marketing for as long as you run your company.
11. 11. Tailor your ads to your audience. Using analytics tools from web advertising vendors, you can learn about your target audience based on their online behavior. Use geographic or behavioral characteristics of your engaged audiences and further craft campaigns to reach such people.

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