The Components of a Good Advertising Campaign

Good advertising is critical to the success of any organization. Your marketing department needs to have a comprehensive grasp on your marketplace and everything that affects your company’s ability to be competitive. When you are putting together a good marketing campaign, there are four components that you must include:

• Market Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Media Analysis
• Timeline

When these four components come together in perfect harmony, then your advertising campaign has a chance at being successful. If you neglect to include any of these elements, or you are not comprehensive in your approach, then your advertising results will suffer.

– Market Analysis

A market analysis is how you develop an understanding of your target audience. Your product was designed with a target audience in mind. That demographic is the starting point for developing the profile of the target audience that you will use to create your advertising campaign.

But your initial design intentions are not the only element that goes into your market analysis. You also need to create focus groups and get their opinions on your product as well. This kind of market research will allow you to uncover target demographics that you may have never considered. When you expand your potential buying audience, you are also expanding your potential revenue.

– Competitive Analysis

As the old saying goes, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. You should never launch an advertising campaign without first understanding everything there is to know about the competitor’s product. Remember that your potential customers will be comparing your product to the competition’s as they see your advertising. The only way you can separate your product from the competition’s is by knowing everything there is to know about their product.

A competitive analysis includes the competition’s distribution methods, the features on their products, the target audience, the product warranty and any other information that is pertinent to helping you to set your product apart. When your advertising comes out, you need to tell customers why they should buy your product over that of the competition.

– Media Analysis

If your target audience is ages 64 to 80, then they may not be too receptive to Internet marketing. That particular audience may prefer radio or newspaper advertising. But how to you know which radio stations and which newspapers to choose? When you have established your target audience, then you need to do more market research to determine the best ways to reach that audience.

– Timeline

A good advertising campaign is launched on a specific date and it is ended on a specific date. The reason that you end an advertising campaign by a specific date is so you can develop a new campaign that utilizes what you learned in the first campaign to sell more product and reach more potential buyers.

Your timeline will also have milestones that you will use as ways of determining how the actual results compare to the projections. Milestone comparisons are extremely important in determining if the advertising campaign should remain on the same track, or if changes need to be made.