It's 2018, and on the Internet there is still the same number of uninformative, outwardly unappealing and insufficiently understandable sites for ordinary users. But that would be half the trouble. Sometimes entrepreneurs promoting their company simply create a website and are not interested in whether it benefits anyone.
The Internet is really a leader in the speed of information transfer, including advertising messages. However, is it really necessary for your company to advertise on the Internet, or can you do with simple flyers?
It's not enough just to figure out which information transfer tool is right for you. It is worth considering the development of awareness of your target audience. It is important to constantly work to increase interest in your company, which will lead to the main goal - to increase sales. The key activity for you is advertising analysis and media planning.
Media planning - what is it?
It is the development of an effective marketing strategy that will give an understanding of what kind of advertising on the Internet will suit your company, its goals and audience. In order to establish an effective workflow, it is worth analyzing the potential audience, choosing the type of advertising on its basis, planning the process of its demonstration and developing a detailed strategy to achieve your goals. This process is called media planning (analysis of advertising and its impact on the audience).
Organization of an advertising campaign
First you need to familiarize yourself with the basics of organizing an advertising campaign. Analysis of contextual advertising of competitors is the best assistant in this matter, because it will give answers to many questions and open pitfalls that you can meet in your project. In the absence of experience in organizing such campaigns, you should contact a specialized agency that will conduct the necessary budget calculations and develop a strategy to reduce all kinds of risks.
Work on the plan
If you are confident in your abilities, pay attention to the main aspects of an effective media plan:
- Determining the target audience. To get started, clearly articulate the idea of who you will sell the product or services to. Based on the analysis of contextual advertising of other sites, you can calculate the necessary actions to create an effective message to potential customers.
- The choice of the type of advertising, its distribution channel, the timing and cost of the advertising campaign is of undoubted importance. In addition, based on the analysis of the advertising market, the potential advertising effectiveness is calculated.
- Calculation of the budget. The cost of advertising varies. The strategy is developed on the basis of many factors, the key of which is not only the final result, but also the material capabilities of the advertising campaign.
- Definition of goals. An important step is to determine the desired advertising results. Depending on the chosen goal, certain tools are used that are most often mixed in the modern advertising market. This is considered the most effective means to achieve certain goals. The objectives of analyzing advertising and conducting all media planning can be to draw attention to the action or the company as a whole, increase website traffic, launch a new product on the market, and much more. The ultimate goal is one - to promote your product or service to increase sales.
Features of online advertising
Modern online advertising is particularly popular and relative budget. They resort to it, in particular, due to the high speed of transmission of advertising messages to the target audience and feedback. In the advertising market, this type occupies a stable place and is characterized by sustainable development. Its features allow you to achieve an instant response of potential consumers along with a narrow target orientation (exactly to the target group). Due to the ability to quickly respond to messages for the target audience, online advertising is distinguished by the ability to adjust the development strategy, and also makes it very easy to analyze contextual advertising.
Choosing an Ad Type
The choice of the type of advertising as a tool for a future advertising campaign should be approached with all seriousness, because it is from the channel of message transmission to the target groups that the future performance of the company and its profit will depend. Company promotion methods are also related to financial opportunities. Based on these two factors, an advertising budget is formed. When forming it, it is worthwhile to rely on approximate recommended shares: the share of the budget for promotional events for industrial goods should be no more than 15% and 35% for other types of goods.
In order to better prepare for a future advertising campaign, you can use data and effective tools from previous campaigns, as well as statistical data and the results of marketing research on the advertising market. Despite the fact that for the effectiveness of the promotion you need several factors that will lead to success, an important role is played by the message to the target audience. What does an effective advertising message look like?
Signs of effective communication
Any advertising message is directed to a specific target group and includes several components, among which the most important are elemental (heading, slogan, text itself, illustration and address data) and compositional (gives zest to any text and its combination with other message details).
An analysis of competitors' ads will become a great assistant in creating an advertising message, which will allow us to determine the right method for creating contextual advertising based on the image we have formed and the success of a company. However, do not forget about the uniqueness of your message.
An effective advertising message is distinguished by the fact that it attracts attention. Among the components that distinguish effective advertising text, it is worth highlighting such features: the intensity and readability of the text, the originality and brightness of the text, the dynamism and frequent periodic broadcasting of the text.
Analysis of the advertising message
An important factor in the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is a properly formed advertising message. It should correspond to the image under which your company is positioning itself, as well as the characteristics of your target audience. Just as before the introduction of advertising on the market, it is worth assessing the possible risks and features of the impact of your message on the audience, also after the end of the campaign, it is important to evaluate its real effectiveness. How to conduct such an analysis of the effectiveness of advertising?
- Analyze communications (estimate the number of contacts established).
- Calculate economic efficiency (calculate the company's profit).
- Assess the quality characteristics - to identify the conformity of the characteristics of the target audience to the product, company image and other characteristics.
Analysis of the economic part
To assess the economic part, there are five basic rules that industry experts use. They are very simple, but require a special relationship:
- Economic efficiency. Do not forget that all advertising costs must be profitable. It is calculated using a special ROI formula. ROI = (Revenue (before) * Profitability - Revenue (after) * Profitability) / Advertising costs. Here revenue (before) is sales before the introduction of advertising. Revenue (after) - sales after the introduction of advertising support. Profitability - the percentage of profit from a unit of goods sold. It is calculated as "Profitability = (Product price - product cost) / product price". Advertising costs - the budget allocated and spent on the promotion of goods.
- The rule of accuracy and measurement sequence; Here it is important to determine the criteria by which you will evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising (sales growth or increase in sales of goods through an advertising message, etc.).
- Conversion rule. Keep track of the effectiveness of the information transmission channel, that is, an advertising message should increase the number of calls, and calls should be converted into sales. If this does not happen or does not happen enough, the message channel is inefficient;
- the best-worst principle; Any effective example of advertising analysis is based on this principle. Examine both negative and positive results in order to choose the best data channels and the best forms of advertising messages in the future.
- The rule of honest analysis of advertising. Never embellish work results for your superiors. To be honest in this part of the evaluation means to be more successful with each new project.
Darling doesn't mean better
Any advertising costs should pay off, that is, bring growth or (at least) preservation of profit with an increase in sales. Advertising campaigns that result in a negative financial result are not effective. Each time, the first step is to calculate the net financial result, that is, look at the profit minus advertising costs and compare it with the period without advertising.
Interestingly, an analysis of the use of advertising showed such statistics: 80% of prestigious advertising does not give the effect of increasing profits. Why do companies go to these costs? Their main priority is that they prevent losses that will be incurred due to the loss of image, moreover, maintaining market status and level of competitiveness.
About communicative effectiveness
Communicative effectiveness is also an implicit indicator that is difficult to track by observation. To measure this type of impact of advertising, special testing or surveys are used, most often carried out in two stages: initial or pre-testing (conducted before the introduction of the advertising campaign) and subsequent or post-testing (conducted after the advertising campaign). Sometimes an intermediate milestone is added - ongoing testing, which helps to correct the inaccuracies and errors during the work, right during the advertising campaign.
Preliminary testing guarantees less chance of making mistakes when developing an advertising campaign. Such testing is especially important for high-value stocks where the profitability and reliability of each event is important. The first stage of checking communicative effectiveness makes it possible to verify the following indicators:
- In choosing the target audience and niche in the market.
- The correct choice of form and content of the advertising message regarding the formed audience.
- The adequacy of the choice of channels for transmitting advertising messages and tools for disseminating information.
The final and intermediate stages of testing are carried out with the main purpose of assessing the quality of assimilation of information in an advertising message, as well as to analyze the response of consumers to advertising and even feedback. The results of the two final stages of such testing give answers to questions about recognizability, memorability, persuasiveness of advertising and its impact on consumer behavior.
About outdoor advertising
For comparison, it is worth paying attention to the more traditional outdoor advertising (on banners, vehicles and buildings). In the modern advertising market, this type of message for the potential consumer is considered the most effective for increasing sales, it is characterized by a high level of effectiveness and increasing customer interest. However, it is outdoor advertising that has the greatest difficulty in analyzing its effectiveness.
If the effectiveness of online advertising in the form of various advertising messages can be investigated and tracked online, then the analysis of outdoor advertising can be carried out, for example, in the format of a survey of the target audience outside the retail outlets, with the use of additional funds for research.
Most often, effectiveness is evaluated not far from advertising structures in the form of surveys, which are a measure of the awareness of the audience as a whole and target groups in particular according to certain parameters:
- It monitors the overall reach of the audience who had real contact with external messages, i.e. how many people saw the advertisement;
- explores the coverage of the audience who understood the information (remembering the name of the product or company);
- estimated the size of the audience that really remembered the entire message as a whole, with the brand and name of the product.