What Is Advertising? - A Primer For Beginners.
Advertising is the act of persuading someone to buy something.
It can come in many different forms, from TV commercials and print ads to social media posts, event sponsorships, or even sports stadium banners.
The best advertising targets customers who are struggling with a problem or need that your product or service can provide the answer for.
This article will cover some of the basics of how advertising works today and give you an understanding of how it relates to other areas like marketing and branding.
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One thing you’ll learn about throughout this article is that marketing and branding are inextricably linked with good advertising campaigns.
It's impossible to have a marketing plan without having a good set of branding principles first, and it's also impossible to have a great advertising campaign without having well-conceived marketing messaging.
In this article, I'll give you some ideas on how to start thinking about your brand and how much thought needs to go into creating an effective advertising strategy.
You’ll learn about the components of branding, and you'll see how they all work together with advertising campaigns that work.
And you’ll learn about the benefits of brand equity with each component working in tandem with other forms of messaging and content.
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I wrote this article after reading through a lot of blog posts, articles and marketing/advertising related books.
I also interviewed many people who are experts in this field including multigenerational marketing expert Robert Cialdini, advertising executive for global media company Hill Holliday (Bill Holding) and digital strategist and certified brand steward Brandezia.
What I've determined having read a lot of information is that the advertising industry is not doing enough to educate people about how it works.
It's full of great ideas and fantastic examples, but there's very little context or explanation needed to go from idea to execution.
Hopefully this article will give you a nice introduction to how it works, how you can start thinking about creating a great brand, and how advertising fits into the overall puzzle of marketing.
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Most advertising executives agree that the main purpose of advertising is to create what's called a "brand awareness."
There are two reasons for this. First, businesses need people to know about their products or services before they buy them.
People don't buy things they don't know exist, and if people are buying something, the main reason is because they've heard about it from sources like other people talking to them or seeing an ad for it on TV or in print.
The second reason is to drive revenue. If a lot of people are aware of your brand and use it, then you have more potential customers for your products or services.
Condition #1: Brand Awareness: If you want to create brand awareness, you need to have a great advertising campaign because it's the only way most people will find out about your brand in the first place.
This is why everything I'm about to tell you about advertising campaigns creates the situation where customers can see your ads on TV, in magazines and even on billboards. If a lot of people are seeing your ads, it increases the chances that they'll want to buy something from you.
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But if you just want to get brand awareness, why do you need great advertising campaigns? As I mentioned earlier, it's hard to get people interested in your product if they don't know it exists.
A lot of consumers are overwhelmed with choices and the amount of marketing messages they get every day.
Cable TV commercials, newspaper ads, digital ads on websites and even banner ads from other websites all help drive people to look at products or services that they never knew existed before.
That’s why it's imperative that any brand – big or small - has a good advertising campaign going for it.
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Another reason you need a good advertising campaign is to help with branding.
Many people are familiar with the term "brand awareness," but they're not familiar with the idea of brand equity. I'll be covering this later in this article, but branding and brand equity are what can make or break your entire business.
The good news is that there's a lot of information available on how to build up brand equity and make your business thrive.
To get a better idea of how branding works, take a look at the following diagram:
*It's important to note that branding isn't just about visual assets like logos or fonts used in campaigns. Branding is much more than just a logo or color scheme.
Brand equity is the overall value that your brand brings to the marketplace.
Brand equity can be worth billions to certain brands and can be devastating for others.
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You might have heard of some of the other components of branding like corporate reputation, customer loyalty, distribution channels and company culture, but you probably haven’t heard about brand asset management (BAM) before.
BAM and many other components are all part of what makes up a great brand.
You can learn more about asset management in this article: http://www.brandezia.com/assets/BrandAssetManagement.pdf
The point is that all these components work together to make up your brand.
Take a look at the following diagram to see how they all tie together:
The key takeaway here is that if you know what's important to each component (which I'll discuss in more detail later), then you can create an advertising campaign that helps build up your brand and its equity.
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So we've talked about the importance of building brand awareness, how branding and BAM work together and what components are important for branding – so what now?
It's time to start thinking about how you can use those components to create great advertising campaigns.
There are two great ways to create an advertising campaign that can build up brand awareness and help with branding.
First, you can create a stand-alone ad campaign. The second way is through a media buy.
Let's go over each one in detail:
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1) Stand-Alone Campaigns: Stand-alone advertising campaigns are the most straightforward way to get your company name out there and to start building up brand awareness.
These kinds of campaigns usually take the form of billboards, brochures, ads in newspapers, magazines or via TV spots.
They usually have a specific focus or call to action.
For example, if you're an online company that has a lot of other products you also sell, you could create an ad campaign for specific products and give the entire campaign a focus on launching them.
The key here is to make sure your advertisements are targeted towards people who are probably interested in that particular product or service.
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2) Media Buys: One of the biggest difficulties great advertising agencies face is matching ads to people.
It's hard to spend money on advertising if the results don't come close to what was hoped for (a huge percentage of all media spends don't even come close to recouping their costs).
Conclusion: The best way to advertise your product is for it to be featured in media within the industry. This will drive awareness and over the long-term, build brand equity to drive monetary value.
Easier said than done. How do you find the money?
• Start with executive sponsorship because it's easier to make a case that this is important, and it's less risky than asking for customers' money.
• If there is still resistance, ask for only a portion of what you would be able to spend on program promotion and marketing (for example, if your budget is $10 million, then haggle down to $1 million).