At Carbon we have a simple rule of three for a campaign to be effective…
- Offer – what is the great offer to your customers
- Reach – how far can your advertising reach extend
- Brand – developing a creative brand differentiator
Get all these right and your campaign is destined for greatness.
1. Research – defining your offer
Long before the creative is considered it’s important to perform a little research to determine your audience, their wants, needs and desires, what we can offer them (your offer) and how we can reach them (your advertising reach). Research can take many forms, for a large campaign we could commission a dedicated market research agency to provide insight, for a small campaign research could be as simple as a guided questionnaire to current customers.
2. Budgeting – understanding your reach
Advertising can quickly get expensive, especially if we consider high profile media such as outdoor, radio and TV so an understanding of the budget available right at the start of the project can help guide the media buying.
3. Objectives and measurement criteria
It’s critical for us to know the goals for a particular advertising project and they should be be documented ahead of time. While ambitious plans are good, it’s also important to understand what constitutes a realistic advertising campaign for your product, service or organisation. In terms of measurement, increased sales of a product or service are an obvious method, less tangible objectives like brand awareness are much hard to quantify and may require follow up research.
4. Media buying and placement
Outdoor media and press advertising are effective on consumer audiences, as are TV, radio station. Digital advertising such as Facebook, Twitter, Google PPC and web banner advertising can yield great measureable results. If your organisation has a short geographic reach then we’d look at more localised campaigns.
5. Campaign creative – your brand differentiator
This is where the magic happens, we’ll design a compelling advertising campaign that delivers on all the research, budgeting, brief, objectives and media buying plans to give the best creative bang for bucks (as our American friends would surely say!). We go through our standard set of creative processes taking all of the above into consideration.
6. Campaign go-live
So our campaign power of three strategy is all set to go. Firstly our great product or service offer, secondly our optimum advertising reach and thirdly our outstanding brand creative. It’s time to hit the launch button, but there is one last thing we like to check, are all your business resources in place to capitalise on the campaign, product stock, sales reps primed etc.
7. Evaluation and post campaign measurement
Depending on the advertising creative and media used, how we evaluate it can vary. If the advert included a coupon or voucher code, whether printed or digital, we can simply count how many customers used the coupon.
For other advertising, we may have to benchmark sales before, during and after your advertising campaign. This follow up measurement is a great way to enhance and optimise the advertising for a second iteration.
We love advertising campaigns at Carbon, and we’re pretty darn good at them! Growth begins here, let’s chat…
