We are all familiar with advertising. We are surrounded and bombarded with it everyday probably more often than we think as it takes so many forms. You of course come into contact with the traditional forms of advertising when you are reading your favourite magazine or daily paper of which some seem to be at least 70% advertising. Probably the most widely recognised form of mass advertising is television advertising. Every or at least most programmes are broken at 15 minute intervals with an advert. Even the BBC advertises. Perhaps not products or services but it advertises between programmes about its own events.

Some less traditional forms of advertising still communicate to you throughout your day, online advertising whether it be through banner ads, pop ups or the sponsored listings in Google. Another form of advertising that companies with any organisational vehicles utilise is vehicle livery. Branding all of the company’s vehicles enables them to promote and communicate the brand or product while it is travelling around. This form of advertising has a huge reach and works out to be very cost effective.

Before these adverts come to fruition whether it be print, television, online or vehicle livery they all begin with a strategy. Taking an even broader perspective on advertising each strategy begins with a clear and definitive marketing strategy. This is because advertising is only one part of the overall marketing strategy along with price, the product and how it is going to be sold or distributed.

The first step of identifying your advertising strategy is to have a clear organisational competitive positioning strategy consisting of; target market and the differential advantage. The first step therefore is to identify and most importantly understand your target market, who you’re advertising to. By understanding the target market we mean what motivates them to buy? This will give your advertising campaign real direction and promise.

The second stage of advertising strategy creation is to define your advertising objectives. What do you want this advertising to achieve? Do you want to just raise awareness of your product or brand? Another objective for an advertising campaign is to stimulate trial, reinforce and remind your target market, correct misconceptions or to provide support to your sales staff.

Thirdly and probably most importantly is the setting and agreeing on what your advertising budget is going to be. You can base it on the percentage of sales you are anticipating the advertising campaign is going to bring in, or it can purely be based on how much the company can afford.

Another crucial and probably the first consideration most people would spend time on is what is this advertising campaign actually going to contain. How you are going to communicate it? what media channel are you going to utilise and obviously with every strategised expenditure you have to evaluate the success of the campaign at the end of it and use this gained knowledge to shape your future campaigns.