Knowing your product’s appeal

What you’re selling helps you determine what media you should be buying. Are you selling tires? Then make print your primary media, because you need to list all those different brands, sizes, and prices in those long columns of itsy-bitsy type. You may also call attention to your print ads with some radio spots. And, if you want to show how clean and beautiful your shop is, consider some TV. Direct mail, if it’s a stand-alone piece for you and you alone, can be somewhat effective as well.
On the other hand, are you selling a professional service such as accounting, financial management, or consulting? Then you want to look at news, talk, or another radio format listened to by business people. If print is in your ad plan, then the local business journal or the business section or main news section of your newspapers are good bets.
If you’re selling beauty products or run a hair or nail salon, you need to reach your target market by buying on radio stations that can prove to you their audience composition includes mostly women. Women also read the newspaper’s business page in great numbers, as well as the entertainment, society, style, home, and main news sections. And dozens of television shows, even entire cable stations, are targeted toward women — for example, the Lifetime network, WE (Women’s Entertainment), Oxygen, and many others.
What I’m getting at here is that you must narrow your focus in order to get a handle on the amount you need to invest in advertising, by identifying your primary market segment. There’s no sense in taking the shotgun approach when a well-aimed rifle shot can find more of who you’re looking for — and for a lot less money. If you’re selling a female-oriented product, you don’t want to waste too much of your ad budget advertising to men, and vice versa. Sure, you’ll get some spillover, and you can’t do anything about that. But targeting your media buys as narrowly as possible saves you money in a big way.

Identifying your target market

By identifying your primary target market, you can do a better job of narrowing your media buys, which leads you to a bottom-line budget figure that makes sense. This information also helps you when the time comes to design and write your ads. Teenagers, as you know, speak an entirely different language than adults, so not only must you buy the media they’re attracted to, but you also want to write and design your ads to attract their attention in the first place.
For example, if you own a skateboard store, then you’re going to target teens rather than senior citizens, right? And those teens aren’t reading the newspaper or looking at direct mail pieces; instead, they’re online at their favorite Web sites, listening to very narrowly programmed radio stations, and watching certain TV shows. If, on the other hand, you’re selling luxury cars that are purchased primarily by affluent adults over 55, you can do well by placing ads in the business section of your paper and buying spots on radio stations programmed with news, talk, oldies, or classical music. In other words, just a little bit of thought into who your target market is and what forms of media it pays attention to can save you lots of money and tons of grief.

Researching and evaluating your competition

A good step to consider when devising your advertising plan, and planning the extent of your budget, is to analyze what your competition is doing. In Buying the Different Media, I give some guidelines and relative costs for all media, but you can pin it down even further with a few well-placed phone calls in your own area. Here are some guidelines:

• Do you see ads for your competitors in the newspaper on a regular basis? If so, call the paper and ask for its retail display-ad rate in order to figure out how much the competition is spending to advertise there.
• Do you hear competitors’ radio commercials often? Call the station’s sales department and ask about its rates. A salesperson will likely tell you precisely what your competition is spending so she can talk you into doing the same thing.
• Does your weekly mail bring coupons or brochures from your competition? Again, contact the vendor of the mail pack that sends these coupons and find out what those ads cost.

Why should you want to know what your competition is spending? Because this information gives you some basis for planning your own budget. Forewarned is forearmed, which in this case means that gathering information about the other guys helps you make a quantified judgment as to how much you need to spend in order to compete with them. If you own a momand- pop hardware store, you may have a tough time generating a budget that can compete with the monster-size warehouse stores — but don’t panic. Simply outspending the other guy (or even trying to keep up with him) isn’t the whole answer. 

You may be relieved to know that you can spend a lot less than your competition and still make more of an impact by being more creative with both your message and your media buying. You can make up for a lack of money with an abundance of creativity and careful — no, make that diligent — media negotiation and spending. You can also make your available advertising budget stretch if you don’t waste any of it on irrelevant media that brings you little or no business. 

Regardless of the limits of your ad budget, and whether you’re trying to reach a broad audience, accept this as a given: You can afford mass media. You can afford to buy radio commercials, ads in a mass-circulation daily newspaper, spots on broadcast television and cable stations, ads in the regional editions of major magazines, and a variety of Internet advertising, including your own Web site. This media may, at first, appear to be unaffordable. But, regardless of the expense (which may be less than you think), when you consider how many people you can reach, it’s the smartest way you can spend your money. 

What you can’t afford to do is fritter away a limited ad budget on questionable media, like the dozens of ads you find in your mailbox every day, that are better suited for wrapping fish than they are for attracting new customers to your business. The old saw “You get what you pay for” is never truer.

Developing an Advertising Strategy and a Tactical Plan

You probably went into business to succeed — and that means you’ll do whatever it takes to reach this lofty goal . . . as long as it’s legal and within fiscal reason. But in order to succeed with your advertising — or with anything in life, actually — you need a plan of action. In this Developing an Advertising Strategy and a Tactical Plan , I help you come up with a plan that works for you.