You probably already learned in marketing school that an advertising strategy or different types of advertising strategies should always be anchored or incorporated in your general marketing plan. Your marketing plan outlines what your goals are and how you intend to act on your goals. Your advertising strategy,
on the other hand, identifies available options for your business in order to get through your target clientele. This is how you should do things. However, in the real world, you may not have any more time in which to outline your marketing plan properly or to write down your advertising strategies. More often than not, you will have to do things on an ad-hoc basis.
If this is the case, then it would be a good idea to at least have a structured method in coming up with your advertising strategy. A good communications strategy starts with the SWOT analysis. Through this methodology, you would be able to understand your business' products and services strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By knowing these important issues, you would be able to develop a communications strategy that is more focused and more precise.
A SWOT analysis may sound intimidating but it is actually easy to do. Before diving right into SWOT, we must first understand the two major parts of an advertising strategy:
1. Assessment The assessment give you an idea of what is currently going on in the market. It will let you look back and understand what is happening in the present. It will also alert you to what the future holds for your product or services, with your competitors, and with your customers and clients.
2. Action This part will tell you what your clients will do about the most significant opportunities or problems presented by a particular situation. What marketing collaterals such as brochures, flyers or print stickers would work best to entice clients?
The 'What do do' part is directly linked to your 'What's going on' part. For instance, your SWOT analysis could actually reveal that the current recession is the one that is threatening your business. It could also come up with results that your products and services have not been getting the expected response by target customers because of serious competition from other businesses with the same products as you have going all out on discounts and price slashes.
This situation would require you to develop immediate actions. These actions might include the following:
Re-establish your market position. Because your products or services are worth it, consumers should take another look. Yes, consumers can get something cheaper but they are not always guaranteed to have that quality or that excellent service which you can provide.
Create a stronger brand personality. Why are limited editions more expensive than the regular ones? This is because many people aspire to have it. You can create this image through marketing collaterals such as sticker printing.
Essentially, your ad strategy, even if it is having sticker printing or label printing services done in order to come up with quality stickers and labels, must deal with the big strategic issues of branding, positioning, direct marketing and media rapport.
