Developing an advertising strategy that works

By Chris Haycock | 07 March 2022

How to begin developing an advertising strategy to ensure you can scale at a later date.

For anything that involves you dipping into your cash flow, you need strategies to ensure you’re not wasting money. If you get results from half your ad spend, and have no clue where the other half is being drained, you’re never going to make improvements.

For your advertising strategy, you need to identify where you’ll spend your advertising budget. Make your list as big as you can because it’s largely trial and error when you begin. The advertisers you do well with keep and the ones that return terrible results, drop them.

They really aren't worth the effort, especially if you have not seen any results after several ad placements.

Have at least one advertising campaign running constantly. If one week, you’ve a radio ad, follow up the following week with a newspaper ad.

Remember, you need to define your budget with this and work within it as best you can. There may be a spell when you don’t have the cash flow to run your ad campaigns. If that is the case, put some cash aside from your revenue to pay for advertising.

Don’t take the short term approach to this and use it to fast track business growth and then stop. The best time to be advertising is when you have strong cash flow in place, but the only way you’re going to get to that position is to get started advertising.

It's commonly known in advertising circles that you won't really see any results from the first few advert campaigns. Consumers need to be exposed to a brand (or product) from you at least 7 or 8 times before they will take a look at your offering. You need to convince them that you're not a fly-by-night operator that is going to do a runner once you've bought a product.

Therefore, plan for a run of ad campaigns - perhaps at least 10 ads over the course of a month or two, to build your brand reputation and instill trust in your audience.

As for where to advertise, the most cost efficient channel is digital advertising because you get the largest reach, often lower cost per click, and plenty of control over who sees your ads to ensure the only people clicking are people you know from your research will be interested in what you have to offer.

An added benefit of digital marketing is that you have the ability to track and measure campaign results. Non-digital advertising is notoriously difficult to track.

And finally, make your offer so compelling they can’t help but contact you. You can do this by running an advertisement promotion (such as a BOGOF, discount, or half-price offer) which is known to attract higher purchase rates.

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