Why are Ads Important?
What will we discuss today?
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What is Brand Advertising?
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Evolving process of a Brand
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How to create Brand Awareness
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The Advertising Funnel
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Social Media & Google Tools for Branding
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Product Life Cycle
To create a unique, memorable, trustworthy image of your product/service and establish a long-lasting relationship with your prospects which will turn customers in future you need to advertise your brand to create awareness in the customer’s mind about what you have to offer them.
Companies use brand advertising to create a long-term impact on the minds of the customers. For acquiring a customer you first need to make the audience aware about what your brand is about and what you have to offer the customers which will add value to their lives.
Brand advertising establishes brand identity, loyalty, credibility in the market to gain trust in prospects which they can turn into customers through regular advertising.
Evolving process
Brand advertising is not a one time process, it’s an ongoing process which is to be performed regularly to remain in the minds of customers and nurture them through it. A single campaign only raises awareness for a short period, so regular campaigns with a set budget are necessary. Budgets can be increased or decreased as per the customer responses and market conditions.
Brand advertising is designed to increase overall demand for a brand by creating awareness and increasing credibility for the same. Brand awareness campaigns add tremendous value with more customer awareness for the brand resulting in great trust and stick with the brand throughout the buyer’s journey.
Advertising makes consumers aware of the product/service and tries to build preference for that particular brand over the competitors. If the campaign succeeds in doing this, the customers will choose the advertised product/service when they take the purchase action.
Brand Awareness
Raising brand awareness is the first stage of the advertising process to give information about your products/services and persuade the customers to buy them. Advertising must convince the customers of the assured quality and value the product/service will be providing. Including testimonials from satisfied customers is a great way of building confidence and preference among new customers.
Advertising on the Internet makes it easier to measure the effects and results of a particular campaign. When prospects click on your advertisement to obtain further information you can track these actions and measure the success of the campaign in terms of number of clicks, responses, enrollments.
Advertising Funnel
Advertising takes the customers through a funnel which nurtures the relationship of the brand with the customer at each stage.
- Exposure– At the exposure stage, delivering a great first impression on the customer’s mind is of utmost importance. This builds the brand’s identity and credibility. Attracting customers can be done through brand logo, web presence and testimonials.
- Influence– Customers are likely to purchase from a brand they have trust in and this can be done with high quality campaigns which stand out in front of competitors. You can contribute to social causes to create a positive impact on customers which builds confidence in them.
- Engagement– Staying in the customer’s mind is very crucial so that they don’t forget your brand. This can be done through regular advertising and allowing two way communication so that customers can connect with the brand and build a strong relationship which will turn them to buy from you.
- Conversion– Nurturing the customers through this funnel the final stage is of converting the customer when he makes the purchase from you. At each stage of the funnel, if the customer is satisfied he/she will surely buy from you. Once he/she becomes your customer you can retain them with regular updates on new products, after sale services, which will turn them into lifetime customers.
Brand advertising is a long term game as compared to direct response ads. But if done efficiently it pays off in overall growth of brand through great reach on customers and their acquisition and retention.
Social Media and Google Tools
Social media platforms offer a reasonable cost means of running various campaigns for brand awareness and instilling loyalty. Free tools like Google Analytics can help you identify statistics of the number of visitors on your website and time spent by them viewing your content.
Facebook Ads, Google Ads, SEO are great ways of reaching out to customers. Designing your campaign in a manner that attracts the viewer’s immediately and setting budgets can really go a long way. Proper keyword research, catchy headlines, effective description which describes the brand and the value provided to the customer, directing the customer to the brand website where they get more information about you and your web presence and then directing them to the landing page where they can submit their contact details makes the campaign successful.
While advertising keep in mind to differentiate your offering from the one of competitors. Highlight your shine points, in what way you are different from others like customer service, affordability, quality, convenience, uniqueness. You need to convince the customer that buying and using your product/service will add great value to them. This makes a psychological desire in the minds of customers to take the purchase action considering it will make their life better.
Advertising based on Product Life Cycle
Another important consideration while advertising a product is product life cycle. Products go through different stages of its life cycle and advertising has to be done on that basis. Each stage of the product life cycle has different advertising strategies to address the challenges at each stage as the product moves through the cycle.
Determine at what stage of life cycle your product is and then advertise accordingly. At the introductory stage, advertising generally focuses on bringing awareness of the product and its value to the customers. At the growth stage, mainly campaigns focus on differentiating the product from the competitors with competitive pricing. As the product moves to mature stage, regular reminder ads are run to stick in the customer’s mind and offer some coupons or discounts. When the products reach the decline stage usually brands cut the advertising cost on them.
You must have got an idea how branding & advertising work in the digital world and how they are different from each other and the different strategies to be adopted for each one keeping in mind the product life cycle.
