Stay Ahead of the Pack: 5 Pro Tips for Crafting Effective Advertising Strategies

Last Updated on January 20, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas

The advertising industry is a $600 billion industry. There are tons of people parading around as industry experts and gurus, touting the latest funnel or shiny advertising object that promises riches for those who do it.

Yet, despite all of these efforts, businesses still struggle to generate enough revenue to survive. Why is that?

They’re not using the right advertising strategies in their business. Keep reading to learn how you can develop a smart advertising strategy that generates results for your business.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Here’s a marketing lesson for you. This is for veteran and novice marketers alike.

There’s a major difference between strategy and tactics. When most marketers talk about the latest advertising strategies, they’re really talking about tactics. It’s just that it’s a bit sexier to say marketing strategy vs. marketing tactics.

What’s the difference between the two? Marketing strategy is the overarching goal for a marketing campaign. Tactics are the things that you’ll do to fulfill your strategy.

Top Tips for Creating Successful Advertising Strategies

How can someone create a successful advertising strategy? It starts by reading these 5 tips to help you create a solid strategy.

Tip #1: Set Goals

If you can’t tell, advertising strategies are goal driven. You need to very specific goals for your business. The goals then inform the strategies and tactics you’ll use to achieve them.

Your goals need to be SMART. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Let’s say you want to set goals for your blog.

One goal can be to increase email subscribers from 50 to 250 in six months. Amazon FBA sellers would have revenue based goals, such as to increase revenue by 30% in the next 12 months.

Your next step would be to create a strategy to get you to that goal.

Tip #2: What Worked in the Past?

As you’re creating your advertising strategies, you want to examine what worked well for you in the past. If it worked before, you may want to implement the same strategy.

Before you do, examine why it worked for you. Maybe you had incredible timing or there were other factors at play.

Likewise, if there were things that you did that didn’t work, look at why to avoid making those mistakes again.

Tip #3: Do Your Research

Creating a successful advertising strategy does mean doing research. You want to know a lot about your business, your competition, and what makes your business different.

You’ll want to be able to answer one question. Out of the thousands of blogs or businesses like mine out there, why would someone choose mine?

There could be dozens of reasons, from excellent customer service to having a superior product.

Tip #4: Understand Your Audience

When you ask people who their ideal client is, they typically stumble on the answer. They usually don’t know the answer.

You want to know everything possible about your target audience. You want to know the demographic information such as gender, age, where they live, and household income.

You also want to know what makes them tick. Know the books they read, what they like, where they shop and what problems they’re trying to solve.

The more you understand your audience, the easier it is to create a marketing strategy and tactics that will reach them. It’s normal to have the main target audience and a secondary target audience.

Tip #5: Craft Messages That Resonate

When you create advertising strategies, your next step will be to create messaging that is just for your audiences.

You may have three main messages for each audience. Your messages need to resonate with your audience by showing that you understand their needs.

For example, as if you have a fitness blog or sell fitness products targeted towards older women, you can create messages about the need to lose weight and that it gets harder when you get older. You want to follow that up by showing how you provide the solution for them.

Tip #6: Choose Your Tactics Wisely

Now is the time when you get to choose your tactics. You want to to make sure that you choose tactics based on your message, goals, and your target audience.

For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness and you’re targeting women who love DIY projects, you can choose to do a broad brand awareness campaign.

Your tactics can combine targeted Facebook ads and TV ads that appear on home channels like HGTV.

If your goal is to increase sales, you want to invest in activities where buyers are further along in the buying cycle. One option is to create a referral campaign or you can invest in SEO to reach people when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Marketing Tactics: Traditional vs. Digital

There’s a bit of an ongoing debate in the marketing world as to what’s more effective, traditional marketing or digital marketing.

The answer is that it depends. It depends on what you’re selling and to whom. FBA sellers should rely on digital advertising because their customers are going to be online. For retail businesses, you can combine both traditional and digital strategies.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Read this to compare the difference between traditional and digital advertising to find out which one is right for you.

Create Advertising Strategies That Work

One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is that they confuse advertising strategies with tactics. They’re related, but they’re so different from each other.

A strategy is about the long-term plan you have for your business, while tactics are the steps you’ll take to execute your plan.

If you want to create a solid strategy, start with your goals, then create your strategy.

Once you have those in place, then start to create tactics. Ready to move forward? Check out this article to help you drive traffic to your website.