Dear Entrepreneur,

Any communication campaign needs to have clear, measurable objectives, whether it is designed to communicate product benefits or to support an event. In order to achieve these objectives, it must also be planned carefully.

It is important to set campaign objectives for an advertising campaign. It is essential to identify a specific task for a specific campaign. This might be:

Raising awareness of a company, product or service within a clearly identified target market.
Communicating the benefits of a product or service.
Generating leads for the sales force or retail network.
To ensure you design a cost-effective campaign that delivers results, advertising objectives should be translated into precise, measurable targets.

There are eight main stages in planning an advertising campaign. These include :

1. Define Target Market

An understanding of your audience will influence the media you select and the creative treatment of your advertisement. To define your target market, you should ask questions like these:

Who buys your type of product?
Who influences the purchasing decision?
How many potential buyers are there?
Which prospects do you want to reach with the campaign and where are they located?
What is the role of advertising in reaching the target audience?
2. Select Media

There are four important factors to consider in selecting campaign media:

How closely the audience profile of the medium matches your target audience.
The comparative costs of reaching the target audience through different media.
Whether the frequency of the medium matches the timing of your campaign.
The creative opportunities of the medium for the communication of your message.
3. Plan Campaign Timing

You have to consider a number of factors first in relation to the purchasing partner of your products:

When are your customers making their buying decisions?
If you are launching a new product, when will the product be available?
How quickly will you be able to follow up the campaign?
What is the next available publication or broadcasting date?
How long will it take to produce the advertisement?
4. Decide Campaign Frequency

Campaigns raise levels of awareness with each appearance and increase in number of opportunities to see the advertisement. Campaigns reinforce the impact of the message by repetition and provide an opportunity to communicate multiple or complex messages about the company or the product range.

5. Plan Creatives

To achieve good results, you must develop a comprehensive creative brief. The main elements are :

Campaign objectives
Description of the target audience
The main concerns of the target audience
The main benefits of the product or service
The media size and mechanical details
6. Develop a Response Mechanism

Action is a vital ingredient of any advertising campaign and it is essential that you make it easy for your prospects to respond. First, decide which action they are to take:

To place an order
To arrange a sales meeting
To request further information
To visit your website
To visit a retail outlet
To try the product
Review the cost, convenience and practicality of response options, including telephone, post, fax, e-mail and website.

7. Set a Budget

A campaign budget will include direct, indirect and variable costs. Direct costs include the production costs of advertisement, including design, writing and production, and media costs. Indirect costs include the cost of setting up response handling, either by internal resources or an external supplier, and the management costs of planning and controlling the campaign. Variable costs include the cost of handling the campaign response.

8. Set Schedules

To set a campaign schedule, work back from the launch date and work out how long each individual activity will take.

COMMON MISTAKES

Poor Targeting

Without a clear picture of your target, market advertising can be wasteful.

Failure to Integrate

Advertising must be integrated with other related marketing tasks. Poor salesforce performance, for example could waste the contribution of a highly successful advertising campaign that provided a large number of sales leads.

Inadequate Resources

If companies try to achieve targets without committing the right budget, it will mean either that advertisement does not appear frequently enough to have impact, or that production quality is sacrificed.