Category: Blog

Three Channels of Marketing

by adventureadagency, posted in Advertising, Blog, Marketing

Is your advertising campaign really reaching the audience you want in the way you want? That is an important questions to think about. The problem is how do we answer it.

In marketing, there are a number of different ways to reach your consumer, but all of these different types fall into three different channels of marketing. Each of these different channels have their own advantages and disadvantages.

By understanding each of these channels audiences and their various advantages and disadvantages better, you can better target your marketing and advertising strategy, and you can answer that question of is your advertising campaign really reaching the audience you want in the way you want.

First, there is the one-to-many model. This channel is where you are marketing as a company or business to a multitude of consumers the same message. In this channel, we find a very large portion of advertising included. General television advertising, billboards, and newspaper ads are all examples of advertising being distributed to multiple consumers at once. Sales promotions are another example. The promotion, for example of 50% off at a retail store, is distributed to everyone through advertising and given to everyone who participates.

Finally in this model, there is also public relations. These efforts are made by one company or business to maintain a positive image in the eyes of the masses. For instance, public relations does not focus on being perceived positively by one customer, but instead by all customers.

The advantages of this model is that it is faster and easier to do this type of advertising because it does not have to be personalized. Also, it is controlled to a certain level by the businesses doing it. Because this model involves messages going from a business to many consumers, the business is able to be aware of what messages it is sending to consumers, and it can change as the consumers change.

The biggest disadvantage is that this type of advertising can become generic as everyone gets the same thing, and there is not as much flexibility in who you are targeting. Even if you put a great television advertisment up and it reaches many consumers with the right message, people still may not care or identify with the message.

Second, there is a one-to-one model. This channel has messages being sent straight from the business or marketer to a specific individual or smaller group of individuals. In this type of advertising, databases and information is better used to target advertising. Instead of sending a flyer to everyone in the states, a financial services company may use database information to only send flyers to households that have a high income level. Direct marketing is a perfect example of this.

The biggest advantage then for the one-to-one model is that you can better target your audience and likely get a better response to your advertising plan. The disadvantage of this is that this benefit will likely cost more and be more time consuming. Plus, you have to have access to that database information on demographics and more in order to be able to target at all.

Finally, there is the many-to-many model. This is where consumers are actually communicating on channels to other consumers. The easiest way to see this is in social media and the buzz building that occurs when a post is shared over and over again.

This is an extremely powerful form of marketing, which is one of its benefits. Consumers are considerably influenced by other consumers, even more so than by businesses. As a result, consumers are more receptive to messages sent to them. Another advantage is that since this is mostly consumer driven, there is little to no expense associated with this. Most or the expensive would come from content creation or paid boosting and targeting of posts on social media.

The downside is that this channel is consumer driven which takes a lot of the control out of a business’ hands. Buzz building can be an organic thing that happens, but often businesses would need to pay to boost a post on Facebook for inorganic audience members in order for a business to spread its reach.

Now that you know the three different channels, which channel do you think is best for you and your business? Maybe it is a combination of all three. However, advertising is an art. If you need help changing or creating your plan, Adventure Ad Agency is here to help.

Finding the Right Price

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog

One of the hardest challenges that businesses face is determining the right price for a product or service. It is not as simple as determining your costs and adding a percentage markup. Actually in total, there are at least five other factors than costs that affect price, and all of them are important to consider when determining your price.

First of course, you do need to cover your costs. This means that you need to be able to pay for the materials, labor, and overhead that go into your product or service. The problem is that overhead is a grey area. Many factors of pricing affect this dramatically.

One of these is your overall organizational and marketing objectives. The overarching goals of your organization can end up having a great effect on your costs. The more you want to do, the more your overhead will grow. Before determining price, thinking about where you are and where you are going. A major challenge of pricing you want to consider is that once you set a price it is often hard to change it, especially to raise it.

Plus, you need to think about how much you plan to spend on marketing and advertising. Advertising is an important tool that can bring in new customers and bring back existing customers. It is crucial to any business, but it also has a cost that should be put into the price. If you plan ahead and set a budget that is included in your price, spending on advertising will not be something that you feel like you are spending your profits on. Instead, it will be planned and accounted for in your price.

Next, there are legal and regulatory issues to consider depending on your product or service. These must also be included in the price. While this does not affect everything, it has a big effect on those it does reach.

After looking internally though, it is time to look externally to set the price. What is the competition priced at? Are you going to enter the market as a high, medium, or low priced competitor? In addition to this, ask yourself, what value do you provide to your customer in that price and how will you customer respond to your product and service? All of these external factors can influence price.

Finally, the last factor to consider is your personal pricing objectives. This is wear markup and profit comes into price. This is when you get to determine what additional profit you want to make after considering all the other facts. Be warned though, the markup must match the external factors previously mentioned. If the product is highly priced, but has no value to consumers, no one will buy it.

For better help understanding how to plan for advertising and marketing expenditures, Adventure Ad Agency is here to help. Please email us or give us a call anytime!

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The Four Ps and What they Mean for You

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog, Marketing

Product, Price, Place, Promotion. In marketing, we like to call these the four Ps. These four strategy perspectives are a powerful way to examine any product or service and its marketing strategy. Whether evaluating someone else’s product or service or your own, by first looking at the existing strategy, you can then see where there is room for improvement.

Product  is simply taking a look at what product or service is being offered. From the raw materials that go into it  to the label on the box, examine what exactly the product being provided offers for the customer. Specifically, what value does it have. Looking at the value is especially important for the service industry, as they often do not have physical goods being provided. Their product is the value gained from their service.

Price may seem obvious, and it is. How much does the product or service cost? After asking yourself this question, it is important to then decide if the price set covers the costs of providing the good or service, as well as accurately accounting for the value. Later, when examining the competition, understanding your price is key.

Place is the strategy of determining where your product or service is being purchased. This part is key to learning where the audience for you product is. By determining where the items are going, you can better focus on providing value specifically to a more targeted audience, as well as advertising to that same targeted audience. You could also potentially see where your product or service is not reaching, that you believe it should reach. Then, you can adapt your marketing strategy to that audience.

Promotion – Finally, promotion has everything to do with advertising. Ask yourself, how are you currently advertising and promotion your product. Looking back then at product, price, and place, you may learn many ways to improve your advertising strategy.

The most important rule of the four Ps though is to always look at them in context, more importantly in context of the competition. These four ways to look at your marketing strategy are made even more powerful when used while also considering the competition in the market. Once you know your own product, price, place, and promotion and work to improve them internally, you can then look at the competition’s product, price, place, and promotion and improve externally.

What is your personal brand?

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog, Marketing, Social Media

Who are you? What are you about? What do people think when they first meet you? These questions are weird to think about, because we do not often stop to consider them. We are more focused on what we are doing, not why we are doing it. The problem is that whether or not we are aware of it we are constantly conveying a sense to others of who we are through our personal brand.

The concept of a personal brand can sound vague and made up, but I will assure you it is not just real, but also crucial to professional success. It can make or break you in the business and marketing world.

Let’s break it down. The word “brand” simply means mark. Your personal brand then is your personal mark. A mark can be either a tangible or intangible impression that is left upon someone or something else as a result of someone or something else.

For instance, you can take this literally and think about the act of branding a cow. While this has a slightly different meaning, the concept is the same. The branding stick leaves a mark or an impression on the cow that will remain on that cow unless altered by some other force. Businesses have brands that convey the meaning and purposes of their organization. They also use their brand to create emotional associations. These associations and impressions can not be changed unless the business actively works to change them.

Similarly, when you meet someone for the first time, an impression is imprinted into their memory about who you are and how they feel about you. Every time you post on social media, develop a new relationship, or publish work, you are building your personal brand.

Therefore, everyone has a personal brand, and if you understand this, then you can focus on how to control what you personal brand is. Often, what people convey to others can be different than what they think they convey or want to convey. What can you do then to make sure that doesn’t happen?

First, think about it. Think about who you are and who you want you be. Then, each time you post, ask yourself if this post is adding to or taking away from your personal brand. Each time you meet someone new, consider what you are wearing and how you can conduct yourself to convey your personal brand.

Second, look the part. A big part of brand is image. Humans do not get logos. They get themselves, a powerful advertising tool in its own right. It is important then that we humans utilize this gift. We have all heard the sayings “dress the part” or “dress for success.”

Thirdly, beyond the day to day, look for opportunities to build your personal brand the same way you build your resume. If you want to convey to the world that you are care about the community, go out of your way to get involved. If you want to convey to the professional industry that you are serious about your career and informed about the industry, make sure to be informed by reading relevant journals and maybe even sharing interesting articles on social media or with colleagues.

Finally, to have a strong brand, you need to have something unique to set you apart. Luckily, you are already a unique and inspiring individual. You just need to spend sometime thinking and tapping into what makes you who you are. Never stop trying to answer that question.

The Evolution of Advertising

by adventureadagency, posted in Advertising, Blog

When we think about advertising, it is easy to quickly just think about television commercials and billboards on the side of a highway. However, advertising is much more than that. Advertising continues to evolve and change every day. What advertising meant last year is different than what it means this year. To understand what advertising is now and where it is going though, we must understand how it has evolved from where it was in the past.

Advertising initially began in full swing in the twentieth century with the emergence of the invention of the radio and cable television. The 1950s through the 1970s are heralded as the heyday of cable television. With these inventions, advertising was finally able to reach mass audiences. With a limited number of television channels, advertising could directly reach consumers without much other clutter competing for the viewer’s attention.

Then, cable television began in the 1980s, and the advertising industry began to be able to fragment the mass media and better target consumers. As more networks were created, further segmentation occurred and the concept of narrowcasting emerged. The idea of narrowcasting is simply targeted advertising through cable television to smaller market segments by demographics such as location, interests, age, etc.

The next big thing to sweep the advertising world was the increased presence of advertisements in magazines. As television advertising rose in cost, magazine and print advertising declined, only further fueling this print advertising boom. These print options could also more narrow segment the market.

Finally, with the ushering in of the twenty first century, there came the internet and with it digital media. Unlike previous methods of segmenting that used demographic variables to target markets, digital advertising provided the opportunity to implement behavioral targeting, which previously would have been too expensive to collect data on.

As a consequence of this, today our world is filled with much more advertising clutter creating an even higher demand for quality advertising that engages viewers. Currently, there is an increased ability for the consumer to avoid or skip over ads whether through a DVR or through the click of a button.

As a result, the advertising industry has become more creative with growth in strategies such as product placement and sponsorships. Social media has also emerged around 2010 as a powerful new advertising tool that is low cost, if not free.

Over the past hundred years, the entire landscape of the advertising industry has changed, and it will only continue to change. Advertising agencies then must continue to be on the top of their game, constantly thinking of new and creative ways to engage and reach the consumer.

Better Serving Your Female Customers

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog

Women are key in making buying decisions, especially within households. As you segment your target market, you may find more and more that your target market is made up of primarily women.

In fact, data shows that women make 85% of all consumer purchases, and the women, not the men, tend to spend 80% of the combined income in households.

As a result, you want to make sure you are doing your best to serve your female customer and to best market your product to women. This will allow you to grow sales, but it also sets you apart from the competition. Women also have strong proponents of customer loyalty and referrals.

Here are are top five tips for marketing to your female customers:

  1. Be honest and present all the option. Women are looking for quality products that are consistent. It needs to benefit them or those they care about. For that reason, they want to hear the truth and all of the option. High pressure sales environments are not likely to attract women. Instead, they want a hands on personal approach. They want someone to sit down with them and walk them through the process or explain the product in a truthful manner.
  2. Use, use, use technology. Website and social media are a direct link to your female customers. Most female shoppers do research and/or shopping online. With more testimonials and easier usability, the better your website and social media will become, and the better these become, the better you will be catering to your female customers.
  3. Leverage your existing female customers. Women respond best to referrals and recommendations from friends. Word of mouth is far more powerful than conventional advertising. By encouraging women to share their experiences with your product, you can better leverage your female customers to gain even more female customers.
  4. Remember who you are selling to … It is key to never forget to understand your target audience and what their demographics are. Once you understand that, this understanding should be reflected across the board in sales promotions, in social media, on your website, and in even your own sales force. Women respond extremely well to other women, as they understand how to better cater to the needs and desires of the female customer. It would not make sense to have men selling makeup products as they will not understand how these products will benefit women from personal experience. Plus, having women showcasing these products will make other women more comfortable.
  5. Be responsive. As with any customer, it is important to respond in a timely manner and provide the quickest and best service possible. However, it is especially important with women. Many women are running households and are going to not only go with the best quality, but also the fastest service. For example, women home with a baby can’t wait a week for the plumber to respond to her phone call, even if he does the best work.

These five simple tips are only the beginning of how you can better target your female customers. As you look at your industry and your female customers, there are sure to be additional ways you can further cater to their needs. This could be through technology or through simple improved communication methods.

10 Step Website Self-Check

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog

What makes a website great? What makes a website terrible? The quality and effectiveness of a website really comes down to ten main elements. All of these ten elements are pretty simple, but due to the wide variety of options in each category, sometime people make websites overly complicated or confusing, or maybe on the other side of things, they make it boring and dull.

Fear no more. We have broken down these ten elements for you a created a 10 Step Self-Check Test for you to use to rate your website. What do you think your score will be.

  • If you have 2 or less elements, your website is an F.
  • If you have 2-5 elements, your website is average and is a C.
  • If you have 5-8 elements, your website is pretty good and receives a B.
  • If you have 9 or 10 elements, your website is fantastic and is an A.

Good luck! Here is our 10 Step Self-Check Test:

  1. Home Page: Your homepage is your front door, your welcome mat, your first impression, and your first impression is one of the most important. It sets the tone. While this may sound silly, think about the way you feel when you open your home page. Does your homepage leave your audience with the right feeling?
  2. Design: The way you set up and design your website will make a big impact on the experience your user has. The most important design element about a website is if it is functional. Can your user find everything they need to find easily? Does the layout make sense for the purpose?
  3. Timeliness: This is simple. Is the website being updated? Look at the last social media post and see if it was in the last week or two. Are you regularly posting new content? At the very least, is all the information correct and up to date.
  4. Searchability: Most people come to websites with a purpose, not just to look around. The search bar needs to be somewhere easy to find so that people can use it. Your menu also must make sense and clearly direct your audience to information through helpful categories or whatever is best for your purpose.
  5. Branding: Does your website stay true to your brand? Is your logo thoroughly incorporated through the website? The easiest thing to forget is to maintain your brand on every section of your website. Your logo should be the same across sections and social media platforms. The colors and theme of your website should go not only with what you are trying to convey, but also you brand.
  6. Credibility: A section of your website need to be devoted to showing that you are a legitimate and serious website. For a company, this would mean including you mission statement, certifications, a portfolio of your work or services, and other additional resources to build credibility. Often people like to showcase their employees and give background on the company’s purpose and founding. All of these benefit the credibility of your site which is an ever increasing problem online.
  7. Headlines: Your headlines are important. They bring your audience into what you are trying to tell them. Whether it is a blog post, a news blurb, or a helpful tip, creative and engaging headlines make the difference between people clicking to read and just passing over it. Do you have thoughtful engaging headlines?
  8. Social Media: In the world we live in, most websites will also have corresponding social media accounts, even if it is just a Facebook page or a LinkedIn account. Optimally, a website will add as many social media accounts as makes sense for them. Whether or not they are incorporated into the website well is usually the problem. What is the point of having them is they don’t work together with you website. Plus, the most important thing is that you add as many as you can keep updated.
  9. Audience: Remember who your target audience is. If you are trying to sell children’s toys, make the website more user friendly for a younger audience. Make it a fun, colorful, exciting experience. If you are a dentist, you may not need as much color and fun, but you will need to appear professional with a clean website that is easy to use.
  10. Overall: At the end of all of this, it is the combination of these nine other areas that leave an overall impression. When your user leaves the website, they will leave with either a good overall feeling of being satisfied or a bad overall feeling. The big question is which does your website give? Does it leave your audience satisfied and do you believe they can find and enjoy finding what they need to on your website?

Enhancing User Experience

by adventureadagency, posted in Advertising, Blog, Marketing

The one essential design principle that spans across every platform of communication is usability. Consequently, user experience can make or break an advertising platform.

Any time you are producing content, you are communicating a message, and the ability of this content to be used and understood is absolutely essential to getting your message heard and remembered. This is why the user experience of everything from your website to your social media posts to your business card is arguably one of the most important design elements.

User experience is understood as how your audience experience or processes the information being given to them. For example, a website has its own unique user experience. From the way you navigate the page to the emotions your feel as a result of the pictures to the ease of finding the company’s address, you are having a user experience.

Despite the fact that user experience is essential to the success of communicating messages, enhancing your user experience is not very hard. In fact, it builds almost entirely off of the principles of segmentation discussed in the last blog post.

Therefore, the first step is to enhancing user experience is segmentation. This is identifying a target audience and understanding their needs wants and desires. Once you understand this, you can create a custom user experience strategy for your audience. After developing a strategy, there are three main steps.

  1. Define the information or message to be communicated. In this step, it is important that you decide what content needs to be included. This is when you need to take a serious step back and cut you thoughts down to the bare minimum. Be simple. What is the most important thing my audience needs to know? What information is required?
  2. Decide on and organize a delivery platform. After deciding on the content, the next step is deciding how you want to share that content. You need to combine your knowledge of your content and your knowledge of your audience to choose a platform that will provide the best user experience for your audience. For instance, if you wish to share news about an upcoming event, what social media site provides the best user experience for sharing it with friends and organizing an event? Is it Twitter through tweets and messaging or Facebook through posts and creating a group? Clearly, you would choose Facebook due to the marriage of user experience with content helpful to organizing a group
  3. Execute your plan. This is when you go ahead and create your graphics, images, text, etc. that supports your message and platform.

An important key to user experience is making your content purposeful and relatable. Following the process steps above will help make your content more purposeful by focusing in on segmentation and the specific needs of the audience. However, the actual final content created needs to be relatable and reflect this audience as well.

Through all of this process, it is important you follow the golden rule of user experience: don’t make things complicated. The more difficult it is to understand a message, the less the audience will be willing to engage with it. In a world of ever-increasing technology, people want things faster and easier. Be simple. Don’t overthink it.

Segmentation: How to Identify Your Target Audience

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog, Marketing

The only thing more important in marketing than what you are selling is who you are selling your product to and why they should want to buy it. As a result, the very first step in marketing or advertising any product is segmentation, which can be broadly understood as identifying your target audience or the group of people that will want to buy your product.

Philip Kotler of Northwestern University defined segmentation as “the subdividing of a market into distinct subsets of customers, where any subset may conceivably be selected as a target market to be reached with a distinct marketing mix.” As implied by this definition, the entire process of segmentation can be broken into three steps. These are segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

During segmentation, you need to identify your market and divide that market into smaller subsets of customers. In order to do this, you need to find measurable and distinct ways to differentiate your customers. The four common variables that can be used in segmentation are:

  • Demographic variables
  • Psychographic variables
  • Geographic variables
  • Behavioristic variables
Demographic variables are things such as age, race, and gender that we typically think of when looking for ways to divide large groups of people. You may also think of geographic variables, which measure climate, city size, and other locational factors. However, while these are easiest to measure, they are the least predictive of actual customers’ behavior. Conversely though, the variables that are hard to measure are more indicative and predictive. Behavioristic variables that measure brand loyalty, end use, and price sensitivity, and psychographic variables that measure lifestyles and motives are both examples.

After segmenting your market, you need to implement targeting. This is evaluating the various different subsets of customers to decide which group to target or focus on.

Finally, positioning begins to take place as you create a strategic marketing plan based on the selected target group. In this step, you make decisions and choose marketing strategies based on the needs and wants of that target market.

While this sounds simple, designing a marketing plan to specifically meet the needs of your targeted customer is not as easy as it sounds. However, if you are successful, you can drastically impact sales and competitiveness of the brand in the market.

4 Ways To Get More Leads Now

by adventureadagency, posted in Blog, Marketing

The goal of marketing is ultimately to generate more leads and conversions. Leads refer to people who inquire about your products or services, and conversions refer to those leads that actually buy your products or services.

Why do I need lead data?

Many businesses want lead data in order to create lists, such as a recipient list for e-newsletters, or to nurse sales. Your lead data can tell you a lot about your customers. By analyzing your lead data, you can better understand your customers and know how to reach them in the future.

So how can I get more leads?

There are several strategies for fostering lead generation.

1. Brand Awareness

One helpful aspect to lead generation is brand awareness, which comes from exposure. You can raise brand awareness by posting daily on various channels. These daily posts could occur on a blog, Facebook, YouTube channel, or any other medium that your customers are on. One thing to keep in mind is that, although your posts are daily, each one should add value to the customer – don’t post for no reason.

2. Use Your Existing Real Estate

You may be wondering where to find new leads. We recommend using your existing channels and mediums – there is no need to expand your channels just to generate new leads. You can always incorporate new targeting options on the same channels to reach new prospects – it is highly unlikely that you will exhaust all of your potential customers on a certain channel. Just be sure to post the right content on the right channels – always tailor your message.

4. Do What You Know

With new marketing technologies constantly expanding, it might be tempting to go after the ‘new and shiny’ thing on the market. However, you may be more effective on the channels you already know. Note that we are not advising you to completely ignore every new technology. Of course you want to be ahead of your competition on new methods, but be sure to properly do your research before offering these services to clients. You shouldn’t jump on every new opportunity that arises – choose which new technologies you explore carefully.

4. Analyze

Our last tip is to analyze your data. You must see what strategies are working so you know where to go in the future. Proper analysis will give you direction and guidance on how to generate more leads in the future.

If you have any further questions regarding lead generation, feel free to contact us today!