When you put together a marketing plan, you use market research to help determine what your advertising goals will be. But when you are creating your advertising campaigns, you need to set a criteria for effective advertising that you will use to determine if you are getting the maximum return on your investment. Your advertising criteria is the general rules you will use to create effective marketing campaigns.
Your advertising message needs to be focused to be effective. Each marketing campaign should only have one message, and that message should be delivered as concisely as possible. Determine the features of your product that will interest your target market through market research, and use those features as the selling points in your advertising. If you intend to use a clever phrase or image to sell your product, it needs to relate to the product and the focused message in some way to be effective.
A good advertising campaign is constantly changing. After you release your initial campaign, you should use market research to gauge customer response and pay close attention to the customers that contact you to give input on your campaign. If you are using a dog in your campaign but it is confusing customers, then remove the dog. If a large segment of your customer base says that a blue border around your print ads would be more effective than the red border, then make the change. Keep altering your advertising campaign based on customer input until you find that combination that drives revenue.
A successful advertising campaign has a point, or a purpose for its creation. If the purpose is to open up a new market, then create metrics to measure how successfully your product is taking in the new market. If you are trying to increase unit sales among your target demographic, then set a threshold that you consider to be successful, and stop investing in the advertising campaign once you have reached that threshold. You can use successful parts of previous campaigns in future marketing endeavors, but once you have achieved the outcome you were looking for with your advertising campaign, then the campaign was successful and can be ended.
Advertising is considered a success when it drives revenue while staying under budget. Create your marketing budget in the planning process, and then work to stay within that budget as you create advertisements for the campaign. If an advertising campaign proves to be very successful, then plan follow-up campaigns that capitalize on that initial idea's success. Do not extend budgets on advertising ideas, but rather create new plans that have their own budgets so you can keep a close eye on how much return you are getting for your marketing investment.
