Strategic Advertising: Frequency, Timing, Coordination, and Optimization

How do you build a successful advertising plan that is tailored for your business?

We’ve told you (and told you) that you can’t do a marketing activity once and expect results.

You can’t even just do one type of marketing multiple times for any sort of return, either. Including—or, in some cases, especially—advertising.

Whether print or digital, you can’t advertise once or twice—even in a single publication, much less across multiple publications—and expect any results. If you’re willing to budget for only one ad, or one ad per publication, you may as well not bother advertising at all.

The Formula for Advertising

You need to do advertising strategically to ensure you have the right mix of platforms and the right amount of frequency. You need to ensure that you’re hitting your target audience as often as you can and in the right intervals—and with the right amount of time cushion between run times to adjust the campaign, if needed—to achieve success.

The right formula for advertising is complex and depends upon your company, your product or service, and your target audience.

How well is your company understood when the campaign begins? How well is your specific offering recognized at the start of the effort? How familiar is your target audience with your type of solution to its challenges?

Further, is your target audience even aware that it has a challenge? If it does, does it even realize that a solution exists to address the challenge, so that it might be on the lookout for one?

All these factors—and beyond—play into setting the right advertising effort to reach your unique goals.

Advertising Frequency Best Practices

Truly, the optimal frequency for advertisements varies so much based on so many variables that bringing in experts to help you craft the right campaign is critical to success—and to ensuring you don’t waste time and money.

Frequency best practices start at three exposures, per Herbert E. Krugman’s estimation in the 1960s, to Thomas Smith’s hypothesis of twenty exposures in 1885.

Who is right? Both. As we said, it depends.

Optimal Ad Timing

Further, beyond frequency, you need to ensure that the ads you run hit at the right time in your prospects’ buying cycles—and that doesn’t mean just before purchases are made or during the purchasing process, either.

How do you know? Research, of course. (Your favorite!)

Advertising Integration and Coordination

Oh! And your ads should tie into everything else you’re doing in your marketing plan.

After all, a marketing plan done well is a collaborative effort across a set of tactics that returns on investment exponentially better over time than would any single tactic executed alone.

Hey, FrogDog: Any Ad-planning Shortcuts?

Great. Lots to consider. So how do you get all this done, done well, and done so that you don’t waste a ton of time and company funds?

How do you calculate ad frequency for your unique needs? How do you ensure you ads are optimized for your target audience? How do you know if your ads optimize and build from and into your overall marketing effort?

It takes experience and, yes, even for those with the know-how, it takes work. As with every type of effort—from a gym workout to a home remodel—doing marketing haphazardly can be wasteful and damaging.

Need help understanding how to advertise the right way to get results? Contact FrogDog today for a free consultation.

Image courtesy of stocksnap.io Andrew Neel