Public Relations Tools
Keep in mind that Public Relations play a vital role in any ad campaign. An effective PR effort generates credible publicity to support your advertising message, and is often used as a non-paid form of advertising since the public often regards the press as a more-credible source of information. To that end, PR campaigns often take advantage of the following tools:
Press releases
Publicity Events
Annual Reports
Web Sites
Brochures
Newsletters
Advertising Objectives & The Budget
One key element to a successful advertising campaign is a clearly defined set of objectives.
For example, will the ads generate awareness or will they promote specific benefits? Will they enhance consumer understanding of, or reinforce, other marketing activities?
The other key element is the budget. A brilliant ad campaign that a company can’t afford to implement is as useful as having no strategy at all. While the details of a specific budget will vary from company to company, most budgets are calculated one of 2 ways:
Sales Percentage
This method is based on a fixed percentage of past or expected sales.
For example, say the designated budget is 10% of sales for the previous year, and last year saw $10,000,000.00 in sales. This year’s budget is $1,000,000.00
Task Oriented
This method projects the costs of a complete list of planned activities and allocates the resources accordingly.
Overspending is avoided by evaluating each objective and t he required tasks to achieve those objectives well in advance of spending the time money and energy.
Media
Once the goals and the budget are established, we can consider our options
Newspapers offer immediacy and flexibility of ad size / design with a broad market reach, but have a short life span.
Magazines offer quality reproduction, broad market reach, and selectivity, but ads can be very expensive.
Broadcast
TV offers flexibility, reach, and repetition, and is arguably the dominant advertising medium. TV ads provide national and local impact to very specific market segments, but the ads are temporary and very expensive to produce and to place.
Radio is usually far less expensive than television advertising, and provides similar reach and flexibility.
Direct Mail
Direct mail offers extensive coverage, market selectivity, and personalized information, but is often expensive, and usually has to overcome potential resistance to be effective. Most often encountered as
Catalogs
Sales Letters
Postcards
Outdoor
Probably the oldest media outlet, outdoor advertising offers broad exposure to consumers, but messages are limited by the visibility of the space. Included in outdoor media are
Billboards,
Displays on buildings,
Bus stops,
Busses,
Taxis
Electronic
A.K.A. the Internet. Currently it’s mostly utilized as a direct mail format in the form of eMail Marketing. However, targeted placement of banners / pop-ups / etc. can be considered direct.