The advertising process – communication with the public a promotion message to transmit it through a medium – includes five steps.
- Set objective(s) of promotion. Promotion campaigns can be planned to achieve either one of the marketing objectives or several objectives at the same time. They might include improving sales, improving brand image of products, increase the market share, etc.
- Decide on the advertising budget. The question is how much will the firm spend on promotion? The truth is that successful promotional campaigns drive sales growth and can increase market share of a business. High growth of promotion spending of many multinational companies rich in cash in recent years confirms the importance of promotion. The bigger the advertising budget, the more media choice there is. Limited resources will restrict options to the cheaper media.
- Create an advertising campaign. The firm will need to decide what sort of advertising campaign to run and what audience to target. Many popular advertising techniques used in promotional campaigns include bargain appeals, celebrity endorsement, comparative advertising, direct response advertising, feel good factor, guarantees, numerical or scientific claims, sex appeal, slogans, etc.
- Select the advertising media to use. There are six main media used for advertising including television, radio, cinema, print (newspapers / magazines), Internet, outdoor (posters / banners / billboards). Which one(s) is the firm going to use to advertise?
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the promotional campaign. Many promotional campaigns are difficult to measure in terms of actual sales generated. So, have the objective(s) of promotion been met?
Elements in the communication process
Effective communication with customers is an important part of being a customer-oriented business organization. This is what the communication process looks like:
- Sender. This is a business organization sending the message to current and potential customers.
- Encoding. The message coded in a symbolic form.
- Message. Messages might include pictures and symbols that the sender transmits to the receiver. Message execution style is usually about slice of life, lifestyle, fantasy, mood or image, musical, personality symbol, technical expertise, scientific evidence, testimonial evidence, etc.
- Media. The communication channel mainly including television, radio, cinema, print (newspapers / magazines), Internet, outdoor (posters / banners / billboards)
- Decoding. A receiver assigns specific meaning to symbols encoded by the sender which should be mutually understandable.
- Response. The receiver of the messages will react in a certain way after being exposed to the advertising message.
- Feedback. The receiver shall respond to the sender communicating opinions, attitudes, decisions, points of view, etc.
- Noise. This includes any disturbances, distortions or unplanned events during the entire communication process e.g. competitor launching similar promotional campaign.
In summary, when planning an advertising campaign, any business organization will need to go through this aforementioned process incorporating all the elements from the communication process as well.
