5.4.1. Steps to a successful advertising campaign

Promotion is a crucial part of the marketing mix that generates the company’s profit. Through promotion, we advertise our product to potential customers and simulate their interest in the buying process. To create an advertising campaign with flying colors, we need to determine five factors including target customers, goals, promotional mix,deployment and measuring success.

Step 1 – Target Customer

Marketers need to comprehend customers’ information. The initial information relates to their age, sex, occupation, habit, buying decision, lifestyle, etc. Moreover, we also collect their opinions about our soap brand because those aid us in determining potential customer segments. Then, we will have an in-depth perspective on target customers. By identifying the right customers, marketers of BLAD Company can pay more attention to them and maximize cost saving for advertising campaigns. Also, we shorten campaign planning and execution time, as well as create appealing advertisements.

Step 2 – Goals.

The promotion campaign is to extend and reinforce the coverage of Baby Soap along with maximize total revenue including return on total cost and profit in a bounded time.

To achieve the goal of Baby Soap promotion campaign, we have to put effort into attaining 2 objectives: build brand awareness and make acceptance of the product.

The first objective is building brand awareness. It is a fundamental foundation to achieve a range of business objectives toward the goal. To put it plainly, when our marketers get success in recalling and recognizing the brand, Baby Soap can attract new customers, make profits, moreover, gain competitive advantages. Additionally, improving brand perception significantly contributes to changing customers’ perspectives on the brand which affects their buying decision-making. If the brand perception is powerful enough to change from customer’s negative perception to positive one, we can succeed in getting one step closer toward them. Therefore, the marketers have to control brand consistency. In other words, all staff and partners have to convey exactly the message in acceptable ways.

The other objective is making acceptance of the product. When customers become familiar and comfortable with a product, they are more likely to make a purchase. Moreover, they contribute to making a positive influence on new customers. Obviously, the more customers we approach, the more opportunities we get to raise brand awareness, also, gain profit. If first-time buyers trust in our brand, keep buying our products, and they are willing to pay, these can be considered their acceptance.

The second objective is broken down into two targets: convert new customers into loyal ones and increase the sales volume. Beside making profit, the marketers need to put effort into retaining customers. As for a new brand as Baby Soap, we should deal with both capturing new customers and retaining existing ones hand in hand. Together with the results of improving brand perception effort, we could try to expand overall brand affinity and reinforce brand loyalty. This means we could not only maintain total cost for reproduction but also gain bigger profit, even expand business scope.

Step 3 – Promotional mix

The promotional mix of this campaign is a useful tool so that Baby Soap becomes well-known and popular product to consumers, especially in the harshly competitive market. As a result, we focus on the outstanding strategies of the promotional mix – advertising and sales promotion.

Firstly, advertising gives a message to a target audience and generates feedback in the form of a sale or other action taken by a consumer. It is also a method of communication that our company uses to convey messages to consumers, especially prospective customers. Thanks to this, customers can realize how Baby Soap differs from its competition or its Unique Selling Point (USP) from the ads. In terms of this aspect, BLAD Company mainly discusses broadcast media, public media and internet media.

Broadcast media relates to launching advertising on television in a short time of approximately 30 seconds. With this advertising, customers are impressed by attractive images and creative content as well without being annoyed. As a result, our company can give customers messages about the product. Moreover, we can take advantage of public media, which promotes our soap on transportation such as taxi, buses. Through transit advertising, BLAD Company extends and reinforces the coverage of Baby Soap actively without too much cost. Additionally, living in the information era, people are influenced by the daily amount of news from Internet media such as email, Youtube, shopping websites (Shopee, Lazada, Tiki, etc), forums, etc. With this approach, we only pay for the low cost but high connection and flexible interaction with our customers

Secondly, our company will use sales promotion to spark interest and create demand for buying products. Therefore, sales promotions are used to motivate customers’ buying or trigger an uptick in purchase in order to reach a benchmark or goal, though they have wide-reaching effects outside of immediate sales. Running sales promotions can help BLAD Company create loyalty and enthusiasm for our brand, increase sales and revenue and offer valuable insights into consumer behavior and price sensitivity.

Step 4 – Deployment.

Deployment of marketing plan is to review, fulfill and timely upgrade plan so that marketing plan can get the best results. This is the crucial step in preparing and launching our new international advertising campaign. In this step, launching the product and conducting the survey will go hand in hand so that marketers can immediately adjust the strategies to fit customers’ preferences. Depending on each type of advertising, there are its own ways to poll customers’ tastes. For example, as TV advertising, marketers need to spend time observing and researching for broadcast time so that the product will be advertised in the prime time to attain a high audience. For other advertising, marketers should conduct other surveys to sound out how customers know about brand and product. Consequently, marketers can timely adjust the advertising campaigns to increase not only sales volume but also brand awareness.

Step 5 – Measuring Success

After putting advertising content on the media, enterprises need to monitor the operation of the advertising campaign to measure its efficiency. To properly evaluate the efficiency of an advertising campaign, our company needs about 6 months to review customer feedback and business results. During this time, the Marketing Department also needs to check the results and re-evaluate the steps in the advertising process to make adjustments or optimizations in case of need and to be ready for the next campaign. In this step, we focus on two main objects: customers and sales staff because customers are the direct goal that our advertising campaign wants to target.

In addition, we realize that the survey through the sales department is also a way to measure the advertising campaign because this department plays an important role in the process of approaching and bringing product information to customers. Therefore, sellers have a direct view of the reaction from customers about the advertising campaign. The evaluation not only bases on the assessment of the environment and the form of advertising but also depends on the psychology of the audience. Thus, marketers need to pay more attention to the measuring success step after implementing the advertising campaign to build a new advertising strategy that is more suitable for a larger number of customers, bringing good advertising efficiency.