Advance advertising tactics

THE best thing about guerilla marketing is when you don’t get to spend much for your marketing efforts. However, this will work only for small and medium businesses such as yours. One of my buddies asked me why I think it won’t work for bigger companies.

The answer is simple––when you’re a big company, you have big competitors too. These big competitors have bigger budgets on their arsenal and if you don’t––you’d be at the bottom of the food chain.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) eventually goes big because of marketing efforts, this means that you now have a bigger cash flow and bigger advertising budget.

In turn, the competition you have had during your SME days might be on your tail too. Does this call for drastic measures? Of course not. Keeping your competition out of the spotlight is a big mistake.

My take on this is when you have competition, don’t just pray they’d go away––learn their ways, use it against them. Sounds drastic right?, but no, this is just the way things are. You need to have a friendly competition with your rivals.

The best part of a marketing effort is when you know what to put in your advertising campaigns. This is where the tactic of getting to know your competition kicks in. The more you know about your competition, the better chance you’ll have at gaining grounds. Here in Cagayan de Oro City, the word “advertising” is either misused or over-used.

In advertising, there is what we call as the advertising triad, or in a sense, the advertising quad. Advertising comprise of 3 main key points––the advertiser, who pays for all the expenditures; the advertising agency, the one who does the concepts, designs, leg work and media planning; and of course the media, where we place our advertising collaterals.

There is a spin-off point in the triad making this a quad––the advertising suppliers (AS), who handles all the printing, production and basically everything we need for materials. The fourth key point is what we have a lot of here in the city. 

Advertisers go directly to the advertising supplier and in-turn have their designs put into production there, it’s not that these AS’s can’t handle the layout and printing––they can that’s why they exist.

It’s just that, advertising materials need careful planning and design to make it work––this is the job of the advertising agency. 

These advertising agencies have the technical know-how and design savvy to boost your marketing efforts; this is why corporate giants have their own advertising agencies.

I’m not telling you to go and make your own ad agency, instead find one that’s within your reach and will extract the best in your product lines and use them to design and produce real strategic and worthwhile ads. They have the capacity to make your designs work. 

       

AS’s only have a layout artist whom they rely on for your designs and just basically transfer your initial ideas into the computer. Advertising agencies are more than just that––they conceptualize out of the box ideas that will work for your marketing efforts. The thing is, as an SME you only have so much in your budget that you will opt to go directly to the AS’s. 

We’ll leave it at that for now, try out a different perspective other than yours––I’m sure if you go to an advertising agency and have them take care of your concepts and designs, you will have a load off your work leaving the dirty jobs to the ad agency. Thanks for reading.

Live Life, Rock On!

***

I’d love to hear from you. Email me at shaun_alejandrae_uy@yahoo.com