Advertising is NOT Marketing...
...in its entirety. It is one of the last parts to consider, believe me.
Picture the scene. You are a brand going in to meet your agency or your marketing consultancy, and you tell them, like any brand, you want help with your marketing.
There are a range of questions/asks you may have. From experience they fall into a couple of typical categories.
The questions where you think you know exactly what you want and need…
“We need to set up PPC and Google Ads to get a good ROI”
“Our Facebook and IG ads need setting up properly as they’re not getting enough sales”
“We need to keep in touch with our clients and keep on top of our CRM campaigns.”
& Then there are the questions that are more open ended, or so it may seem…
“We need to grow and get our message out there”
“We need to get a marketing strategy in place across digital marketing”
The thing is with all these though, they are all advertising dressed up as marketing, or more blatantly, just managing the communication (advertising) part. You know, the visible bit where you show and tell the world about your product through a particular medium, people respond to it/see it and bear you in mind to buy your product or service.
Advertising as marketing is a standard misconception in the industry, let alone to the wider commercial world.
One of my favourite quotes is from Abraham Lincoln :
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.”
Marketing is the overall process of sharpening the axe first - generating growth through identifying the product fit, research, value proposition, knowing the audience, location, pricing and other factors. THEN chopping down the tree with advertising when all that is identified, so you can grow.
Classically trained marketers know about the 4Ps, seemingly rudimentary yet excellent. For those who don’t let me recap; 62 years ago now, academic E. Jerome McCarthy nailed it with his 4 Ps marketing mix. Product. Price. Place. Promotion.
There have been a number of variations since, with thought leaders attempting to effectively iterate it with 7Ps (don’t ask me what the other 3 are, it really does not matter). 8Ps (definitely don’t know this one). 4Cs. Whatever…
Product - The WHAT. The product (or service) being sold. How does it manifest. If online is it through an app or a webinar? DOES THE SITE WORK? If a physical product, what is the packaging, what do you want it to be for your audience?
Price - The HOW MUCH position. This is a whole other article in itself and would not profess to be the pricing expert. But with the welcome advent of behavioural science in marketing, it has been more widely considered. Tactics to abhor cost, left hand charm pricing, payment terms. Annual v Monthly. And where it fits in the competitive space. If you deliberately low-ball - you are setting a precedent from the start. Ryanair style. Also the price of actually doing it for the customer. If you are selling a safari experience at cheap price for example, it is not good for the customer if the cost and effort to get there is high and not factored in.
Place - Where is this product or service? Is it on the shelves in Sainsbury’s, or is it in this far flung safari experience? It also includes logistical consideration e.g. if I am a DTC ecommerce business, where is the warehouse and where are the customers in relation to the warehouse, what are the implication of access to the product?
So yeah, plenty of axe sharpening as essential preparation, and we have not yet even touched on promotion.
Basically - plan ahead then place adverts. e.g. If your website is not set up properly to convert, capture data or sales, or even tracked, the axe is not sharp enough. You have to hold off from sending human eyeballs in that direction until you are ready.
So assuming you have followed the Process, you are now clear on your product and its positioning, pricing etc. Now you can effectively plan how it is going to be communicated to your target audience and where…
Back to this 4th P. Promotion. The quadrant that people celebrate the most.
More akin with the advertising we all think we know and love. Time to work it harder. Create a criteria and an advertising plan based on the determined 3 Ps.
A good strategy is to separate the marketing plan derived from the initial Ps, and then that informs what you want the ads TO DO. e.g. very simply put
“We want to [marketing plan] and to do this we must [advertising plan]”
E.G. “We want to increase our share of voice/market for our online XYZ product. > Therefore, we want to reach an audience of XXm. to do this. We will use Facebook, PPC, Online Video, then TV to reach these audience”.
Media Planning is a whole other article so will not get into that here either. That is Promotion focussed though, with Place also considered for strategic placements, e.g. you want to advertise to City executives, you may buy an ad on a Waterloo & City Line car with a page in City AM.
What I would say though, in a world of seductive sales presentations and media channel evangelism - Do not let the tail wag the dog!
In an article I wrote for Mediatel : Don't confuse access to a self-serve platform with a strategy I go into this in more detail. TLDR : with access to all the tech platforms within reach of any fingertips, qualified fingers or not, there is a danger of the platform dictating a strategy with various campaign building tools. As beguiling and user friendly as they are, they are of course designed to hypnotise your media spend skew to their platform. E.G Facebook may well, would you believe it, recommend some Instagram activity!!
When approaching this suite of tools, run it through your own qualification criteria. Does it help achieve my goal? Is it the most cost effective way of reaching these target prospects? Am I actually advertising in the place where my target audience is?
As a business leader or marketeer, you can bet your KPIs will be better placated and achieved if you show a range of media channels activated with supporting rationale. The product clearly understood. The price according to the audience. The place where it will be available, and where it will be promoted, for example.
With all this in place, the axe should be sharp enough to fell even the biggest trees.
SA