What is strategy exactly?
Think of strategy as the backbone of your advertising campaign, holding all of the pieces together. It is how you are going to achieve your core objectives, which is why you need a sold idea of what strategy approaches you will include, in order for your tactics, and creatives to reach their highest potential. There are a handful of different strategy tactics; highlighting the clients or products benefit, appealing to logic or emotion, product oriented strategy that focuses on features and USP, or consumer oriented strategy that fucoses on brand image, attitude, lifestyle, and values. When working on strategy, whether it be for a client’s campaign, yearly schedule, or rebranding plan you want to make sure to hit the major steps. This includes concise research on your clients products market and where their at, insights on your client, their product, and consumers. After which you are ready to start on your creative brief.
This will cover everything your team needs to know to create the tactics. It makes sure that everyone is on the same page, and everything flows together. From this you can start on your brand strategy and communication planning, involving your brand guide, and timely scheduling of tactics. Lastly you want to make sure to incorporate evaluation of the progress your work has made for your client through the measure of advertising effectiveness, and business strategy. This is arguably the most important part of strategy, because this is what you are getting paid for, and how you know what you’re doing is working.
Why you need great strategy.
Strategy is how you are going to reach your objectives. Evaluation and the end of every client project that will show them exactly how your work benefits them and their brand. Clear strategy will make evaluation easier, and more exact. This is where consumer data, website and social media analytics, GRP’s come into play. Good strategy clearly identifies who the advertising will target, when, where, and what your tactics need to be, and both qualitative and quantitative goals.
Don’t forget!
As in all aspects of the advertising industry, there are a handful of tips and tricks for professionals of all levels. All good strategy approaches stem from thorough, supported, relevant research. You need to know who your targeting, what interests them, and how to incorporate that into your advertising campaign. And secondly, spend wisely, this apply to time and money. You want to make sure to pace your work to the end, it’s a marathon, not a race. PEST and SWOT are also very helpful strategy outlines to follow, both of which are linked down below.
By Rachel Cramer
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