How to Create an Advertising Plan for Your Company

Digital ad spending is on track to reach more than $645 billion by 2024. 

Companies spend a lot of time and money creating ads designed to attract customers, but sometimes, advertising strategies fall short. 

How can you craft an advertising plan that works and helps you meet your business goals? Start with the tips below. 

Create an Executive Summary

Your executive summary is a short summary of your company, including the business name and your mission statement. It also highlights key points in your marketing plan report. 

This summary should be the beginning of your advertising plan. It should be concise and convey the contents of the report in an engaging way. 

You can use a template to write an advertising strategy, but make sure to tailor it to fit your brand. 

Conduct the Research

How well do you know your company’s strengths and weaknesses? Have you analyzed your competition to see what they’re doing well and where you can improve? 

Do you know your target market and how to reach them? 

Research is a vital part of your marketing strategy. Without data, how can you tell what you’re doing well and what you need to fix? 

Perform a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Identifying these strengths and weaknesses outlines your business’s potential for growth and helps with marketing and planning. 

Understand the Trends

Keeping up with the latest advertising trends is also an important part of business advertising. 

For instance, a recent HubSpot survey revealed that 57% of people surveyed disliked the advertisements they saw before a video. In addition, 43% of respondents didn’t even watch the ad. 

Knowing how to relate to your target market means understanding what they want. And recently, advertisers have been looking for ways to break through the “digital noise” and online ads that people see each day. That means understanding the latest trends. 

One of the more recent advertising trends businesses are implementing in their marketing plan is going back to traditional methods of reaching out. Keep these in mind when crafting your marketing strategy. 

Use the Right Tools

Have you collected enough data to create a buyer persona? Do you know which marketing strategies are best for reaching that audience? 

Conducting research and tracking analytics isn’t easy unless you have the right tools. For instance, you might want to use keyword planning tools to enhance your SEO or analytics tools to measure your KPIs. 

Technology can even combine the different aspects of a marketing strategy into one tool, making ad buying simple. You can learn more about cross channel intelligence and omnichannel advertising here. 

Create an Effective Advertising Plan

If your current advertising strategy isn’t working, or if you’d like to take steps toward growing your business, it all starts with a solid advertising plan. Use these steps to gather the necessary data. Once you have a better understanding of your company’s position and how to reach your goals, you can formulate a plan designed to reach them. 

To find more business advice, be sure to read some of our other posts. We cover a variety of topics, including useful business products and services. 

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.