3 Steps to Developing Your Own Advertising Campaign

Latest Snickers’ Ad Campaign

If you’re like many start-up companies, you might not have the budget for an ad agency to develop a marketing message and advertising campaign.  Luckily for us, we have a good friend in advertising who’s worked on multi-million dollar campaigns for Fortune 100 companies and is helping to craft the jT story.  While there’s no substitute for his creativity, training and real world experience, he did educate us on the process agencies use to deliver successful ad campaigns.

1. Decide on one benefit of your product or service that you want to communicate to your audience.  This is key to ensure that your message is clear and not cluttered.  “It is important to note the benefit is not a feature of the product,” our mentor cautions, “it is the upside customers get from using the feature.”
2. Create a Big Idea. The big idea houses your benefit in a unique way that allows you to create ads in any medium. The Big Idea often uncovers a truthful insight of the product. Let’s use the most recent Snickers campaign as an example. The benefit is that Snickers satisfies your hunger. Now for the Big idea, they found a truthful insight that we can all relate to, “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry.”
3. Once you have decided on your benefit and created your Big Idea, it’s time to execute. This simply means it’s finally time to come up with some ads. While creating your ads, remember to convey your benefit and make sure they fall under your big idea. In the Snickers tv ads, they decided to depict how people are “not themselves when they’re hungry”, by cleverly showing regular people transforming into clumsy, cranky or irritable celebrities. When creating ads, your goal should be to make them interesting and memorable, the key to great ad copy.

Once the benefit and big idea are set, you can develop a whole host of delivery mechanisms to get this campaign to your customers.  From print to internet banner ads, TV spots, billboards, social media interactive apps, etc., all of your executions will reinforce your one benefit.  With enough exposure and assuming you nailed the key benefit, a segment of your target audience will also be convinced and take the action laid out in your original objective.

Last piece of advice from our expert is to collaborate often, “Working in a team will flesh out the best benefit and the best message to your intended audience.”  If you are a one person operation, bounce ideas off friends and family throughout the process above.  Show them the product and features and have them tell you the major benefits.  “You will be surprised how many people are willing to help when they see the passion you have for your work.”