Have You Made Your "Strategy Theme Sheet" ?Written by /"Wild Bill/" Montgomery
A "Strategy Theme Sheet" is a self made work-sheet document which helps you identify basis and theme of your advertising upon which you expect consumers to purchase your product in preference to your competition. The "Strategy Theme Sheet" deals directly with your advertising copy. The majority of content of a Strategy Theme Sheet comes from product and consumer demand for which product was designed.The Strategy Sheet is made up of eight subjects: 1) Objective - Your advertising objective will start out with "My advertising will.....". Of course your advertising will perform some kind of function, so you need an action verb next. Some common verbs used are "convince, persuade, and communicate". "Remind" could be another verb used. For example "Have you had you Wheaties today?" would be a Reminder objective. I prefer using "convince objective". It demonstrates confidence and use of persuasion, something that occurs inside consumer's mind. 2) Target Consumer - This is more than a simple statement of demographics. Women, 18 to 45 may be correct, but "Working Mothers, 18 to 45" or "Homemakers 18-45, may be an even better description. Focus your efforts and advertising copy on that specific group. Write out several different phrases describing your target consumer in fine detail. Remember, your talking about a real person here. 3) Product Benefit(s) - Simply put this spotlights features and benefits of product itself. Cost and Quality are your major players when describing your product benefits. Note: Price + Quality = Value! 4) Consumer Benefit(s) - These benefits are reflection of how product affects consumer's life. Making consumer's life or task at hand easier, faster or more desirable. It's how you "make consumer believe" your product's unique advantages for them and their life. Note: Use Product Benefits or Consumer Benefits, not both. 5) Support - One major part of your support statement is how you show, prove, vindicate or corroborate evidence to support your claims about your product. Support is also reason you provide product and consumer benefit(s) you your claiming. Many advertising strategies fail because they failed to support claims of product and consumer benefits.
| | PATIENCE IS A VIRTUEWritten by Roen P. Branham
I want 10 million visitors to my site a day! A common desire, but not a common event. Banner ads don’t work and neither does Internet advertising! A common statement these days, but is it true? Multimillion-dollar Web sites go out of business on almost a daily basis after spending hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising. Why do these companies with sheer girth and unlimited funds tend to fail? The Internet, while composed of millions and millions of surfers, can be a myriad of confusion. It seems that majority of "nay-sayers", and online population in general, want instantaneous results. Not next week, not tomorrow, not five minutes from now, but right now! If they do not get it, then good-bye. There are no second chances. Your strategy had better work right away, or you could see your ad business dry up like Sahara. What is being left out in this simple equation is a complex formula that has withstood test of time, and has been proven to work year in and year out. Test, test, and test some more! A typical campaign sent through postal mail could take anywhere from 3 months to a year before mailing gets completed, and results start to come in. The time involved includes creation of ad copy, testing a list, then maybe testing a different ad with list, and finally deploying campaign. Wow! Three months to a year is a full life cycle for some Internet companies. (No offense to some of my past employers :-)). The full results can take months before they are completed and straggling respondents abound. Throughout an offline (postal mail) campaign, much painstaking time is given to layout, content, and audience for an advertisement. The sluggishness of a postal campaign could be a godsend to advertisers. For time it takes to test a list, you could brainstorm new ideas for campaign. That time is invaluable for making changes, and moving with current market.
|
