Contents of the free course 
Introduction
Positioning
The Importance of Setting Objectives
Benefits
Strategy
Have you also considered these aspects of the course?
- Planning
- Advertising
- Promotion
- Your Personal Action Plan
- Further Reading
- Answers to Questions
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Introduction
The aim of this course is to enable you to
. plan a strategy for your advertising and promotion, with
- a clear objective
- a precise target customer
- a key benefit, and
- supporting benefits.
. decide how you should allocate your promotion time and budget.
Although the message in this course is relevant to businesses of all sizes, the main thrust is targeted at the vast majority of businesses which employ less than 50 employees.
Every business needs to get value from its advertising and promotion budget. Hopefully, this course will help to deliver value in your place of work.
The full course is divided into three parts.
Section 2 deals with planning. This comes first because it provides the foundation for success.
Section 3 deals with advertising. This shows how to pack more power into your adverts, brochures, leaflets etc. (The advice here works for direct mail, but that is covered in greater detail in the ‘Direct Marketing’ course.)
Section 4 deals with promotion. This covers a range of other methods of communicating with your customers, including news releases and public relations.
The full course often refers to ‘your’ business. This can mean the business you work in or the business that you own or the business that you manage. If you are not yet working in a business, think of a business that you would like to be in. Use that as the basis for the exercises in the full course.
The full course shows how to create an Advertising and Promotion programme for your business. As you work through the book, you will discover activities which you need to tackle.
Planning
You probably feel that you can’t wait to get started. You want to devise your next prize-winning advertising campaign straightaway.
Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. Great ads result from a great deal of planning. Great disasters begin with an absence of it. So, it’s with planning that we have to start.
What you need is positioning and strategy.
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 Positioning
You position your product or service in a certain place in your customer’s mind. When they think about the product or service, they regard it in a certain way.
For example, a Porsche and a Volvo estate are both cars. But when you think about them, they probably conjure up different connotations.
Exercise 1 What words do you associate with:
a Porsche
a Volvo
They are positioned differently in the marketplace, aren’t they? They are bought by different people and for different reasons.
Both firms are very successful. But, because their products are positioned differently in the marketplace, they require different ads with different messages. Because their messages are precisely aimed at their target customers, the firms have become very successful.
That’s a very happy state of affairs. And the key is positioning.
To emulate them, you need to define your target customer and clearly position your product or service in their mind.
First, you decide on positioning - how you want your typical customer to regard your product/service. Then you develop a strategy to achieve it. The strategy covers what you will say and how you will say it in order to persuade people. Let’s get started.
In this section, we will answer these 6 crucial questions:
1 Who is the target customer you want to reach?
2 Where are they?
3 What do they want?
4 What ‘tone’ will work best?
5 What type of promotional activity will reach your target customer?
6 How much will it cost?
Make your answers as precise and comprehensive as you possibly can.
Your aim is to picture the one person who epitomises your typical customer. Then you can aim your advertising and promotion directly at that person. You can talk to them about what they want to know. That way you have a fighting chance of being able to persuade them.
So, consider typical factors like these:
. how old?
. which sex?
. how do they spend their time?
. what do they earn?
. what do they think? - what do they agree with? What do they disagree with?
. how large is their family?
. what do they read?
. what are their hobbies?
Crucial Question 1
Who is the target customer you want to reach for your business?
Crucial Question 2
Where are they? Where do they live or work?
Remember to concentrate your thoughts on that one typical customer! What do they want most from a product or service like yours? What makes them happy? What makes them sad? What are they worried about? Above all else, what would cause them to recommend you? What price are they prepared to pay?
Crucial Question 3
What do they want?
If you were speaking to someone face to face and wanted to persuade them (not force them) to do something, you might choose your tone of voice carefully.
For example, you might be keen and excited. Or, you might be quiet and soothing. You might present a very logical case. You might be friendly. Or humorous. Or professional. There are lots of choices.
The same applies when you aren’t speaking to someone face to face but, instead, are using written, picture or sound media.
Give thought to the ‘tone’ you will use in your publicity material.
This links strongly to how you want to position your product/service in your target customer’s mind.
Crucial Question 4
What ‘tone’ will work best?
What type of promotional activity will reach your target customer? What do they read/hear/see and take notice of? Where should you put your advertising money?
If you’re not sure, find out! A little bit of money and effort spent on research can save an awful lot of advertising money being wasted.
Crucial Question 5
What type of promotional activity will reach your target customer?
The Importance of Setting Objectives
Whatever the reason for your advertising or promotion, whether to attract new customers or to counter the activities of a competitor, it is important to set an objective. There is no point in paying for expensive communication unless it leads to an acceptable volume of sales.
So, what are your objectives? 
Do you want to:
- attract new customers
- retain old ones
- tell them about a new product/service
- launch a new shop/branch etc ...
- announce a sale
- get customers to buy more frequently
- get them to phone you/write to you/visit you
- get them to buy now rather than later
- encourage them to save your advertisement until a later date when they are in the market for your product /service.
Or what?
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What are your principal objectives?
Now make your objectives more specific.
Complete the boxes. Tick where appropriate.
Enter numbers where appropriate.
. Do you want to:
Get orders?
How many?
Generate enquiries for more information or for a sales representative to call?
How many?
Attract visitors to your exhibition, shop, special event?
How many?
. Will you achieve it with your first approach or
.Will you need to contact them several times?
. How much extra business will you get?
. By when?
. Will you offer a special discount? No/Yes
How much
How will you measure the success of your advertising or \::. promotion?
Of course, you must be able to cope with the extra business that you generate.
Can you cope with all this extra business? How? Remember, it may not be a bad thing to create a ‘queue’ . Some customers have an irresistible urge to stand behind others. But only if you explain the delays to them and regularly remind them of the ultimate benefits.
Benefits
All products or services have two sets of characteristics:
1 ‘Features’ are what it ‘is’.
2 ‘Benefits’ are what it ‘does’ for the customer.
People don’t buy products or services. Nor do people buy the features of those products or services.
They want the benefits that solve their problems. The product or service is merely the means - the vehicle - that provides those vital benefits.
So, people don’t want a CD player. They want more enjoyable listening. Or, memories. Or, status. Or, to keep up with the crowd. The CD player is just a means of achieving those.
Sell the benefits, not the features.
‘Sell the sizzle - not the sausage’.
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What are your Benefits?
Think about one of your products or services. List all its features. Put them in the left hand column below, then convert each of those features into benefits for the customer. Put the benefits in the right hand column, alongside the features.
Features (What it is or has)
Benefits (What it does for the customer)
Which of your benefits is the key benefit - the most important of all to your target customer?
How can you make that key benefit believable? How can you prove it to the customer’s satisfaction? For example, could you use guarantees, demonstrations, testimonials or independent evidence?
What can you say to support your key benefit to make it
more credible?
Your Strategy
You’ve already considered the five main points of your strategy.
1 Your target customer.
2 Your objective.
3 Your key benefit.
4 How you can make that key benefit believable.
5 The ‘tone’ you’ll adopt.
To complete the job, let’s return to ‘positioning’ - how you want to place your product! service in your target customer’s mind. This isn’t easy and it may require a lot of thought. Have a go now but return to this exercise at a later date as your thoughts progress.
What ‘position’ do you want your product/service to have in your target customer’s mind?
Summary
A deep understanding of your customers is crucial to achieving success. You’ve harnessed your knowledge, considered your positioning and started to put together your strategy.
Great! That ought to fill you with a sense of achievement. It should make you feel both ready and committed. Committed to thinking your strategy through and doing some research to increase your confidence in your answers. Ready to start putting it into practice?
That’s what we’ll look at next.
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