How to promote & advertise your product or business?


What is advertising?

The term advertising comes from the Latin word “adverto”. “Adverto” basically means to turn around. By turn around we mean turn around and look because your attention is grabbed by something.

Simply put advertising is grabbing attention and then sharing some message with the person whose attention has been grabbed.

Advertising has many parts. During the advertising process many decisions have to be taken. These decisions include:

  • Deciding what objectives the advertising should accomplish?
  • Deciding the advertising budget?
  • Deciding whom the target audience is for the advertising?
  • Deciding what media will be used for the advertising?
  • Deciding the actual copy of the advertisement

How to design the advertising objectives?


One may tend to think that the point of all advertising is to make the consumer buy the product that the advertiser is selling. However, there may be many other reasons why advertising is done. Some of the reasons are:

  • To motivate the consumer to behave in a particular way…for example: to motivate the consumer to take up trial purchases from a store.
  • To change the attitude of the people…for example: some advertisements might be designed to make the youth think that drinking aerated drinks is “cool”
  • To create awareness about new products and ideas…for example: To create awareness about certain products that are new to the market like a new “easy cleaner” etc.
  • Image creation and positioning… for example: We have discussed positioning in the previous pages. Some advertisements are designed with the aim of positioning themselves in the mind of the consumers.

Let the above examples give you an idea of the kind of advertising objectives you can have. You must choose your advertising objectives on basis of your business and your situation in the market and in the minds of the consumers.

Before you decide your budget, make your advertisements or choose your media etc. the first thing you need to do is decide what your advertising objectives are.

How to decide the budget for advertising?


Many different ways are used for deciding the budget for advertising. Some methods are as crude as using the same budget for advertising as your competitors or using a fixed percentage of the turnover as the advertising budget etc. However these methods of determining the budget are crude and independent of the advertising plan and what has to be achieved though the advertising.

Let the following questions guide you when deciding the budget allocated for advertising:

  • Who is the audience intended to be reached by the advertising?
  • What is the size, location of the audience etc.?
  • What are the media available for delivering the advertising message?
  • In the advertising plan, is there a need for multiple releases of the advertisement? Or is the advertisement to be released only once?
  • If there are multiple releases, what should the frequency of the releases be?

From the above questions it is apparent that the advertising plan has to be known and the research about the target audience etc. has to be done before the budget is prepared.

How to decide whom the target audience is for advertising?


This subject has been discussed on the previous pages of this article, so we shall not discuss it here. In case you jumped some pages you could go back and check how to identify your target market by clicking here.

Deciding the media that can be used?


There are many possible media that can be used for advertising. The choice of media “mainly” depends on your target audience. You have to choose a media that your target audience is most exposed to.

The next factor used when deciding the kind of media to be used is price. Some media are costly and some are cheap.

Some of the media are stated below:

  • Newspapers
  • Magazines
  • Trade journals
  • Direct Mail
  • Audio/Visual/Audio – visual Media:
  • Radio
  • Television
  • Cinema
  • Outdoor hoardings etc.

These are just the very obvious media that are out there. If you are a small business and most of these media are out of your advertising budget, you could be creative and invent other kinds of media.

For example: You could talk to your newspaper distributor and distribute your advertising message on a pamphlet along with the morning newspaper.

To get an idea about what kind of alternate media you could use, check out these links:


How to design the advertisement copy?


When we say “copy” we mean the advertisement. The advertisement copy means the whole advertisement.

What should the advertisement copy basically achieve?

An advertisement copy should basically achieve the following:

The advertisement should interest the buyer:

Once the target audience is known, it can be predicted what will appeal to the target audience. It can be predicted what kind of add will grab the attention of the target audience etc. This information has to be gathered about the target audience and the advertisement has to be made in such a way that it “grabs the attention” of the target audience.

The audience should interpret the advertisement in the way indented:
Every one has different perceptions of the world. Every one understands things differently. As an advertiser you have to make sure that you know how your target audience thinks and interprets things. You need to make sure that the message that your advertisement gives is not interpreted in any way other than the way you would like it to be interpreted. The message in your advertisement should not convey something other that what you want it to convey. The message should not offend your target audience.

Advertisement should influence the audience:

Customers have different attitudes towards different products. What they choose to buy and what they choose not to, depends on their attitudes with respect to the products. If these attitudes can be influenced the customer can be influenced. This is what the prime purpose of an advertisement is, to change the attitude of the customer about the advertiser’s product. So an advertisement has to be so designed that it does not directly affect the customers “purchase behavior” but it subtly changes the attitudes of the people in favor of the advertiser’s products.

The above stated are the three things that an advertisement copy should basically achieve.

To understand how to design advertisements in more detail you could go though the following articles:


New age marketing!


Everything we have explained in this article is just the basics of marketing. There is lot more to learn. New developments are constantly being made in the field of marketing. Now-a-days, because of marketing that is present everywhere, people have become immune to marketing. They are not motivated by advertisements any more.

To overcome this, a new breed of marketing is being developed. It is in it's early stages yet, but it is growing. It is called "viral" or "buzz" or "word-of-mouth" marketing. The idea is that, people do not believe advertisements anymore. They do not trust advertisements anymore. So, if you want to advertise, you will have to do it though other people. People will trust what their friends have to say even though they will not trust advertisements.