Marketing promotion strategy: How to make good advertising?

What are the criteria for a good advertisement? How to make good advertising? The author analyzes several key points of making good advertisements based on his own work practice and combined with case studies for your reference.

To be honest, we haven’t paid attention to purely creative advertising for some time, because in our view, creativity is like an isolated island, and strategy is like flowing water. Creativity separated from strategy is just a display and cannot be reused.

Only with strategy can creative ideas be linked together, but what often shines brightly under the spotlight are isolated islands floating on the water.

01

What is a good advertisement? Everyone has a different perspective, and in our opinion there are two points:

First, it can solve business issues

We once said in "Break Out of the Second-Party Thinking": Marketing requires understanding the business goals of marketing, rather than simply piling up creative ideas.

If you want to be creative, you can just come up with a rough draft, but why is it so difficult to get a rough draft published? It is precisely because it often fails to solve the commercial goals of marketing that it becomes a kind of self-satisfaction.

Good advertisements directly address business issues. Some advertisements may not seem that "creative" (such as most 2B advertisements), but they may have been thought up by a marketing team after countless days and nights.

People who don’t know the truth may say disdainfully, “I can think of a dozen such ideas a day,” but the difficulty of this type of advertising is often not in the creativity, but in figuring out what business problem to solve and how to solve it.

Second, it can achieve a higher input-output ratio

The previous point talks about the goal, and this point talks about the limiting conditions.

If the budget is 1 billion, then marketing and advertising are not difficult (at least getting exposure is not difficult). It is because of the budget constraints that excellent advertisers can discover which channels have a high ROI and what content can trigger more discussions.

It is ridiculous to talk about goals without considering the conditions.

In our opinion, a better situation is that the brand’s content can spontaneously gain wide exposure and discussion without having to spend much effort on promotion.

There are many operational techniques involved, especially in the field of social marketing.

In addition, we also believe that in most cases, if a lot of user education is still needed after an advertisement is released, it is either that the brand itself has not chosen the right business track, or that there is a problem with the content of the advertisement. High-quality advertisements should not require user education.

02

In view of the above two points, let us try to analyze how to make good advertisements.

First, how does advertising solve business issues?

The difficulty lies not in how to solve business issues, but in how to identify business issues. Once the problem to be solved is found, the advertising expression is actually ready to come out, just as natural as opening the door before entering a room.

Unfortunately, we believe that there is no universal methodology for identifying the right business topics. We can only rely on human research and analyze specific situations.

Especially for agency companies, if they do not put in enough effort, they will not be able to accurately identify the problem. Asking good questions is much harder than answering them.

But there is still a method that everyone can learn from, which is to think in higher dimensions.

Don't limit yourself to the KPIs and business issues at hand. Try to look at industry competition and development from the boss's perspective. This way you can figure out what the brand really wants and what motivates you to take a series of marketing actions.

Second, how can advertising achieve cost-effectiveness?

After last year’s Cannes Advertising Festival, we said in “Hacker Advertising – A New Way to Subvert Traditional Marketing” that brand advertising promotions must learn to invade from one media space to another, so that information can be spread across platforms.

In fact, excellent advertisements break through the single-dimensional content and give people a rich experience. You can choose to provide a multi-dimensional sensory experience, or you can provide a multi-platform dimensional experience through techniques.

Multi-sensory experience from vision to hearing - Coca-Cola advertisement

In addition to the creation of advertising content itself, we have three small thoughts on advertising communication for your reference (we use the award-winning works of the Cannes Film Festival in the past two years as illustrations):

1. Get users to take action

If advertisements are only viewed passively by users, then the moment the advertisement ends means the interruption of dissemination, which makes it difficult for dissemination to break out of the established framework.

To gain additional exposure, users must not only receive the information conveyed by the advertisement, but also respond and take action to the information. The action here does not refer to purchasing, but rather to user action that extends the communication life cycle.

For example, suppose the Chinese copy in an outdoor hard advertisement reads "Search for XXX". After the user sees it, he searches for the keyword on his mobile phone and a new advertising page pops up. In this way, the original outdoor hard advertisement is transformed into a mobile advertisement, extending the life cycle of the advertisement itself.

Guiding users to search for information - Budweiser advertising

2. Let users spread the word

The above mentioned that advertising encourages users to take action, gain deeper interactions and longer exposure, while what is discussed here is mobilizing users themselves to spread recommendations.

Ordinary users are usually in the long tail part of the communication chain and are in a passive position to receive information, making it difficult for them to influence each other and promote communication.

The most common method to get users to spread information is through UGC, allowing users and new elements to participate, thereby forming new materials with user imprints. This way, users will be motivated to share and spread the information on their own, which is equivalent to mobilizing the long-tail communication power.

Blank page - Lebanese newspaper advertisement

3. Let users discuss

If an advertisement can trigger discussion among users, then the content of the advertisement will naturally form a topic and attract more user groups to join in the discussion. From this perspective, the advertisement is no longer just an advertisement, but an event.

Generally speaking, if an advertisement wants users to discuss, the most important thing is the choice of content. This requires marketers to find the conflict points between the brand and user emotions. This conflict point should be interpreted from multiple angles, so as to absorb the views of all parties and attract more users to participate in the discussion.

Needless to say, Nike's most popular advertisement in the past two years

In fact, finding conflict points is not complicated and there are traces to follow. The most explosive topics are nothing more than social issues and historical controversies.

Social issues can naturally attract traffic. For example, it is college entrance examination time recently, so topics such as hard work and talent, family background and self-struggle, personal talent and interpersonal relationships can easily arouse public participation in discussion.

These visible topics are cyclical, and after going through a few rounds you will find that the topics are always the same, but they are presented to you in a different form each time.

Of course, in foreign countries, they are more likely to take advantage of conflicts with competitors. For example, Burger King often picks trouble with McDonald's. There are also some current political topics, which I won’t talk about. In short, we must always pay attention to content risks.

Clowns (McDonalds) will scare children - Burger King ad

Conclusion

After being in the advertising industry for some years, we have increasingly distanced ourselves from cool ideas, and believe that only advertisements that can solve commercial issues in a cost-effective manner are good advertisements, and cool creative presentations are just the icing on the cake of an advertisement.

However, methodology is always easier said than done. There is always a huge gap between theory and practice. Only by continuous practical attempts can we cross this gap.

Related reading:

1. Online marketing promotion: How to use H5 activities for brand promotion!

2. Brand promotion and marketing丨How to make users remember your brand?

3. Brand promotion: How to lay out the content marketing matrix?

4. Brand promotion: Brainwash advertising has no effect at all!

5. Brand promotion, how to formulate a brand portfolio strategy?

6. A collection of phenomenal marketing and promotion cases in the first half of 2019!

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

Source: Spread Gymnastics