Creating Impactful Advertising Campaigns: Tips and Tricks
In 2023, brands and businesses worldwide spent a whopping $733 billion on advertising, to increase sales, boost their businesses, and establish a lasting brand identity. The aftereffect?
Well, their sentiments can be accurately summed through this quote by John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half!
What’s astonishing is that this 19th-century quote is still relevant today! The majority of businesses that brainstorm, use modern state-of-the-art tech to gauge customer sentiments, and develop targeted advertising campaigns fall flat on their face and fail miserably.
Let alone bring in sales, these campaigns fizzle out before the dawn of the next day! They don’t get the results expected, sales hit an all-time low, and even after a seemingly good strategy, nothing seems to work! On the other hand, there are brands whose advertising campaigns hit it off almost immediately and are remembered for years.
So what magic potion do these brands use that the former don’t? The answer may be more obvious than you think. It lies in impactful advertising campaigns.
We are a social media marketing agency in Ahmedabad (Litmus Branding) and we often get asked, “What do you do differently that every advertising campaign clicks?” Well, the answer is simple, we get the basics right!
In this blog, we have put together all the tips and tricks that go into the making of an impactful, viral advertising campaign. Read on to know more.
7 Tips and Tricks for Creating a Stellar Advertising Campaign
Here are 7 strategies that brands can adopt to create impactful advertising campaigns, that click.
1. Adopt Nostalgia Marketing
People distinctly remember what they saw as children, everything word to word, the brand color, the face of the brand, the music, the jingles. Appeal to your target audience through a touch of nostalgic advertising campaigns. Coca-Cola does it repeatedly and brilliantly, with its Y2K nostalgia-invoking “It’s Gonna Be Me” advertisement. Nostalgia is the best way to remind consumers about your brand, lift brand recognition, and renew brand loyalty. Brands like Maggie which were under public scrutiny came back with the “We miss you” and “Welcome back Maggi” campaigns and came back to form through just these two nostalgia-led advertising campaigns.
2. Add The Pixie Dust of Storytelling
Now who doesn’t like a good story? Though print media is the most difficult to crack, but the worth of a well-told story-led advertising campaign is millions! Dettol captured it excellently in its hand sanitizer print advertising campaign where it showed what all a kid’s hand could have touched from pets, insects, books, and whatnot. It clicked with mothers who are concerned about the well-being of their children.
A well-told story appeals in a way that nothing else can, it solves customer problems in a way only they understand.
3. Understand the Medium
The place where most brands often go wrong is using the same type of advertising campaign for different mediums. But unfortunately, this doesn’t work! What works in print doesn’t work in the digital space, what works on television (age group 31–50 years) might not as well on Instagram (age group 18-34 years).
Each medium requires a different approach and a different advertising strategy. Hence brands need to team up with professional branding agencies to develop medium-oriented advertising campaigns that click.
4. Do the Groundwork
This is where you need to get back to basics. Who is your audience? What is their pain point? What problems are you solving for them? A successful advertising campaign starts with a deep understanding of your target audience and ends by letting them know that your brand understands their needs, desires, and pain points.
It’s less about flashy creativity and more about aligning your messaging with what resonates with your audience.
When the core messages are clear, voila you have your audience! Staying grounded in the fundamentals is the best way and only way to create campaigns that not only capture attention but also drive long-term engagement and brand loyalty.
5. Speak Your Audience’s Language
Swiggy’s chaotic mem-fest ad had a lot of influencers and garnered a massive 9.2 million views. This ad targeted the “influencer” inspired audience. With the Gen Z and Gen Alpha generation making purchasing decisions, it is obvious that this appealed to them.
Now can millennials be enticed by this? Not quite! Millennials would need a mellowed-down version with a way different approach. When you are clear on your target audience, everything falls into place organically, and the results—exponential. That brings us to the next very important point—advertising goals.
6. Know Your Advertising Goals
While the end result is money, not all advertisement campaigns are to rake in the moolah! Like investments, where you invest in equity, fixed deposits, and insurance, your advertisement investment should also be diversified. Those who set goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don’t.
The biggest advantage of setting different advertising goals is that you get a clear idea of the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and can monitor what type of campaign increases sales. You can set marketing goals for brand awareness, boosting SEO, growing social media presence, and many more, and check if a particular campaign appeals to your audience.
7. Collaborate with An Expert Ad Agency
When you partner with a branding agency or a social media marketing agency that has a proven experience across different industries, you gain a perspective that can often be missing from an in-house approach. Experienced agencies know how what has worked in the past, what’s in trend, and where the customer sentiments point. They take your brand beyond surface-level promotion.
For example, at Litmus Branding, our experience with brands across sectors and domains allows us to identify subtle yet impactful aspects, like how color psychology influences consumer behavior, how cultural nuances in messaging resonate differently with diverse audiences, and how different audiences respond differently to humor, memes, and digital experiences.
Wrapping Up
Every year brands invest billions in advertising campaigns, and these ads end up being seen till the “Skip Ad” button appears. But, ads that hit on emotion, humor, or hope linger way past the “skip” button and manage to stay in the audience’s minds.
Advertising campaigns are less about what you want to showcase and more about what your audience needs.
The above-mentioned tips and tricks will help you make stellar advertising campaigns, but getting the basic right and judging the pulse of the audience needs expertise and experience. We understand that even in a world where everyone’s itching to skip, the right story will still make people stop, watch, and remember, and at Litmus Branding we do exactly that.
If you are looking for an ad agency or social media marketing agency, in Ahmedabad then, get on a call with our team at Litmus Brading today, because we have done it before, and we do it best.
