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Sonoma Family Life Magazine

Six Step Checklist to Advertising Success

6 Easy Steps to More Effective Advertising Campaigns

Creating an advertising campaign can seem overwhelming. There's always so much to do. Here's a quick 6 step outline that will help you keep track of the most important things. We call it the GAMETE Method (You may remember from biology that gametes combine to create new growth.)  Print it out and keep a copy in each Campaign folder to help you plan and then execute your new growth strategy.

How to Create New Sales Growth

1. Goal

  • What do you want to have happen as a result of this investment?
  • What makes this investment worth it-in a month, 6 months, a year?

2. Audience/Venue

  • Who's the target audience? What are they like? What does their life revolve around/what drives them?
  • Who already buys what you want to sell-who else do you want to reach?
  • What's their buying cycle like?
  • How do you reach them. Which venues/media reach this audience? Which venue caters to this audience?

3. Message

  • What action do you want them to take?
  • What needs to be said to this audience to get action? (Call for more info, check out website, ...?)

4. Execution and Timing

  • How the message/ad actually looks. (Headline, impact, hierarchy, graphics photo-within context of magazine)
  • When should it happen?
  • How will it play against the anticipated; time of year, competition, general mood/economy, available time for this audience to take action?

5. Tracking

  • Devise a good Tracking System, then test it.
  • Tracking should answer 'How did the new customers come?' and 'Why didn't the others come too?'
  • Future ad plans plans based on bad information will cost you big money. Tracking system=  online + walk-in + call-in + 'word of mouth'  results.
  • Beware of false positive and false negatives, and second generation results.
  • Polling, coupon returns, memory, web traffic may or may not work for your business. (Just because it's easy to put a dotted line around an ad, doesn't make it worth it for the customer.)

6. Evaluation

Now that you have good data, ask yourself 'Was this the right...'

  • 1. Goal?
  • 2. Audience/Venue?
  • 3. Message?
  • 4. Execution and Timing?
  • 5. Tracking?

Now that you've covered all the bases, you can fine tune your plan for the next campaign and focus on what will help you the most!


Call us at Family Life Magazine to customize your marketing strategy at 707-586-9562.