Before you Begin
First and foremost, the most important role of any and all marketing campaigns is intent. What is your intent? Are you trying to create or strengthen brand awareness? Are you simply looking for a cost per lead? Are you looking for a general 3 to 1 return on investment and it makes no difference how you get there? These are the questions that every company owner and/or marketer should be required to answer before embarking on an ad campaign.
It is also important to understand any laws or regulations that could apply to an advertiser’s product, service or industry before strategizing a creative brand and message. Once a marketer understands words and implications that are not allowed, it becomes much easier to draft an effective message that will be legal and long lasting. For example, this can be as simple as saying “No side effects” or “Very Limited and Minor Side Effects”.
Stating and acknowledging these two important components before you being is critical as it defines both the scope and limitations of what you can and may say.
Our Creative Process
Creative and media placement are equally important when creating an effective marketing campaign that can be long lasting and generate strong results. This applies to Direct Response and Branding campaigns while reaching across all markets and industries alike. The wrong creative message to the right demographic will not produce strong results, similar to how a strong creative message that hits the wrong audience will not work either.
We go through a detailed questionnaire with all our new clients to uncover a variety of pointers that will ultimately affect our messaging, such as:
- product/service benefits
- objections
- past creative and media experiences and results
- competition discovery
- legal/regulatory conditions
After this detailed discovery process occurs, we then work closely with our professional writers on ideas and messaging. We combine our proven creative formulas with our client’s feedback to create masterpieces.
Copywriting
At RMG, we know that strong direct response copy is half of the recipe for long-lasting successful campaigns. It can be as simple as changing one or two words in a script to elicit an uptick in response. We use some of the best direct response writers in the industry who have generated some massive results on campaigns that started out at modest investment levels. We use a combination of direct response formulas and test creative to find the best spot to pull leads. As we know copy can grow stagnant if not continuously updated and changed to elicit interest, so we strive to stay ahead of the curve for our clients so that campaigns never fall short of expected results.
Production
With radio and television, an advertiser will want to invest in professionally produced creative. The process of production is important because it’s the final piece in completing the creative puzzle. With these 2 marketing mediums specifically, the most popular options are to produce 30s (30 second spots) or 60s (60 second spots). For Radio, 60s are the best way to start a campaign when trying to get your message out, develop response and to become branded. With radio being and audio medium, it’s important to have that full amount of time to deliver your message and be able to repeat the contact information so the listener can process it for response. Once the message holds a presence for a period of time, then adding 30s and 15s can be valuable. Having all of these completed during the original production and writing process is valuable for the advertiser from a cost perspective. Television is a little different. Television production is often more expensive than radio, because of the filming logistics and volume of editing that is required. Many times, a 30 is efficient in TV because it’s a visual marketing medium, so the viewer has time to process the message and the contact info is running throughout the entire spot.
With both Radio and TV, it’s important to pick an experienced group of professional talent to bring your vision and writing to life. When investing in an advertising campaign, and this being the final portion of the creative process – it is not the time to ‘go cheap’.