An ad agency or advertising agency is a business or service dedicated to planning, handling and creating advertising for clients. These agencies are independent of clients and provide their skills and views to sell client’s services or products.
Advertising agencies can also manage branding strategies, marketing and sales promotions for its clients.
For an advertising agency, it is very important to realize that they can increase sales with their effort. Truly speaking, advertising agencies are minds working on the other side of the internet to increase sales. For a person working as an advertising agent, it is very important to know about the buyer’s psychology.
Those who are working in an advertising agency should know about the various thought processes that go in the mind of a reader or a viewer, a potential buyer. This will definitely help to build your business better.
There are ample of theories to explain the process that goes in the buyer’s mind when he/she goes to purchase anything.
The process is not the same for each buyer and it is sequential.
One of the popular features followed by ad agencies is AIDA.
AIDA is a acronym stands for:
A – Attention
I – Interest
D – Desire
A – Action
The AIDA model states that advertising agency should know how to draw attention of a buyer to get the customer interested by exhibiting its advantages, benefits and features. Interest is followed by desire. It is advertising agency’s duty to create a desire in a buyer to buy a specific product. All three steps of the AIDA policy will help you to stimulate the action towards the purchase of a product. AIDA theory guides and leads you to build a better advertising business. BIG B’s of advertising world have followed AIDA to generate good advertisement campaigns.
Another model called DAGMAR has now increasingly become more popular and comprehensive than AIDA. DAGMAR steps are more defined and easy to apply.
Term DAGMAR is an acronym for Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results. According to DAGMAR, a sale must carry a potential customer through four stages:
I. Awareness
II. Comprehension
III. Conviction
IV. Action
Suppose you are having a service or product and your customer knows nothing about the product.
As your client is unaware of the product, the first step is to make him aware of your product by posting advertisement regarding your product on respective websites.
Comprehension is the second step of DAGMAR. Try to know the answers to these following questions.
a)What is your product about?
b)What are product’s potential features and benefits of product?
c)What will your customer get from your product? And how?
Answers to all these questions will help you to get a potential customer.
Next stage is conviction and this is very important. Convince your customer by telling him the benefits of your product. After convincing, your next step starts i.e. action, which is not controlled by you. You have to depend on the customer. However, your previous actions will have a major role to play.
If you have been able to convince, the customer ad have answered him satisfactorily and then you will definitely be the winner of the day.
Aida And Dagmar - Models For An Advertising Agency
Advertising Agency Software: What You Need to Know
There are many different types of software that an advertising agency needs to conduct business efficiently. Here are some examples of tasks that can be supported by software that is currently available to agencies:
• Create estimates and quotes, invoices and schedules for client approval
• Prepare drafts of a new brochure, print ad, or annual report for review
• Manage client feedback on direct mail materials
• Track key project milestone dates
• Prepare and review media plans
• Prepare a storyboard presentation for a client
• Prepare market research
• Schedule project tasks
• Review rough cuts
• Create project timelines
• Manage external client and prospect requests
• Schedule media
• Time tracking
• Track expenses against estimates
• Plan and analyze resources usage
• Accounting and bookkeeping
To meet these needs, an advertising agency should consider the following:
Graphic Design Software – The agency will need a creative design Application Suite like Macromedia Design Suite or
Adobe Creative Suite to do the basic graphic design, storyboarding and other more creative aspects of producing
advertising material.
Audio and Video Editing Software – If they do the mockups of their radio and television commercials in-house they will need to be able to edit them for client review before they turn everything over to the actual production company that produces the final versions.
Office Applications - Most companies use Microsoft Office for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software since it has become the standard for businesses.
Contact Manager – The agency needs a good contact manager to keep track of all of their client information. Larger agencies may want to opt for a sophisticated customer relations management (CRM) system instead.
Email Client – An agency needs a good email client. Although there are a lot of good email clients available, Outlook is the business standard and has scheduling capabilities for meetings, distribution lists, public folders, the ability to flag all correspondence from specific individual clients and basic content management capabilities.
Project management, Time & Expense Tracking Software – because they work on individual projects, an agency needs software that can track all of the costs associated with each project. The software should be able to track employee time with the ability to use split rates and multiple rates, raw materials, outsourced invoices, etc.
Accounting Software – They need standard accounting software that provides invoicing, accounts receivable, accounts payable and general ledger functions. Larger agencies may need the software to handle multiple currencies and tax codes.
New Possibilities
With the advent of extranets, special software suites have been developed specifically for advertising agencies. They include programs that can provide contact management, time & expense tracking, project management, scheduling and email management. Some of the applications can even interface directly with the firm’s accounting software.
Another innovation is the client service extranet. They have replaced email as the favored forum for sharing and organizing the vast number of documents that are part of all client/agency relationships.
Using an extranet allows all employees, vendors, suppliers, clients and others on the project team to have real time access to all of the pertinent project details from anywhere in the world. Best of all, an extranet makes it possible to share the design documents, audio and video clips with the project online in real time. No more waiting for courier delivery or a face-to-face meeting providing better customer service than ever before possible.
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The Steps to Finding the Perfect AD Agency
A good Ad agency can take a business and propel its success forward in ways that few other business partners can do. If the business is one that will benefit from promotion or advertising, the right AD agency bring to the table the talent, the creativity and the resources to put together just the right advertising campaign and then to deploy it in a way that is a perfect fit for the business’s marketing objectives and for the market that the business serves.
But for every success story of how an AD agency took a business to the next level of success, there are plenty of horror stories of terrible advertising campaigns. A bad advertising strategy not only fail to escalate the sales and success of the business, it may damage the business in the eyes of the consumer and cause damage that could take years to fix.
There comes a time in the life of any business when the decision is made to either employ the business’s first AD agency or to change agencies to find one that can fit the marketing objectives of the company. To be sure that this process results in one of those success stories and not one of those horror tales, some precautions are in order such as…
§ Nail down the company’s marketing objectives before you meet with candidate agencies. Don’t allow the AD agency to dictate what your marketing goals are. By taking charge of what you want before you begin the process, the chances of finding just the right agency are vastly improved.
§ Put together a review committee for the search process of finding the right agency. This team is well informed about the company objectives and the marketing goals that lead to the decision to bring an AD agency on. They can be kept together throughout the selection process so you have wisdom from many different parts of the company management structure to guide the process.
§ Nail down the budget for the project before you put the invitations out to AD agencies to bid on your business. If you know exactly how much you can spend, that will help in the selection of the right agency and in setting their limitations early in the relationship.
§ Establish the schedule of how long you have find an AD agency and then the time frame they have to put a campaign together, get it approved, produced and activated so the outcome is in sync with the company objectives. If you have a major product announcement coming along, the time to start finding an AD agency is months before the week when the product goes public. By timing the project so adequate time is allowed for each step, you don’t rush the process and end up with an inferior promotion which will result in unsatisfactory results.
§ Make sure the AD agencies you invite to bid on the business understand your business, what you do, the product to be promoted, your market and your business image. They should also be aware of previous marketing efforts that were done by the business. If the previous efforts were successful, there may be a strong tie in to the next promotion that would work well. If that last promotion was bad or needs major improvement, the AD agency should know that so they can steer clear of the same mistakes.
By doing some planning up front and being ready when you begin to bring AD agencies in to discuss your goals, you will vastly improve your chances of selecting the right firm. And by finding the right AD agency, you vastly improve the success your advertising will bring to the company which can be a tremendous boost to the corporate profitability.