Goals of Advertising
Advertising can influence how consumers interact with brands, purchase products and refer their friends. Setting advertising goals can help companies achieve financial goals and connect with their customers. Knowing some of the common goals of advertising can help a business decide which goal to use for specific campaigns. In this article, we discuss what advertising goals are and examine 11 advertising goals your company can consider.
What are advertising goals?
Advertising goals are what a company hopes to achieve by conducting an advertising campaign. Companies usually connect advertising goals to larger company goals such as increased sales, customers or web traffic. You might connect your goals to timelines or other metrics to measure your success. Consider setting flexible goals to ensure you can update them as you respond to customer feedback and market changes.
A company can usually categorize each goal into one of the three major objectives for advertising:
- Informative: Informative advertising uses proven facts or features to advertise products or services. A company might provide a logical reason why a customer might purchase a product.
- Persuasive: Persuasive advertising is advertising that strives to convince potential customers why they may benefit from engaging with a brand. Persuasive advertising often appeals to the emotions of the target audience. The main goal of persuasive ads is to influence consumers to make a decision.
- Reminder: Reminder advertising, or retentive advertising, is when a company engages with existing customers to remind them about products, services or company values. Companies may use this advertising tactic to encourage repeat customers to continue shopping with them.
Why are advertising goals important?
When you set advertising goals for your company, it can help you achieve your overall business objectives. Once you set specific goals, you can analyze the current state of the company you work for and develop a plan to achieve your goals. Setting advertising goals can also help you boost sales, customer engagement and brand awareness, which can help grow your business.
11 goals of advertising
Consider the following advertising goals for your company:
1. Brand awareness
Brand awareness is a measurement of how familiar consumers are with your brand. As an advertising goal, you might set numerical targets or percentages for the number of people you’d like to recognize your brand. Consider creating advertisements that incorporate your logo, brand colors and memorable images so that when making purchases, the consumer might recall your brand. This goal often combines all three advertising objectives: reminding consumers about your brand, persuading them to choose your brand and informing them about your brand.
2. Traffic increase
Traffic can mean how many people visit your website, profiles or other pages. Similar to brand awareness, you might set a goal to increase your web traffic by a specific number of visitors. Search engines and clickable images are two forms of digital advertising that can increase your traffic. If an online advertisement is interesting, consumers may click on it. Then the ad can redirect them to your website, which can increase your traffic. Similarly, companies sometimes pay to advertise within search engine results. Internet users may see these types of advertisements if they search for certain key terms.
3. Engagement boost
Engagement is how people interact with your online content and social media profiles. You can choose to target an active audience that engages frequently or a passive audience that may view your posts without engaging. To increase engagement, you can seek feedback from your audience. Then you can use that feedback to update your content and target your audience more effectively.
Another way to improve audience engagement is to sponsor a giveaway. For example, a company might sponsor a giveaway that requires people to tag friends or share a social media post. This may influence passive audience members to interact more with the brand and also increase brand awareness.
4. Multimedia interest increase
Goals related to multimedia interest typically measure how interested consumers are in your content. For example, you can track how many people watch a video from beginning to end. Setting multimedia interest as a goal can help you determine:
- The quality of content your audience is seeking: To motivate people to watch full videos, read complete blog posts or engage fully in other online content your company produces, consider updating your content to make sure it’s engaging. You can learn how to update your content effectively by conducting market research, which can help you determine what competitors do.
- The right duration for your content: If you’re interested in improving audience engagement with your content, consider measuring how long people read your blog posts or watch your videos. Then, try creating content that’s shorter or content that delivers the principal message quickly.
- The overall interest in your content: You can review metrics such as view count and likes to help you determine how many people are interested in your content overall.
5. Lead generation
Lead generation is a method of increasing the number of potential customers who are interested in purchasing products or services from your company. Using both informative and persuasive strategies, you might advertise in new markets to generate leads and connect with new potential customers. Using search engine advertising can also be an effective way to generate new leads. For example, if a person is using a search engine to find a dog walker, they might see your company in their search results and contact you.
6. Targeted market research
Targeted market research is a method of learning about your audience to discover their specific needs and desires so that you can advertise more effectively. Consider what you want to learn about your audience, how big of a sample size you want to gather and what you might do with the information you learn. For example, you might create an advertisement on your website that prompts users to complete a survey before proceeding to your content. Learning more about customers can also help you adjust your future advertising strategies.
7. Attention improvement
A goal of advertising might be to create excitement around a new product or your brand. You can use bold headlines, bright colors and clear announcements to get the attention of your target audience. If excitement is your advertising goal, you might measure your success in clicks, sales or social media follows. This can help you understand how effective your advertising campaign is and determine whether to choose a similar method to gain attention for future campaigns.
8. Brand development
You can set an advertising goal to develop your brand in response to your customers’ feedback. Consider experimenting with narrative content, sponsored ads or traditional advertising. Then review which types of advertisements consumers responded to most and use that information to create effective advertisements in the future. Similarly, you might make subtle adjustments to the fonts on your website, your brand colors or your logo in response to customer feedback. Then you can continue to make alterations to ensure you’re creating content your customers enjoy.
9. Customer retention
Customer retention is a measurement of how many customers continue purchasing from your company after making their first purchase. To boost your customer retention, you might advertise new loyalty programs that reward your customers or offer new discounts monthly. You can also measure your customer churn rate, which means the pace at which customers start or stop engaging with your brand. This is a great metric for reviewing whether your customer retention efforts are effective.
10. Positioning and differentiation
Positioning refers to how your customers think about your brand. For example, if you work for an organic fast-food restaurant, you may want your consumers to think of a quick, nutritious meal when they see your brand logo. To influence how your customers think about your brand, you can create advertisements that compare your products with a competitor’s to highlight the value of your products. This type of ad can differentiate your brand and influence consumers to choose your products. You might measure this advertising goal by examining your sales in contrast to a competitor’s sales.
11. Sales and profits
One of the most common goals of advertising is to increase sales and improve profits. If making a direct sale is your advertising goal, consider showcasing your products and services online by using persuasive techniques. For example, a clothing company might advertise on websites with the direct goal of selling a particular item. In those advertisements, the company might use happy models to appeal to its target customers.
You might also create promotional materials that indicate an urgent event such as a single-day sale to attract customers. You can measure your achievement of this advertising goal by calculating the amount of revenue the company earns during the advertising campaign.