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.

Over 10 billion dollars is spent on fast food advertising to children annually in numerous fashions. The majority of these ads are for food and drink that is high in fat, sugar, calories, salt and low in nutrients. Its not as much the advertisement itself as much as it is the tactic used to entice our children to want their product. The most obvious media venue is television advertisement. The marketing gurus know how to get into childrens heads and how to get their most wanted response. They know that children can and do influence their parents when it comes to food purchases.

On an average children view over 40,000 commercials a year most of which are for candies, cereals, toys, and fast food restaurants. Fast food advertising to children is not only limited to fast food restaurants. If it is fast and it is food then it is fast food. Its fair to say that fast food advertising is big business. Additionally, trying to curtail children from television viewing is a daunting task particularly since many kids have televisions in their bedrooms. The methods used for advertisement are within the norm for advertising. Businesses spend money to get their product noticed by what should be their target audience. In other words, you’d be hard pressed to find an advertisement on 60 Minutes for Cocoa Krispies just like you’d be hard pressed to find an advertisement on the Nickelodeon Channel for T.D.Waterhouse.

Sneaky Tactics

Children today have more purchasing power, they are the consumers of tomorrow, and because they do influence their parents on purchases it opens a whole new audience for marketers. Children are much more vocal than they used to be and they are not afraid to speak up when they want something. Advertisers call this Pester Power. I call it nagging. In other words, kids aren’t afraid to kick and scream to get their parents to buy something. Fast food advertising to children is all about Pester Power and marketers rely on children to nag the parents rather than market to the parents directly. They know that marketing to children will net higher results. Marketers break Pester Power down into 2 categories. Persistence nagging and importance nagging. Persistence nagging is begging repeatedly . Importance nagging, on the other hand, is what marketers rely on. This is all about providing for their children and the guilt that comes with not being available enough for their kids. There are many tactics used in fast food advertising to children such as toys included with meals and monopoly game pieces. Fast food businesses will claim that this is to provide a more pleasant visit to their store for the parents but in reality it is baiting children to desire fast food.

Internet And Viral Marketing

Fast food advertising to children is not only limited to television. The internet; which is more cost effective and viral marketing have also become advertising venues. Internet marketers know how kids use the net and how popular sites such as MySpace and Facebook are. They also know that children love to click on links. If it says click here – they do. Many websites offer free ring tones and music downloads. In order to get the freebie an e-mail address is required and thus cross promotion campaigns begin creating fast food advertisement to children via e-mail marketing.

We can’t stop fast food advertising to children but we can control the television viewing time. Less time in front of the television as a family could reduce the pestering for fast food and create a more nutritious and healthy family environment.

No business can survive the long run without some form of consistent advertising. As a result, most business owners will eventually consider using advertising to promote their business.

The toughest part of the advertising equation is in determining where and how to spend your advertising dollars. If you do it wrong, you could plunk down your entire advertising budget and receive absolutely no return on your investment. But, if you do it right, your advertising could continue to bring a nice return for years to come.

HOW DO I MAKE THE RIGHT ADVERTISING DECISIONS

In order to make good decisions concerning how to spend your advertising budget, you must first have a good understanding of the different types of advertising and promotion available and what can be expected to be achieved by each.

-You must understand which markets the different media’s can reach.

-You must understand the demographics of the media’s consumers.

-You must understand the buying habits of the consumers reached through the media.

WHAT OFFLINE ADVERTISING & PROMOTION MEDIA’S SHOULD BE CONSIDERED

The media’s that people think of most often are television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising. Of course, these are the big boys that big businesses use regularly.

Other methods of promotion include trade shows, press releases, direct sales, telemarketing, word of mouth, branding and billboard advertising.

CONSIDERING THE BIG MEDIA OUTLETS

The big boys of advertising media’s generally cost big bucks. Given certain circumstances, the big media’s can be bought for very little money.

Take for example, television, radio and newspapers cost big bucks during their prime times, but can be bought for pennies on the dollar during non-primetime hours.

Television primetime is between 7pm and 10pm. Radio primetime is between 7am and 6pm. With newspapers, the primetime is Wednesdays and Sundays.

If you intend to hit a media during prime time, get ready to drop some bucks. Primetime means that you will be able to hit more consumers during these times. So, in most cases, a primetime buy will enable you to reach more people with your advertising.

Non-primetime hours can still deliver a lot of eyes and ears to your message, and sometimes, these off-hours can be bought for a bargain basement price.

GETTING MILEAGE FROM EVENTS

Trade shows and press releases are more event-driven. The trade show is the event, while the press release generally exploits an event.

Trade shows are an exceptional tool when you deal directly with potential sellers of your products or services. Other shows are directed at the consumer, and those can be very valuable avenues for sales as well.

The press release is aimed towards gaining attention for a business by distributing newsworthy information about the business.

Sometimes the appearance of a business at a trade show or other show can provide the necessary angle for a press release. But most often, a successful press release will actually require more noteworthy information than the appearance of a business at a show.

Yet, even the most mundane of information could be spiced up to give the real air of importance necessary to get your press release read and printed.

The great thing about a press release is that might permit you to get relatively inexpensive promotion on television, radio, newspapers and magazines; for far less than what it would cost you to buy advertising in those same outlets.

UTILIZING A SALES TEAM

Depending on what type of business you run and the consumers you are trying to reach, you might find direct sales and telemarketing to be very lucrative ways to drive sales to your business.

Both are very similar in nature. Direct sales can be very expensive, as it requires a great investment of time to accommodate. Telemarketing seeks to minimize the time expenditure, but it often leads to a smaller degree of respect and attention.

Depending on your product or service — and always depending upon the people you employ to the task — each method will be more suited to each business on an individual basis.

BRANDING YOUR BUSINESS

I grouped branding and billboard advertising together in my original list for a reason. I did this because billboard advertising serves most businesses best by helping to support the process of branding.

Branding is the process of establishing your business as the supplier of a certain product or service, or in emphasizing a certain USP (Unique Selling Proposition) as it pertains to your business.

If branding and USP seems to be a confusing concept, think about Wal-Mart and their tag line: “Always Low Prices, Always.”

Think about Ford Motors, “Quality is Job One.”

Think about the Visa Card, “It’s Everywhere You Want To Be.”

You see, these top corporations have managed to make their USP part of their branding.

Even if you are only competing in a local marketplace, your USP can and should fit snugly into your branding strategy.

NO MATTER THE MEDIA OR METHOD

Whichever method or media you should choose to employ in your advertising and promotion, you should become knowledgeable about your market, and the consumers reached by each media. It is important to understand which consumers can be reached by a certain media, and in what quantities.

However you choose to spend your advertising dollars, you should always track the results of your promotional efforts. Failing to track successes and failures will ultimately lead to the failure of a business.

When you know whom you are trying to reach and how you think you might be able to reach them, you will begin to learn how to use advertising and promotion to make your business successful. That is a good thing — after all, that is why you got into the business in the first place, right?