Any marketer knows that marketing is about establishing relationships with consumers. The actual marketing process often begins with the distribution of advertising materials, such as web banners, flyers, TV ads and others. It is often suggested that the advertising should be deployed long enough that marketers can build a relationship with their potential customers. Everything we do should be aimed to win customers and keep them in relationship with us.

Many people believe that advertising is identical with marketing and in many cases, that’s true. However, advertising is actually a subset of marketing and there are other things that constitute marketing itself. It means that we could have an incomplete marketing effort if we choose only to perform marketing efforts. In general, advertising doesn’t equal marketing. We should also need to create a comprehensive plan and advertising only plays one of the role. We also need to set up our brands, so consumers can get a bigger picture of our presence in the market.

In general, advertising can be considered as a short-term marketing campaign and advertising materials often have relatively short lifespan. Then marketers need to move on to the modified advertising material. This could happen when the products have changes or there are other factors that require the change of advertising messages. In general, advertising is aimed to

• Get attention: Marketers often use great headlines and designs to attract attention. They often need to be somewhat daring to make advertising look more attractive.
• Communicate brief messages: good advertising materials allow marketers to deliver something meaningful and significant to their target. A crucial message that they need to deliver is a promise to effectively solve problems faced by consumers, followed by other benefits of choosing the products or services. In this case, most marketers tend to restrain themselves from dumping all available information in one go, except if they use catalogue or direct mail.
• Create desire: Advertising messages are intended to compel people to want and buy more. Marketers seek to entice consumers by providing additional information that states benefits. In fact, by not telling all details about the product could create a curiosity factor, especially if it is a much awaited product.
• Encourage contact: Marketers use advertising to arouse enough desire and this is demonstrated by informing that their solutions are great. They could also offer special promotions and this could get the audience to take audience.
• Launch low-cost & low-risk marketing campaign: There are many advertising tools that can be used to ensure more affordable marketing campaign. Marketers will usually use mass communication technique to effectively attract best prospects in the market.

It is clear that advertising sounds a bit like flirting and marketers often thing of it as a way to improve their sales process. It should be noted that if prospects respond to our advertising messages, it doesn’t mean that they will become real customers. Getting their attention is one thing, but converting them to real buyers is another. In this case, marketers need to prove themselves worthy of their “love”, or in this case, their money.