7 steps to effective advertising

Return to Insights

There is a very simple structure to follow if you wish to ensure budgeted media spend achieves your desired business goals.


Insights sit at the heart of this process. Being fully armed with business insights, market intelligence and customer profiles are all crucial components of effective media planning.


Sadly, all too often, golf businesses press ahead with commercial activities without building the essential foundations that are necessary to ensure their advertising efforts are laser-focused at potential customers.


We encourage clients to adopt a basic structure that ensures media budgets deliver measurable results. It is a simple framework that often highlights some significant process (and customer insight) gaps.

Understand Your Business

Have you got complete clarity of your business objectives? Do your know what the objectives of your marketing campaign are? Do you have total confidence that you know who your target audience should be? You must answer these questions, or you will fail, before you start.

Gather Market Intelligence

This is often overlooked in the planning process and it is a crucial ingredient in a successful media buying strategy. This is not just about customers, it’s about your competitors too. What messages are your audience currently receiving? What is winning them over? What will make you stand out? Do you go head-to-head with competitor brands? Is your product superior?


Identify Customers

It is essential to define your target customer before you embark on a particular piece of commercial activity. This can often be basic information like location, age and income but it is an essential piece of the media-buying puzzle.


Establish Objectives

Your commercial activity, its frequency, and its messaging, needs to perfectly synchronise with your objectives. What are you trying to achieve? Are you looking to raise brand awareness? Are you trying to increase customer retention or drive direct sales? Be very clear about your objectives and success criteria.


Budget Appropriately

Creating an ad hoc approach to media buying will have limited business benefits, and it will invariably deliver an ad hoc, less-than-satisfactory result. Create a comprehensive budget that is aligned to the objectives of the business. Avoid last-minute, ‘not-in-the-plan’ late deals.


Research Media

Establish which channels with be most effective for reaching your audience. The goal must be to find the optimum blend of activity to reach the optimum audience. Ask for proposals, but have a genuine budget in mind. Share that budget with inventory owners and build positive relationships with them. It is in a media owner’s interest for the relationship to work too.


Monitor Performance
Some activities will outperform your expectation and others will not hit your goals. By creating a detailed plan you will be well-placed to evaluate every piece of activity as it happens. Become comfortable in challenging a media owner about your activity.

Landmark manages strategic media planning processes for golf resorts, clubs and brands. To discuss your advertising needs, contact [email protected]