At the beginning I would like to remind you with the marketing mix or the 4P's. The marketing mix consists of "Product, Price, Place and Promotion". And the promotional tools consist of 4 tools which are advertising, sales promotion, public relation and personal selling. So I will talk about the advertising in this blog and its importance.

For any business, the advertising is an important role in the marketing plan, why it is important? Simply because any one wants to make his/her product or service known in the market, and how can u reach your customers without doing advertising of your product or service, so we need to advertise our products or services.

So how can we advertise our product? There are two types of advertising:

1-Above the line: which means that the advertising will cost an amount of money.

2-Below the line: and this means that the advertising won't cost money for the advertiser.

Lets starts with the first one "Above the line":

There are many tools in this part like "TV ads, Radio ads, Printed ads, Outdoor ads and other media"

So how can I decide which tools should I use when I want to advertise for my product or service, it is simply regarding my financial recourses and the type of the product or service and also regarding the target segment I want to reach. Like for example if I want to make an advertising for a new brand of dishes, well I would say the target segment for this product is the mothers, and I prefer to make a TV ad everyday between 1 pm to 4 pm because it is the mothers' time at home when they watch the television. The same track with the radio ads. And about the printed ads, it means the newspaper ads or magazine ads. And the outdoor ads include the giant posters, ads on buses or trains, in the airport terminals, in shopping malls and so on. And regarding the last one which is the other media, it means the product placement in movies like when you watch any movie you could find someone drinks a famous brand of soft drink and of course the advertiser pay money for the production of the movie to put the brand in this movie.

And now let's go to the other part of adverting "below the line":

And in this part as I said that it is not going to cost the advertiser any money and can reach a high number of people, how? It is the online advertising or by using the internet. The advertiser could for example create a website for the brand and could put all the specifications of this brand in the website and any visitor could know what this brand is, how can he/she use it and so on. Another way which is the advertiser could create a page on social media like Facebook or create a Twitter account or any other popular social media, and by this page can collect a number of fans and whenever the advertiser put any post, the audience can get it. also another way to market your brand by using the E-mail marketing.

So this online advertising is very important nowadays, and I can say it sometimes is more important than the offline advertising "above the line" Why? Because if you do an ad in the television, can u make sure that the target segment will watch your ad, may be he/she will flip the channel, but in the online advertising the people you have for example in your Facebook page are watching your posts and interact with you and that means that you succeeded in create the brand in the customers' minds.

Finally I would like to say that the objective of the advertising is to reach the target segment, weather by using the advertising "above the line" or "below the line" but we have to identify the product or the service first before taking any action.

 

Written by: Mohammed Hussein