Advertising Management: A Comprehensive Guide

Advertising management is an indispensable part of any modern business. In fact, 68% of marketers consider it extremely important for their overall marketing strategy. Business competition is high, and the race for customers is even higher, so you must find ways to stand out. With proper advertising, you can craft meaningful messages that will speak to your audience, popularize your brand, and warm up your prospecting efforts.

In fact, you probably can recall at least one ad that made you buy something or at least remember the brand. For B2C customers, that could be that funny Fiat commercial that worked solely on creativity and did its job perfectly. In B2B, however, besides creativity, you have to have precision. 

Your digital ad messaging should feel as personally crafted as possible, target the right people, and be delivered at the right time. Tracking consumer behavior should be the path to engaging your prospects during their buyer’s journey.

However, it’s not an easy process to handle, especially if you are new to ad management. Let’s discover its definition, types, objectives, and benefits for your business.

What Is Advertising Management?

Advertising management is the process to plan, oversee, and control various advertising activities meant to influence the target audiences’ buying decisions. Simply put, the role of advertising management is to develop and place the ads in the most relevant places that will bring the best results. 

The scope of ad management includes analyzing the current advertising strategy and target audience, evaluating its effectiveness, and updating it toward existing goals. It also involves setting the budget, crafting relevant messaging, hiring relevant specialists, and managing their work. 

Implementing strategic advertising management practices into your business plan is meant to introduce certain products or services to your relevant audience, develop a better image, level-up brand awareness, and boost overall sales. Some people try to handle these processes themselves while others hire professional digital agencies.

Types of Digital Advertising Management

Although there are many types of advertising management—from print to broadcast media—digital advertising has gained significant traction with B2B marketers. In fact, the U.S. digital ad market is expected to exceed $300 billion by 2025.

Digital advertising management involves placing ads on online channels to promote your brand, product, or service. There is a big variety of digital formats you can use for your business, including emails, social media, blogs, search engines, and forums—and all of which can host your ads. 

Let’s look at the main types of digital advertising management to determine the best format for your business:

Social media advertising

Social media advertising presents its ads on various social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and is popular due to the number of users and easy implementation into the marketing strategy. Social media ads can be targeted, sponsored, and organic (influencers and word of mouth). Some social media automation tools even allow you to boost your post directly from their dashboard.

Search engine advertising

Search engine ads appear during web searches and have two common forms: search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. SEO and link building activities are responsible for promoting your content in search engines (blogs and web pages) based on certain keywords. 

PPC allows businesses to pay and appear on top of suggested results. Since most of the readers end up on the first page of Google, this strategy is worth pursuing. 

Interactive advertising 

Interactive advertising includes video ads and online ads that require viewers to perform a certain action. Although interactive ads take more time to produce, they also show good response levels and appear among current lead generation trends. 

This type of advertising has unlimited creativity options and has an opportunity to engage the prospect emotionally. 

Email advertising

Although email advertising has been pushed to the limits of SPAM in the past, it is still one of the most popular and effective ways to reach an audience. The key here is to include the people you have communicated with your company before or opted-in on your website. It’s affordable and can be used to promote specific offers or introduce new services. 

Programmatic display advertising

Programmatic ads deliver a promotional message across various communication channels. They can be presented as banners, landing pages, or pop-up ads and can appear anywhere on the Internet. 

Digital ads have a high-speed delivery and offer further segmentation of your lead lists. They can be altered, personalized, and changed as your campaign progresses, always striving for maximum effectiveness. But most importantly, they can combine all of the previously mentioned advertising types into one thorough ad campaign.

CIENCE offers a GO Digital solution that analyzes your ideal customer profile (ICP) and differentiates micro audiences from it to create a highly targeted ad campaign. Ads like those can appear to the prospects in your lead list prior to the first contact with a sales development representative (SDR), warming up the cold outreach and raising overall brand awareness. 

3 Main Advertising Management Objectives

The goal of any promotion should be to carry out conversations between the brand and the customer to increase sales and profits, but there’s a bit more to it. Before starting a campaign, determine your advertising management objectives: 

1. To introduce 

The first advertising objective is to inform your potential customers about your brand. Make them aware of the services you provide, introduce a new product or present an interesting offer, or talk about breaking into a new market. All of these will serve as a conversation starter around your brand and can lay the groundwork for the next objective. 

2. To persuade 

Another goal is to convince your potential buyers that your product or service is the best. This objective is meant to show your value over the competitors and persuade them to switch brands. Every ad should have a clear purpose and call to action (CTA) that needs to be performed, such as clicking a link or filling out a form. 

3. To remind

Some advertising campaigns may start from ground zero when the company (market or service) is new, but some aim to refresh your audience’s memory. It should be to remind them what you stand for, promote what makes you unique, and of course, why you're better than the competition.

Questions to Ask in Ad Management

To choose the right direction in the advertising management process, you have to ask some questions to determine your advertising path. Here are some top questions to consider: 

What role does advertising play in overall marketing? 

Think of it as the rough number of leads, customers, email opens, clicks, or any other rates you get (or expect to get) from the advertising efforts. And then compare it to the overall numbers from your marketing. This way, you can see how effective advertising is for your business and decide if you need to enhance it or maybe slow it down a bit.

Why do you need to advertise? 

Do you need to break into a new market? Do you want your services to have a wider reach? Or is there a seasonal offer you’d like to present? Answers to these questions will give you an understanding of what you want to achieve and what the strategy (messaging, timing, execution) will be to do so.

Go back to those three main objectives to determine your area of focus. 

How will you achieve set goals? 

This is where you actually plan the future advertising management strategy: Check out the competition, look for ideas, consult with the team, and maybe do a little test run.  

Who will be responsible for coordinating advertising efforts?

Whether you’re gathering the team from the ground up or assembling help from your marketing department, you’ll need designers, content writers, marketing specialists, and managers for your advertising management efforts. 

When will you kick off certain elements of the advertising campaign? 

It’s important to set the terms: How much time does your team have to prepare the vital elements? When is the campaign rolling out? And when should you expect the first results?

Advertising Management Process

So what is the scope of your marketing advertising management? How do you manage ads? Let’s go through the main steps to create a strategic process: 

1. Review the marketing plan. 

Advertising objectives come out of the marketing objectives, so it makes sense to review the whole marketing plan before starting an advertising campaign. This ensures that any promotional activity that takes place will align with your company’s vision and values.

At this point, perform an audit of your marketing plan: 

• Research competitors and markets.
• Evaluate what has proven to be effective in the past.
• Assess budget restrictions.
• Analyze the target market and audience.

2. Create an advertising framework. 

Objectives of advertising management provide the framework for the entire advertising strategy. Specify the goals you need to achieve and how to evaluate them. For consistent performance, you can choose one of these top marketing models: AIDA, SMART, or DAGMAR.

To set realistic objectives, you should consider the needs for your service:

• Brand awareness: brand recognition and brand recall 
• Brand preference: whether you get preferred over your competitors
• Purchase intent: probability the consumer will buy your product
• Purchase facilitation: whether a client knows where and how to make a purchase.

3. Establish the budget. 

An advertising management budget is only a subset of a marketing budget, which is a subset of a general budget. However, in 2021, U.S. Facebook ad spending alone was estimated at $50.30 billion. But thanks to modern digital advertising, it doesn't have to cost billions for you.

To outline a reasonable budget, your sales advertising management team should calculate how important advertising is to sales (percentage of how many converted leads came from ads), calculate the costs of media channels used, and add hiring costs, salaries, tech stack, etc.

4. Determine media channels. 

Once you set the objectives and budget, advertising management can plan out the next steps that need to be taken throughout the ad journey. This includes media channel strategy development, media tactics design, and effectiveness evaluation. Start by answering the following questions: 

• Where would the ad be placed? 
• How many times would a target audience member see the ad in a given period?
• How wide is the reach of the ad?
• What level of ad exposure is needed to reach the goals?

After that, your ad management team should choose the type of advertising to adopt, measure the effectiveness of the chosen method, and update or replace it if needed.

Importance of Advertising Management

According to Hubspot, at least 33% of marketers use advertising to boost brand awareness. But the importance of advertising management doesn’t stop there. Here are some other ways that advertising—and specifically digital ads—can be advantageous to your business:

1. Introduces your name to the public 

Advertising management helps bring and introduce new business solutions to the market. In addition to boosting brand awareness, it gives you a platform to show your advantages over the competitors, and it also opens up brand-new markets for your business. 

2. Keeps advertising under control

Without supervision, there’s a lot that can go wrong in any marketing activity. Having an advertising management process helps to guide your strategies in the right direction, check for updates and new approaches, and find the best (and most cost-effective) ways to reach the right audience with the right message. 

3. Enhances sales

Almost every business activity has the end goal of contributing to sales. Advertising may not result in many direct sales; however, it’s an important step in omnichannel outreach that warms up the leads, spreads the word about your services, and contributes to the overall success of sales.

4. Precise targeting  

You need to be able to target the right prospects who would be interested in your services, and thanks to SEO, website visitor tracking, and targeted ads, that’s what digital advertising allows you to do. 

5. Cost-effective 

Print, TV, or outdoor ads cost a lot, and not all companies can afford that. With reasonable prices in digital advertising, everyone gets to start on the approximately same level, save some money, and then let management do its job. 

6. Measurable results

Traditional advertising can be hard to measure due to being offline, while in digital, there are plenty of KPIs to check the results of the efforts put in: conversion rate, traffic, unique visitors, click-through rate, etc.

Manage Your Ads the Right Way 

From awareness to purchase in the buyers' journey, ads can warm up the leads, introduce your brand to the target audience, open new markets, build your brand, and eventually, enhance sales. However, to get the most out of your advertising efforts, you should invest in advertising management.

Ad management is the strategic thinking behind advertising that is responsible for setting objectives to define the right marketing direction, pick the outreach channels, and take all of the necessary steps to reach your desired goals.