The successful Portland ad agency of today will focus more on marketing and less on advertising. Marketing implies a more specific approach to building business relationships, whether those be with other businesses or individual customers. Advertising does little good if you don’t know the audience you’re advertising to, and you have no means of judging your effectiveness. When hiring an ad agency Portland businesses want a creative campaign designed to boost sales and enhance public image of the company. However, they also want to know they are maximizing return on investment (ROI) for every last dollar of their marketing budget.

Advertising vs. Marketing

A Portland ad agency may imply “advertising,” but its efforts are very much marketing. By getting in tune with the needs and the wants of the client or customer, Portland ad agencies develop their advertising campaigns to appeal to a targeted and highly specific group of people. They use methods for tracking their advertising efforts as they approach this targeted audience. This methodical approach is the very definition of marketing.

Advertising is far less effective because it employs the “see what sticks” mentality, wherein one spends money on high profile advertising methods in hopes that enough people will be moved by the campaign to act. Super Bowl commercials are the most obvious examples of this form of advertising. With one 30-second spot costing millions of dollars, the advertisers have no way of knowing just how many potential customers or clients will be watching their ad. Results are impossible to gauge, so knowing ROI is pretty much impossible. Ad agencies Portland will know that smaller companies cannot afford to leave so much to chance.

How Do You Market Effectively?

With an ad agency Portland businesses expect professionalism and results. Business owners want the Portland ad agency to find effective ways to market product or service and monitor the success rate of those efforts. Anything less is a parlor trick or illusion, and sometimes a quite costly one. Quality Portland ad agencies are able to answer this call of duty because they get into your client or customer’s brain. They try to place themselves in the mind of the person or business owner, who would want to buy your product. The ad agency Portland businesses trust will then develop their campaign in a manner that addresses the hopes, fears, and aggravations of your typical customer.

By getting to the heart of how your clients or customers think, ad agencies can develop marketing campaigns that go beyond advertising and truly work.