Nobody knows your business better than you. The market, competition, industry practices, and most of all, the reason people should buy from you.

It’s your agency’s job to take this information and turn it into compelling, persuasive, and  creative local advertising content that motivates your target audience to follow the call to action set forth in the campaign (visit store, pick up phone, submit online form).

The detail and depth of information you provide in discovery and brainstorming sessions with your creative team impacts the success of a campaign. It affects not only in the performance of the creative, but also the amount of time it takes the team to learn about your business.

9 Things to Communicate with Your Advertising Creative Team

Here are 9 points to consider when advertising your business and meeting with your creative team:

• Be armed with concise, 30-second version of your unique selling proposition (USP). Why should people buy from you, or visit your restaurant, or enlist your financial services? What sets you apart from your competition?
• Who buys your product? Build a profile of your primary and secondary audience—who they are, where they live, their income and education level, their attitudes and behaviors. Past sales data will help identify and illustrate the target buyer, and where hard numbers aren’t available, use your instincts.
• Understand the different types of advertising used in your campaign, or the media mix, and how the target audience engages in these media channels. It will help determine frequency goals for the ad campaign--how often the audience needs to be exposed to the advertising message in order for them to take the desired action (see #4).
• What are your advertising goals? Awareness is pretty much a given. What specific action or outcome is desired of the campaign? Increased sales? Foot traffic? Website visits? Event attendance? An information request as part of a longer sales cycle? How do you want your audience to feel after viewing or listening to the ads?
• Sketch out a few talking points on what the ad should say and how the message should be communicated. Is there a certain way the message should be communicated? A certain personality that should convey the message (ethos)? An emotional appeal that’s effective in hitting the pain or pleasure points of your target buyer (pathos)? A logical appeal based on facts and data that helps your buyer minimize risk (logos)?
• How is your product or service sold? The length of the selling cycle is a good guideline for deciding how much pre-sell education is needed in your advertising and marketing materials.
• What information, affiliations, discussions, or events are important to your target audience? This is a critical, albeit less quantifiable, concept in media planning—relevancy. Knowing what matters to your target audience is important for negotiating placement of your advertising next to relevant editorial content or programming to increase impact and engagement with your message.
• Think of the language spoken by your target audience and within the industry, and provide a list of key terminology. This will prepare for discussions on keywords that bring visitors to your website, and how those key terms can be used to help your offline advertising drive traffic online.
• Focus on clarity over creative. If you’re paying to outsource your copywriting and design to an agency, it’s their job to be creative. Your role is to give the team enough information about your business and a clear direction on your goals so they can spend their where they bring the most value—creative work.

Giving your agency the right information with the right amount of detail will help your creative team show rather than tell your story. It makes for more productive brainstorming, review, and feedback sessions, and stronger advertising.

And the more you know about the different media channels and how they align to the buying cycle for your product or service, the better the understanding you’ll have of how your local advertising can motivate your audience from awareness to sale.