Media Planning Dos and Don’ts | Strategic Marketing
Media planning is the process of selecting the ideal mix of media channels for your marketing message. It involves research, analysis, and properly allocating your budget. Media planning is a vital aspect of any marketing campaign, whether it’s print, television, radio or digital. The planning process is a time-consuming task that must be handled carefully in order to ensure the highest return on investment (ROI). There are proven methods that can help you determine the best combination of media to meet your business’s goals and objectives. If you’re brand new to media planning, it’s helpful to learn the dos and don’ts.
DO Understand Your Audience
One of the initial steps of media planning is to understand your audience. Conducting market research is a great way learn about your target demographic and ensure that your marketing strategy is designed to reach the right people. A thorough understanding of your audience requires awareness of how your customers typically find your business and where they’re most engaged with ad content. What type of information are they searching for? Do they go online or offline? What media channels are they accessing throughout their day? From here, media objectives can be established.
DO Establish Media Objectives
Once you have a solid understanding of your target audience and the market they’re in, it’s time to dig deep into the media space to determine which channels will be most effective for reaching said audience. Does your audience gravitate toward traditional media like television, print, radio, or newspapers? Are they immersed in digital media like mobile, social sites, and online videos? Consumers receive and engage with content in many different ways, both digitally and traditionally. As a result, it’s your primary mission to find the perfect media mix for reaching your target audience across various media channels.
DO Budget Appropriately
Optimizing your budget and staying within its constraints can be a challenging task. However, it’s imperative as a media planner that you not only determine how to advertise your brand’s message but that you cost-effectively allocate funds. Market analysis and understanding the advertising outlets that your audience consumes will help you decide how to spend the budget when media planning. Will you put 50% toward radio, 25% in mobile ads, 10% in billboards, and then the rest in social media? The call is yours but make sure that it’s a calculated call, and most definitely test your results and adjust the budget accordingly.
DON’T Leave Your Strategy
Under increasing pressure to meet your media objectives and deliver a return on investment, adhering to your strategy can become as great a challenge as originally creating it. As soon as numbers start to deviate from your goals and your focus is placed solely on conversions, it’s easy to subconsciously leave your strategy and forget what should be guiding your efforts. Great media planning relies on developing a dependable strategy and then having the willpower to stick to it.
DON’T Neglect an Omni-channel Approach
In today’s age of multiple screens and channels, people actively consume messaging from a variety of sources. When engaged in media planning, consider implementing an Omni-channel experience. This is a multi-channel approach to advertising that creates an integrated customer experience no matter how or where a customer finds you. This will give you a better chance of reaching all your customers because your ads will be cohesive and visible across multiple channels. For example, you can serve your audience an ad on their computer at work, then remind them later on their phone, then remind them even later on the radio during their drive home. Keep this approach in mind during your media planning.
DON’T Forget to Test and Track
Testing and tracking your media campaign is how you will determine success, as well as the adjustments that need to be made. This is the only way to really see improvement and determine the ROI of your marketing plan. Focus on the metrics that help you understand the impact of your efforts, narrowing it down to the most important numbers. Maybe it’s your conversion rates or lead count, but be sure to use that data to make the necessary changes to your media plan.
Partner with Strategic Marketing for Expert Media Planning
Strategic Marketing is a full-service advertising agency with years of experience planning and buying media for numerous clients. We utilize both established and innovative media tactics to ensure that your messages connect with your target audience in the most cost-effective way possible. We specialize in media planning for several different advertising outlets, such as television, radio, print, out-of-home, pay-per-click and display advertising. We can streamline the media planning process, saving you time and money to help maximize your ROI. To learn more, visit our website or contact us today by calling (561) 688-8155.
- Published in Advertising, Strategic Marketing
How Video Production Can Be a Versatile Marketing Tool
Although video marketing can be considered its own separate campaign strategy, the process of video production can play an integral role in other marketing strategies you may already be employing. Whether it’s search engine optimization and content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing or any of the other marketing strategies out there, videos can be beneficial to your campaign and help to increase your return on investment. Here are some instances of how you could use videos in new and existing content:
- Product or service demos
- Training and how-to videos
- Customer testimonials
- Repurpose written blogs
- DIY and instructional videos
Boost SEO
One of the most important marketing strategies for many businesses to utilize is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be a cost-effective way to boost your brand’s online visibility and get customers to find you when they’re searching the web. Video has consistently been a factor in SEO, but it will be even more essential in 2018. Recent studies have shown that Google is placing more emphasis on video content by increasing the number of videos that appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), on both mobile and desktop devices.
One way that Google shows video in the SERPs is through the video carousel that appears at the top of the page, which is most prevalent on mobile devices. Since Google is shifting to favor mobile-friendly content and websites over others, factoring video production into your SEO strategy could provide the extra boost in SEO you need to increase your organic ranking. Just remember to optimize your content and website pages to be mobile friendly.
Another tactic for establishing a dominant presence in the SERPs is to utilize rich snippets. Rich snippets are search results that show more information aside from just a title and description, such as an image or video thumbnail. According to Moz, rich snippets will have a significant impact on how search engines will rank results in 2018. Whenever possible, incorporate schema markup into the code on certain pages of your website that contain videos, and the more the better. This will tell search engines what your content means, allowing them to return more informative and visually-appealing search results to users. All in all, video production can provide a substantial increase in user engagement, page visits, site retention and be valuable to your overall SEO and content marketing strategy.
Grow Social Engagement
Your business should have a strong social media presence to connect with your target audience, and video production is a great way to increase engagement and generate more followers on your social platforms. Studies have shown that users are drawn to video more than other forms of content. When consumers are on social media, they expect to see more entertaining and personalized content, compared to more traditional marketing channels that speak to a wider audience. Because of their popularity, social media platforms are changing the way users consume video by making it a dominant feature within the landscape of many platforms.
Facebook and Instagram, for example, have a feature that enables you to stream live video while simultaneously interacting and chatting with other viewers. Utilizing this feature as a business allows you to seamlessly connect with your target audience and retain their attention, which can be difficult to accomplish in today’s fast-paced society. YouTube has also taken advantage of the live video feature and has redesigned its mobile app to be more accommodating to live streaming. There are also added features, such as location tags and live chat replay, that make it easier to connect with those in your community. Twitter, a social media platform often used for news-related content, drives engagement through the use of native videos. Informative video content, such as brand announcements, promotional messages and educational videos, are great for sharing on your company’s Twitter page and will engage more of your followers.
Whichever platform you choose to post video content to, remember to make it optimized for mobile viewing, as the majority of videos shared on social media are done so on mobile devices. This article from Inc.com provides valuable insight and a breakdown on the best ways to use video on each social media platform. Overall, utilizing video production in your social media marketing efforts can maximize your reach, increase your brand’s following and ultimately, provide a higher return on investment (ROI).
Why Video Production is important
Whatever type of marketing campaigns you are currently running, whether it’s SEO, social media marketing or content marketing, video production can help you win the attention of your target audience while increasing overall brand awareness and recognition. Incorporating videos into other marketing strategies, such as email marketing, can also have a positive impact on campaign performance and ROI. Producing quality videos for marketing purposes can help you reach more consumers and increase web traffic and conversions.
Strategic Marketing knows the importance of video marketing and production, and as a full-service advertising and marketing agency, we have the capabilities to make it work in synergy with existing marketing strategies. To learn more about how your business can benefit from video marketing and production, contact us today by calling (561) 688-8155.
- Published in Advertising, Strategic Marketing
Creative Ways to Use Graphic Design in Marketing
Graphic design can play a significant role in the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Appealing visual content allows your brand to connect with prospective customers quickly and keep them engaged for longer periods of time. Whether your business has its own design department in house or you utilize an agency, you want your designs to not only accompany all of your marketing efforts, but also be creative enough that they make your brand stand out from the competition. Below are some creative ways to use graphic design to boost your marketing campaigns.
In Content
If you want to increase your page or blog views and boost engagement in your content, incorporate a fair amount of rich media into your posts. Aesthetically appealing blog articles with custom graphics could increase traffic to your website, either through increased social media engagement or improved search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Utilizing graphic design to enhance your content can also increase the time users spend on your website, which may result in more people contacting your business. Consider supplementing your content marketing strategy with infographics, as well. This is a great way to repurpose old content and present new content in an engaging and unique way, all through the use of images and design as opposed to written material.
On Your Website
Getting people to your website is important, but making sure they stay there is another obstacle. Your website is a key component of all of your marketing efforts, so you want to make sure it gives users a positive impression of your business and is appealing enough to keep them engaged. A creative way to do this is through scalable vector graphics (SVGs). SVGs allow you to optimize the user’s experience without slowing down your website, which is crucial for ranking high in the search results. Some examples of incorporating this design element into your website include 3D product illustrations, interactive tours and animations that appear as users scroll through your website.
For Branding
Now that searches are done predominantly on mobile devices, you want to make sure your marketing efforts are mobile-compliant. You may have already made sure your website is optimized for mobile search and that your landing pages and content are also mobile-friendly, but what about the more technical aspects of your brand? For example, many big brands are creating “responsive” logos by simplifying them so they are easy to identify and capture on small screens. To do this, you don’t necessarily have to create an entirely new logo, and you shouldn’t do so unless you’re already in the process of rebranding. Simply making your logo smaller by using fewer design elements is one way to ensure your entire brand is optimized for mobile through the use of graphic design. This strategy helps keep your branding consistent while users are provided optimal search experiences across all devices.
Let Strategic Marketing Design Memorable Campaigns
Strategic Marketing is well-versed in graphic design and how it pertains to every aspect of your marketing and advertising efforts. As a full-service advertising and marketing agency, we take a creative approach that focuses on your brand as a whole, not just a single campaign or advertising platform. We create designs and solutions that give your brand a consistent image across traditional and digital platforms, making your brand recognizable and memorable. If you’re ready to stand out from the competition, give us a call today at (561) 688-8155, or fill out the form on our contact page.
- Published in Advertising, Marketing Strategy
