You have products or services to sell. You have a marketing goal in mind. What you need now are media placements that align perfectly with your goals and help your business grow according to plan.
If you’ve been doing this for any length of time, you know it’s easy to put your goals on paper but not as easy getting it all to work the way you’ve designed. Who do you target? How do you reach them? What do you create?
Where do you begin? With so many choices, it can feel overwhelming. Yet like every part of growing a business, it helps to chunk it down into bite-sized pieces and work your way into a plan that works.
Start By Defining Your Target Audience
Every part of marketing starts by getting to know your target audience better. “Everyone” is not your target. Instead, you’ll start by segmenting your market based on characteristics that make sense to your brand. You might include:
- Marital status
- Household income
- Geographical location
- Generation (Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Baby Boomers)
- Homeownership status
- Political affiliation
- Hobbies or interests
- Buying behavior or purchasing preferences
This short list of demographics is your starting point. As you learn more, continue refining your list until you clearly understand who you’re targeting and why they are an ideal customer.
What About Content?
With content, you’ll start by asking yourself two important questions:
- What type of content do I like to create?
- What kind of content does my target audience prefer to take in?
Content is an ongoing tactic, no matter your approach. Social media accounts require consistent content. If you send emails, you’ll need to produce copy and imagery regularly. Even advertisements require constant refinement as you change and solidify your approach.
This is where working with a team of experts can help you choose the appropriate media channels for your business and provide the necessary help in the creation process. The better you align your content with your target market, the more effective your approach. And the more profit you’ll see at the end of the day.
Choosing Your Media Channels
If you do any research online, you’ll quickly come across a wide array of media channels that offer potential growth strategies. Should you put time and effort into building up social media accounts? Or maybe rely on influencer marketing? How about a podcast? Or maybe digital display ads?
You may have invested in a few of them before. Media placement in several places may seem like a good starting point, but without the right strategy, you can quickly lose more than you gain.
There’s a reason why you should build a multi-channel strategy: customer retention improves by as much as 91 percent when customers interact with a brand in more than one channel. So how do you choose?
Evaluate the relevance of each media channel to your target audience and objectives. The channels you choose should allow you to reach your audience effectively and deliver your message in a contextually appropriate manner.
Don’t just jump at a channel because everyone else is. Get to know the channel and understand all that it offers. Does it make sense? Will you enjoy the process of seeing your brand grow on that platform? Will it be a chore or something that’s enjoyable?
We often suggest starting small, seeing what works, finding your success, and only then ramping it up to higher levels. When you succeed with one, it’s easier to move to the next channel with that knowledge in place.
Plan and Schedule Your Media Placements
Once you’ve selected media channels based on your audience insights and advertising objectives, it’s time to create a media plan. A comprehensive media plan outlines the details of your media placements, including the chosen channels, timing, duration, budget allocation, and desired outcomes.
This looks different for everybody. Maybe you’ll integrate a mix of traditional and digital channels for a well-rounded approach. Or maybe you’re all-in on digital—you see your audience and know them well on specific channels.
Crafting a media schedule outlines when and where each media placement will appear. Because digital is a 24/7/365 game, this may take research and trial and error while you establish a routine that works.
You can consider things like dayparting, where you limit your ad purchases to specific times of the day, or flighting, which includes periodic bursts of advertising during peak or optimal periods. If seasonality works for scheduling and placement, you can align your campaigns distinctly throughout the year.
Measure and Evaluate
No matter what direction you go with your media placement plans, your success will only grow with testing and analytics in place. You’ll need to use relevant and reliable metrics and indicators to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your media plan.
There isn’t a set way to measure and evaluate media effectiveness. Instead, you’ll need to craft a process that gives you the data you need to make informed decisions about how to move forward. You can include:
- Reach and impressions—how many people are exposed to your ads, and how many times your ad was displayed. These provide insights into the audience size and exposure generated by each placement.
- Engagement—can include metrics such as clicks, likes, shares, comments, and retweets. It gauges the level of interaction and interest generated by your ads.
- Conversion—the actions taken by users after interacting with your ads. These may be website visits, form submissions, downloads, or purchases. Conversion allows you to assess the impact of your media placements on driving desired outcomes and ROI.
This is just a start. There are many ways to measure how effective your overall media plan is based on what you hope to accomplish. Your goal is to find prospects, convert them to customers, and keep them happy for life. Choosing your evaluators will give you the data to refine and change to a more effective plan and a healthier bottom line.
Here’s What Else to Consider
Aligning your marketing goals with your advertising strategy is all about balance. It’s walking the line between reaching specific, targeted audiences and maximizing your reach. The more defined your media placements become, the better the results.
Need help? Marketing strategies are always in need of refinement and change. The more you learn, the stronger your marketing strategy will become.
