Want to grow your business? Follow these simple habits to create customer-focused media campaigns that measure effectiveness and ensure you’re getting value for money.
Step into the consumer’s shoes
There’s no denying online media has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives. We spend an enormous amount of time interacting with it. It can be informative, persuasive and entertaining. For many people it also provides companionship.
It’s easy to forget then that traditional media consumption across television, radio, magazines, cinema, out-of-home and unaddressed mail is still occurring at phenomenal rates. In some cases, these more established channels are engaging MORE consumers at a deeper level and in more significant numbers than many online channels.
To help understand what channels will deliver the best results, start with the development of the Consumer Journey Map. Consumer Journey Mapping (CJM) helps to identify key stages in the purchase cycle and provides you with the fundamental insights you need to better engage consumers at each stage of their journey purchase.
Research trumps gut feel
Once you’ve established your CJM, start to think about how you’ll target your communications, and in which channels. This is where the use of research tools such as Nielsen's Consumer Media Insight comes into play by enabling you to profile an audience based on data.
This is a critical step for ensuring you don’t just assume the way you personally consume media is how consumers also consume it. It’s particularly important when you stop to consider the average New Zealand marketer is generally aged in their early 30s, potentially a completely different generation to the consumers they’re marketing to.
Setting goals and measuring effectiveness
With any measurement process it’s critical to define objectives and plan for the right form of measurement methodology, media metrics and wider research strategy in advance.
Setting goals for your media inputs and campaign outputs, whether business (internal/external), behavioural or attitudinal is key for establishing whether your campaign was a success. It also helps to map out the campaign path from awareness to action when looking to prove effectiveness.
Media inputs can include, but are not limited to:
- exposure or coverage through metrics such as total impressions delivered, coverage (a campaign’s net reach), frequency and recency of ad exposure or the opportunity to see or hear
- media composition (a measure of relevancy) that can be presented as a percentage or index and calculated or expressed in impressions
- share-of-voice in relation to total category media spend or 30' equivalent GRPs (Gross Rating Points)
Campaign outputs are the direct 'effects' the campaign inputs have on consumers and range from hard business and behavioural measures to softer behavioural, awareness and attitudinal measures. Establishment and measurement of these outputs are key to proving campaign effectiveness.
Media Outputs can include, but are not limited to:
- engagement, which in some cases can be answered by interaction metrics like the number of clicks, video plays, completion rates and time spent on content
- direct campaign effects, which are the actions taken by people as a result of the activity either online or offline, emails, calls or downloads. It’s also possible to attribute sales, leads and other conversions achieved
- business results, which is an analysis of the campaign effects on sales and profit.
Planning effective paid media communications campaigns is far more complex than just running an ad and waiting for your phone to ring. Your marketing budget is one of the most significant investments in the future growth of your business. Don't leave it up to chance.
