Knowing your audience and what to say to them is obviously crucial. Of equal importance is knowing where and when to talk to them. Unfortunately, when it comes to this, far too many assumptions are made especially from an advertising and marketing industry that can be too insular in their views.
For example, you’ll have heard of the death of TV and how everyone is streaming. Yet a 2020 Nielsen Total Audience report revealed that, in the US, streaming accounted for only 19% of total TV usage.
Channel Neutrality
When we create a media plan for our clients during the Campaign Accelerator, we consider every possible channel and every acronym, ATL and BTL, online and IRL. And the first thing we do is talk directly to our audience F2F (ok I’ll stop that now).
Understanding media behaviour
We first ask about their media habits and where they go for information. This will of course reveal many traditional opportunities such as trade shows and industry publications, social media use, webinars and white papers. When you expand your options a little, you’ll find there are many more cost-effective ways that are perhaps a more realistic reflection of how customers look for information.
More complex journeys
Just looking at digital channels, these can range from simply asking their LinkedIn connections for recommendations, looking on peer to peer sites like Quora, G2 and Capterra to using search engines that aren’t Google. In fact, if you Google the most popular search engines you’ll find YouTube and Amazon in the top three. Many decision makers will get their team to do the research and report back or they will look to thought-leaders in their sector and value their opinions.
Channel Effectiveness
Most enterprise level companies, nowadays have tried and tested channels they use to target key accounts or slightly broader job titles and company segments. Platforms such as Terminus and MRP can offer greater visibility with campaign performance and pipeline data and conversion metrics.
Connect the message to the media
Once you know how and where they look for information, it’s simply a case of marrying the message with the media. You need to provide your audience with easy to understand but detailed information for their specific searches.
Whether it’s explainer videos, thought-leader discussions, competitor comparison articles, feature tables, sales brochures or anything else, you need to provide your audience with the right information at the right time, so there’s no need for them to look anywhere else.
Creating a media plan is just one of five stages of the Campaign Accelerator. You can read about them all in these five short blogs. Or contact us and we can chat about how The Campaign Accelerator can help you get to market much, much more quickly.