Now Marketing is done, it is time to Advertise
Following on from last month's post, where I hinted at how much there was to consider pre-promotion (think 3 other 'P's), this focusses on the juicy part of media planning...
I don’t want to misquote, but I think it was Ad Effectiveness guru Peter Field who mused that ‘what is the point of building a cathedral in a desert?’. Quite. What is the point of having a big beautiful creative output that nobody will actually see?
You have done the research on your market. You have uncovered the insights that indicate why people buy, you have a core message and positioning. You have a shiny new website and a clear pricing strategy. You have a lovely creative film, photography of graphic. So far so good. But surely this is all in vain if nobody is actually sees it?
I have been reading one of the best books on advertising planning; How Not to Plan by Les Binet and Sarah Carter is one of my go-to manuals for marketing thinking. Easily digestible and broken into short chapters and examples, each section concludes with a very handy checklist. It summarises the core reason for advertising: to build awareness and mental salience, with aim to convert prospective customers to buyers. Being a media guy at heart, I was in particular drawn to the Blue section, and wanted to summarise 5 key areas for you which, from real-world client experience, are 100% accurate:
2 main tasks of media, brand building and sales activation
It is easy to forget the importance of the former, the ongoing building of the brand, in pursuit of the shorter-term latter; tangible and easier to measure gains of sales and conversions. But you must always do the 2. In the performance marketing world (well economics originally), we have a saying - the law of diminishing return. In other words if we keep just using targeted media, e.g. Facebook Ads, to drive efficient sales with a low CPA or high ROI, we will have less to convert over time, and performance will suffer. As a metaphor, brand building breeds the fish, and sales activation catches the near swimmers.
Split Comms budgets 60:40. 60% brand building and 40% sales activation
To validate this claim, and based on a bank of multiple global advertising budget, co-author Binet and his effectiveness accomplice Field coined this split in their seminal 2016 IPA paper The Long & The Short of it. To this day is still carries weight. The premise being you spend 60% of your budget on the brand building, and 40% on the sales activation. This has richly been contested in the 6 years since and rightly so, as it depends on type of brand, age of brand etc. Start-ups for example have thrived from bottom-up performance planning (to a point), growing via activation/performance then dipping toe in brand waters. Also, B2B, given its more demo/demand gen led actions needed from advertising, tend to favour the activation splits a little more. Whichever cap you wear, the importance of a brand budget half(ish) and a performance focussed activation half is clear and consistent across the board.
Understand which media is better for which area - fit it to task
Horses for courses. There are a number of channel selections available. Traditional channels such as Out of Home, TV, Cinema, Radio & Print. Emerged digital channels such as Online Display, Online Video, Social, Search, Programmatic, Affiliates, Native & Email. The advent of digital channels and their ease of measurability through readily available reporting has - broadly speaking - enabled them to become the activation/sales channels. Addressable audiences. Targetable placements and pixels/APIs enabling direct attribution of conversion success has led them towards that area. On the traditional (aka. Above The Line) channels, given their broad reach capabilities and lesser targeting features, lend themselves to the Brand build side.
There are exceptions to this rudimentary offline/online rule of course. You can tightly target certain spots on TV or geographies on outdoor, and advertise a direct response offer in the paper; likewise you can do brand awareness online with reach buys on Facebook, Non-skippable online videos, and even branded keywords campaigns on Google. The point is, have a clear thing you want that channel to do. Is it to raise awareness - or is it to convert?
With Brand building - focus on broad reach and future buyers
So assuming above is the way to go. Those are the channels we shall use for Brand building. Take TV. We have decided, for the purpose of this, it is there to reach wider audiences. And that is what it does best. It is an efficient way of reaching audiences at scale at reasonable costs per ‘000 (CPM). If we were to try to get sales straight off the bat by TV alone (unless it was a Direct Response TV ad in companion with a multi-channel/search campaign) we would perhaps be disappointed. However, let’s play to its strength. In reaching the masses. In costly signalling (i.e. they can afford an advert, they must be legit). In sharing emotive communication through brand films to get into hearts and minds. In driving salience and mental availability. This will help build the brand. By the way, I am not writing off the importance or benefit of targeting here, but segmenting can be smart. If you know your audience are typically older, then place ads contextually with shows that befit this demographic. As a footnote, TV is far from dead as a channel for all ages, and for incremental reach add in Online Video channels such as YouTube and VOD (e.g. All 4/Sky AdSmart)
Activation - Be efficient and targeted
The job of the targeted activation is to talk to people who are buying now or in the near future. By utilising segments, targets and contexts, as well as meaningful data points from digital platforms, you can drive the potential buyers over the line to purchase. One thing I do not wholeheartedly agree with my trusty book on is their thought on ‘Don’t waste time entertaining or seducing’ but be rational to drive the purchase. Yes, whilst I agree that being pragmatic, single minded and to the point is key, I do think we should forever be exploring ways to introduce dynamic and creative ways to engage our formats and such like - and not be as binary to think that brand building is the sexy stuff and conversion is merely a clinical procedure. Digital channels are ripe for this. Paid Social, Paid Search Programmatic and Email offer ways to be dynamic with creative formats, audiences and targeting to drive the sale. Furthermore, if you are an activation led B2B business, you will invariably be catching data/generating leads, that halfway house between awareness and activation. To create a value exchange of garnering a lead, or at the minimum to generate a data identifier such as an email address, creative ways should forever be deployed to humanise the process and give a certain level of enjoyable reciprocity in the process of moving people along the buyer journey.
IN SUMMARY - a bit of both please for effective advertising
Those who just do big brand building stuff and activity are potentially leaving much sales share on the table for their competitors if they do not follow up with meaningful activation. On the flipside, purely pursuing the sale, lead or performance outcome will fall foul after a while with less customers to convert, and less who know about you, so won’t consider you for purchase.
Keep fishing, but think about the fish too.
SA
PS. I hope you are getting a semblance of value out of this. If so, and you think any other marketeer or business owner would, feel free to share/forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe. Thanks!