Breaking through the social media planning ceiling
Strategy Leaders
Adding one or more channels to your media mix can already help you increase your media ROI significantly.
I know it can be very tempting to stick to a single channel or the same channels for your media planning. You may have been on them for a while, have probably learned the ins and outs of the platforms, and mastered it there.
But it is very likely that you will hit a ceiling sooner or later if you only stick to one platform, especially social media. The key to grow your brand is building effective reach over a longer period. You can run bursts around key periods if budgets are restricted. But remember, run a marathon and not a sprint.
Reach needs to be built up effectively to make your media investment work hard for you. A mix of mass-reach channels and digital channels have proven to be most effective. Adding one or more channels to your media mix can already help you increase your media ROI significantly.
Extensive research by WARC has shown that by increasing the channel mix from one to two platforms can increase the ROI by 19%. And it keeps increasing the more channels you add to the media mix. For example, based on the research, running a campaign with five platforms has seen an uplift of up to 35%.
Increasing attention through channel planning
While broadcast TV might be out of reach for a while for some direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, connected TV (CTV) and video on demand (VOD) offer a chance to generate decent reach levels for smaller budgets with the best features of TV such as consumption on a big screen, with full viewability and sound on.
Thinkbox’s research has shown that TV consumption offers high effectiveness even though it might be on in the background or while using a second screen. In fact, second-screen usage has enhanced effectiveness and can offer a huge opportunity to drive up search and website traffic for your brand.
And there are further channels to explore which – based on users’ consumption – also offer more visibility and hence lead to more attention rather than a social ad that gets scrolled through mindlessly.
Out-of-home, for example, can be bought in a highly targeted way for certain areas and day times (digital OOH). You can focus on specific cities, neighbourhoods, streets or even single sites. It all depends on what is most relevant to your brand and objectives.
Digital OOH screens also allow for agility. You can react to current events or even the weather forecast, if it is relevant to your product and message, to increase relevancy.
Digital radio, music streaming or podcasts can help drive reach in an environment that is consumed very differently compared to social media or websites. These platforms will allow you to address your target audience in a different mindset which can increase driving cut through of your messaging.
Digital audio platforms also allow for very low entry budgets which gives DTCs a chance to test these channels first. On streaming platforms like Spotify or podcasts channels you rarely share the ad space with other advertisers, which gives you a much higher chance to get the listener’s attention.
Beware treating all digital channels like social media
Digital nowadays is key in almost every media mix, be it social or desktop or online video. And while TV and OOH have proven to add significant increase to the effectiveness, digital has also proven to contribute to the campaign’s effectiveness.
When picking an additional channel it is important is to add a channel that is highly relevant to your audience and delivers significant reach among your audience. Make sure you do your research about your audience’s media consumption. Look at how frequently they consume specific channels. In that way you can expand your reach and show up where they are.
Today’s digitisation of traditional media offers a huge chance to DTC brands to grow their reach and ultimately audiences. Channels are getting more accessible and allow for testing.
Each channel plays a certain role in your media mix and defining the roles is key to measure your campaign’s success.
However, here is a word of warning. Because a channel has gone digital doesn’t mean it should and can be treated as a digital channel such as social media. While you can report on view through or listen through rates these channels cannot be optimised towards such measures.
Digital audio, CTV, VOD, digital OOH are still broadcast channels. That’s is what they do best and what is needed for brands to grow.
What the digitisation does now allow is to be smarter about the targeting. Try various targeting options, day time targeting or even weather targeting. Lower entry barriers and agile targeting is what makes these channels valuable.
Nina Franck is an independent comms and media planner
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