Modern customers are getting more and more demanding, so advertisers must think out of the box. This is the way to stand out from the crowd, capture the audience’s attention, boost brand engagement, and, as a result, achieve higher conversion rates.
However, even the most creative decisions must rely on a thorough strategy. Let’s find out how to integrate both creativity and strategy into media planning and buying.
Why Strategy Matters
Since competition is severe, any advertising step should be strategic. Otherwise, you may waste your budget and time, even in case your advertisements are highly creative. Strategy makes a decision-making process effective, guiding you through a variety of alternatives and suggesting the most appropriate option.
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Strategic Elements of Media Planning
There are three core steps involved in the media planning process, so let’s review each of them in detail.
Identifying Objectives
First and foremost, you need to define your campaign’s objectives. This can be lead generation, expanding into a new market, etc. Keep your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This way, you will make sure that the goals of this specific campaign are aligned with the general objectives of your business and get a clear understanding of what you would like to achieve.
Segmenting the Audience
Proper media planning and buying implies segmenting your target audience, and this is a crucial step for several reasons. First of all, segmentation helps you understand the interests and needs of your audience better. Secondly, with these insights in mind, you will be able to create more relevant content and distribute it more effectively.
For example, for a younger segment, you may want to come up with something creative, while for older users it may be essential to prepare a more restrained ad.
Start with analyzing the overall characteristics of your audience. Then, identify the key segments. For instance, they can be based on demographics, behavior, interests, etc. This way, it will be easier for you to understand the needs and preferences of every segment. Make sure to use relevant data during this process: data provided by analytical platforms you have already used, surveys, polls, and so on. In general, the more you know about your audience, the better.
The desired outcome is a set of customer persona profiles. Keep these profiles as detailed as possible, and analyze the performance of every campaign. This will allow you to update the profiles, if necessary.
Analyzing the Market
The next step is to analyze the market. Apart from figuring out when exactly your audience segments are active (and not only), you should check the activity of your competitors. What channels do they use? What ads do they launch? Understanding your competitors will help you make your ads more appealing, creative, and, as a result, effective. Otherwise, you may copy someone else’s style without even knowing this.
The result of this analysis and audience segmentation should be the answer to where, when, and how to target the identified segments.
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Examples of Innovative and Impactful Campaigns
Creativity in advertising isn’t only about catchy visuals and copy. It would also be helpful to experiment with new formats, leverage user-generated content, address the audience’s emotions and concerns, etc. Note that any ad you create should be aligned with your goals and personalized for each audience segment. It is also essential to analyze the campaigns continuously to detect weaknesses and opportunities.
For instance, Orion Telescopes managed to demonstrate the product’s capabilities with just a couple of images. Despite certain exaggerations, the ad is creative and easily attracts customers’ attention.
Here is an example from Heinz, focusing on customers’ concerns regarding what exactly ketchup is made of.
Note that creativity can be applied not only to digital advertising. Here is a concise billboard ad from McDonald’s promoting its nighttime service. The ad performs at full power only when it’s dark, which is another creative aspect.
Final Words
Being creative is a must in the modern advertising ecosystem, but this creativity should be guided by a thorough strategy. You need to identify your campaign objectives, get a deep understanding of your audience segment it, and thoroughly analyze the market.
This effort will help you decide on the essential level of creativity and maximize the overall performance of your campaigns. Note that programmatic advertising can help you reach your audience segments, but this must be aligned with your strategy. For instance, you may want to buy ad space from specific publishers or cooperate with particular influencers. Finally, when it comes to media planning and buying, you need to focus on quality, not quantity. It’s much more effective to launch one creative and thoroughly planned campaign than an entire set of mediocre ads.
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