Developing a successful media strategy takes time and effort. In today’s world of seemingly endless media communication options, it is more important than ever to follow a disciplined process.
Today’s consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing and advertising messages. There are infinitely more media options to evaluate and today’s consumers are increasingly more difficult to reach. Consumer’s time spent with media has become much more fragmented and difficult to measure.
The following media process should help you stay focused in order to develop a media strategy that will give your marketing message and advertising creative the best opportunity to reach the right customers.
- Establish a clear definition of the product category in which your brand competes.
- Review sales and trend information, looking for factors predicting growth, maturity, or decline.
- Evaluate the current and historical positioning and advertising of your brand and your direct competitors.
- Review all available research regarding current and lapsed customers and get to know your customers intuitively.
- Establish both primary and secondary target audience profiles described by demographics, psychographics, occupations, geography, and lifestyle segments.
- Analyze geographic variations between highly developed areas and poorly developed areas.
- Analyze sales seasonality variations and patterns.
- Review or conduct research on consumer behavior related to both product and media usage and then match your target audience profiles to media usage and coverage.
- Evaluate media vehicles with respect to audience size, composition, geography.
- Analyze and compare both media cost efficiencies and media cost effectiveness, and establish clear communication goals for overall reach, frequency, and effective reach & frequency.
- Compare various media options for reaching primary and secondary target audiences.
Remember: Successful marketing begins and ends with identifying the right target audience!