As you might remember from our last blog, “Super Bowl XLVII and Effective Commercial Strategies”, your game plan and the decisions you make can be the deciding factor between a successful campaign and one that gets lost among the monotony of advertising clutter. At Dana, we approach every media plan with a series of simple, yet essential media buying questions that help us determine the best buys to achieve the most successful results for our clients.
• Who? During a particular season of the year, who is your target market? Is the one you might try to target in December the same as that in, say, July? Sometimes, evaluating the seasonal behaviors of your target demographic can make media buying decisions a more exact science. By using the data at your fingertips, this analysis allows for more targeted decisions.
• What? While many of our hospitality clients can offer a comfy bed to sleep in and some recreation to keep the kids occupied, we want to know…what makes them different? And what about this unique characteristic can we highlight to make the most of a placement? Amid the craze to stand out around the holidays or other seasonal pushes, there must be one thing that is unique to your brand—something you own, something nobody else can compete with.
• When? And it’s not as easy as pointing to the time of year. By analyzing consumer trends (a continually evolving science), we can decide on a certain day that prospective vacationers tend to plan their trips, or even use a special holiday issue to improve circulation toward the target. The question of “when” can be drilled down further into months, weeks and days. The ultimate goal: using the tools at our disposal to get it down to the minute and second!
• Where? The ability to pinpoint target demographics by geographic region has been evolving since the introduction of email marketing and geo-targeting. So how can you get the best return on investment? The answer is not as easy as it seems. You can play it safe and focus on an existing hot spot, or you can use bargaining techniques and new media to get added value as well as spread the word to prospective markets. With a balance of common sense (hitting the existing target) and cavalier procedures (thinking outside the box or hitting a soon-to-be hot spot), you can balance your message and grow a larger base for it without wasting funds, time and ink.
• Why? You might have guessed this question was coming. Examples include: Why are we targeting these markets? Why are we using a given publication to get a hold of these consumers? Why are we not exploring a publication that may give us a better return? These scenarios could go on and on, and for the media team at Dana, they certainly do. Because with every client, every promotion and every buy, we ask ourselves these questions. The relationships we build with both our clients and various media outlets have given us the flexibility to continually improve, providing better answers with every advertisement we place.
For more information about how Dana can help your marketing efforts cut through the clutter with experienced media buying strategies, email lkaniper@danacommunications.com.
