A few months ago, eMarketer reported that U.S. adults now spend an average of 12 hours and seven minutes with media each day. This is a double-edge sword for marketers. We know that people are highly engaged with media, but where do you start in reaching them effectively?
When working to identify the tactics, keep these five things in mind:
It’s easy to skip this step in the planning process, but it is critical for success. You have to fully understand your target and what they are ultimately trying to achieve. Identify their issues and frustrations, their idea of success and end goal. Journey mapping is a great exercise to get the full picture and pull vital insights. If you can understand the consumers’ objectives, you can help them achieve them. Once you understand the full customer experience, tactics can be effectively chosen based on where the customer is in their journey and what information would be the most beneficial to them.
In order to fully understand how to reach your target, start with what you know. I would recommend building a data ecosystem first. That sounds made up, but it isn’t. Make a list of every data source you have access to. This isn’t limited to digital platforms. Facebook and Google Analytics are full of insights, but think beyond that. Customer survey data, credit card transactions, call logs. The list goes on. Once you have a full picture of the information, you can better identify insights surrounding your most valuable customers and determine how to reach more people like them.
The consumer path is like a pile of spaghetti. Everything is tangled together. It is critical to understand that your target doesn’t think about online versus offline or digital versus social. Assuming you followed step one, you know what your target is trying to accomplish and what their problems are. Choose tactics and messaging in a way that helps guide them toward a mutually beneficial solution. You wouldn’t follow someone on the street and demand they click here or call now. Why do it with your marketing? Each tactic should build upon the others to eliminate friction and help support you and your consumers’ objectives.
Impressions, clicks, shares, CTR, video views, etc. are not your objective. It is easy to lose sight of this when planning your tactical approach. There are millions of metrics to be analyzed and each of them can be helpful in determining success. But they should all be pointing to something bigger. I am a strong believer in defining conversions versus secondary actions. An action is only defined as a conversion if it directly points to your objective. If your objective is to generate leads, a form submission is your conversion. A video view on the website is not. It may illustrate that you’ve reached an engaged audience, but an engaged audience doesn’t directly put money in the bank. Each metric is important and helps guide us toward success with the right insight applied. Just keep in mind which ones matter most and the tactics you need will become clearer.
You could have the greatest tactical activation of all time, but if the content and messaging doesn’t line up with that consumer journey, it doesn’t matter. When selecting tactics, you need to fully understand the exact message and value each one brings to the target. Our digital world allows us to do this better than ever. We can set up conditional tactics and messaging so that our target only sees a call to action if we know they have watched our full video or read sponsored content we promoted.
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