Marketers’ three keys to more agile media planning – Nielsen

Marketing success is dependent on adaptability. With rapid news cycles and changing consumer behavior, as well as uncertain futures, it’s important to be flexible. Marketers should plan for media throughout the year to help them achieve their brand goals. This puts the key audience at the heart of all marketing activities and not just once. Marketers can use the results to continually optimize their marketing strategies by implementing consumer-focused, always-on measurement procedures. 

For this level of agility in marketing, the following should be done:

Planning for center around people

We all are aware of how quickly consumer behaviors and needs evolve, so it’s critical marketers listen to their audiences’ needs and respond appropriately. Forrester predicts comfort and sustainability to trump consumers’ shopping priorities in 2022, giving marketers a high-level direction on how to start appealing to prospects.

It can seem like you are chasing after a moving target when it comes to understanding key audiences. With more channels and media outlets, consumers have many options to choose from when it comes time to consume content. Especially as populations continue to diversify, marketers need to establish ways to secure up-to-date insights into the brand’s target audiences. Because it allows brands to monitor consumer interactions across the entire brand experience, first-party information is more powerful than third-party sources. It also provides deeper understanding of consumers’ behavior.

Instead of devoting marketing bandwidth to sourcing audience data, brands can leverage martech tools to keep a pulse of key audiences’ behaviors and interests for them. This technology allows marketers the ability to monitor consumers at any time, allowing them to develop targeted campaigns that meet their consumers’ needs.

Practice nonstop media planning

Marketers need to be able to think continuously and avoid getting stuck in outdated marketing tactics. Marketers can analyze the data gathered through their data collection processes to see how consumers are changing in real-time so they stay in touch with customers. Moreover, the more often marketers record and assess campaign results, the more opportunities they have to see which tactics are truly effective.Marketers can couple these insights with past findings to inform future campaigns and reallocate marketing spend to only the tactics proven to work–and with up-to-date insights, even adjust campaigns currently in flight. This way, marketing teams don’t waste time or spend promoting campaigns that don’t resonate with consumers.

With continuous planning, brands can experiment with new campaign ideas and media buys in the short term with the comfort that they can scrap the campaign quickly if it doesn’t meet expectations. If the campaign has positive results, marketers may integrate it into their usual marketing mix.

The performance of their competition is another important aspect for brand managers. Analyzing competitive spend reveals how competitors are encroaching on target audiences, and if competitor spend is thereby hurting marketers’ own sales goals. Marketers will then be able attribute the impact of competitor spending to their campaigns succeeding.

Optimize marketing effectiveness by aligning your planning efforts

Connected planning offers marketers the opportunity to improve campaign planning. Marketers can use historic data as well as audience profiles from each software solution to create a seamless planning process. This allows them to align planning with buying. Marketers use different targets across media channels which causes them to be unable to accurately measure their work. For example, if different platforms use different data sets (e.g., online platforms sync with the brand’s first-party data while offline systems are fed third-party data), marketers do not have a unified target to work towards. Their measurements won’t add up, therefore.

Marketers often work with 28 vendors on average, making it difficult to plan and measure coherently. A fragmented approach isn’t only inconvenient; it’s detrimental to effectiveness. SME research has shown that marketers of all sizes and industries are unsure of their current martech capabilities. Nearly half of those surveyed (47%) considered data quality a barrier.

Marketing success can be maximized by ensuring consistency in data, software, partners, and other information. Marketing professionals can gain actionable feedback regarding campaign success by using consistent target definitions throughout channels and campaigns. Marketers can then see whether campaigns have met their goals. Marketing technology has improved to allow marketers to communicate more easily between different tools. This makes it possible to measure consistency across all systems from buying platforms to planning tools. Marketers have now access to all-in one solutions, which streamline their tech stack. With all of their marketing insight in one place marketers are able to act more quickly and accurately than switching between different systems. 

With the pandemic’s effects on consumer behavior and media consumption forecasted to linger long past its grip on public health, marketers need to maintain the flexibility and sensitivity they employed over the past two years as part of their permanent planning strategy. To maximize their marketing impact, they should utilize all three keys together. Marketing professionals can work confidently regardless of the media landscape by having a growth mindset, updated planning, and measurement practices.

MarTech Series first published this article.

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