Today’s digital-first media landscape requires new levels of sophistication in technology, agility and ways to apply insights to help meet marketing objectives. As such, the advertising community must be able to translate billions of behavioral signals into actionable media plans to simultaneously achieve reach, relevancy and results.
The media planning recommendations provided here are grounded in digital events—browsing, buying and streaming—that happen in customers’ lives every day as they interact with brands and campaigns. Below are three building blocks for creating a media plan that helps deliver growth, whether in sales or brand metrics or somewhere in between, and helps you engage with users that matter most to your brand.
1. Defining (and reaching) your ever-changing customers
Do you truly know your audience and how or where they show up in digital environments? This may be a basic question every marketer asks, but it’s important. Where do customers spend their time? What are their interests? These insights matter when planning campaigns.
According to Deloitte’s 2021 Global Marketing Trends report, the art and science of delivering relevant content to your customers relies partly on the creative direction of marketers, but largely on data-driven insights to craft relevant customer messaging.
Say your brand has previously focused marketing and advertising efforts on driving repeat purchases of your products with existing customers. But, to achieve growth in your category, you’ll also need to reach new customers who aren’t buying your products, yet. To understand this new audience, we recommend utilizing an audience mapping exercise as a first step. At Amazon, this exercise looks at high-indexing audience attributes and brand affinity using Amazon DSP, and can help brands get a better understanding of which audiences are most likely to engage with their ad campaigns.
2. Sizing the audience opportunity for your brand
Size your audience opportunity by working backwards from your brand’s growth or campaign objectives to help ensure you can simultaneously drive reach, consideration and purchase.
A way to size the audience opportunity could be by breaking out audiences into three categories:
- Potential customers: not shopping your category or brand, but have shared interests with existing customers
- Interested customers: shopping your category, but not your products
- Existing customers: those already shopping your brand products
Gaining insights on these overlapping audiences can help you size the opportunity of reaching audiences who have purchased from similar brands or products that may find yours relevant.
3. Finding the right measurement for success
Measurement is central to creating a success storyline that connects the dots between ad performance and campaign, brand, or sales lift insights. But that’s easier said than done sometimes. According to Kantar, 67% of marketers think it’s tough to assess digital channel effectiveness, given blind spots in available measurement.
At Amazon Advertising, we think taking a multidimensional view of success yields the best results. Impact isn’t measured by just one performance or engagement metric—impact occurs across a vast digital and offline landscape from which marketers have to stitch together the results.
To measure the holistic success of a campaign or your marketing efforts, we recommend adopting a diverse set of measurement solutions to evaluate impact across three primary dimensions:
At the ad creative level to identify creative optimization opportunities.
At the audience level to fine-tune your audience selections.
And at the brand level to adjust messaging priorities based on performance.
By combining these types of solutions, you’ll have a wide-angle lens into what drives growth for your brand.
Using insights to propel your brand forward
For years, brands have been using consumer insights to help produce memorable ad campaigns. Media planning and digital campaigns will continue to evolve and so will the ability to measure them effectively and efficiently—if you know the right tools to use and when. Learn more about how insights-driven solutions can help you optimize your media plan.
