Nine steps to making your media budget work as hard as it can

For most brands, media investment is likely to be the biggest proportion of marketing investment and needs sweating hard. In the last few years, global advertising revenues have been consolidated into a small handful of search, social and retail media platforms. This has created real challenges for brands wishing to orchestrate an effective and efficient reach-based approach, while avoiding duplication and balancing brand-building and conversion-based activities.

With brands planning such a high proportion of their media direct with platforms – often without full oversight of retail media bought by sales colleagues – it’s no wonder many are considering whether to in-house media buying entirely, hoping for more insightful solutions for effective planning.

Effective media requires a learning mindset.

The strongest brands proactively define protocols for how to approach media and set goals. Effective media principles must apply specifically to your brand, so consider the nature of your audience, their needs and motivations, their path to purchase, and category dynamics such as frequency of purchase, competitiveness and shopping behaviours.

But in a world where cookies may finally soon disappear – and where marketers are subject to a hard sell from advertising platforms, with compelling data being part of the pitch – here are some prompts to help any marketer take control of their media.

Optimise spend

The first step is properly and consistently measuring marketing spend. Have a clear taxonomy in place which gives you an overview of every pound or dollar, and have a target split between development and deployment costs (or working/non-working, as they used to be termed).

Minimise development costs where possible by reusing assets, creating a learning plan to proactively define research needs and managing a tight agency roster. The biggest opportunity to increase impact may be to shift spend from poorly performing types of deployment spend into media that tends to be the hardest working line of any brand budget.

Rules of thumb

With so much information on best practice available what learning can you build into your plan to set you going on the right foot?

For example, evidence appears to indicate that using a couple of channels is more effective than a single channel, that video-based channels remain particularly good at building brand associations, and of course that effective creative drives both brand and sales outcomes.

Apply learning

Beyond the generic, a measurement plan appropriate for your budget will help future planning. For brands spending more than £1m, marketing mix modelling will pay back in its ability to unlock more gross profit from future spend on media and the broader mix. Brands with smaller budgets are likely to have concentrated that spend in fewer channels to maximise scale, so the limitations of in-platform attribution modelling may not be so problematic.

Being clear on the role media plays in delivering strategic brand objectives will create balance. Though much vilified, performance marketing metrics can be useful if you are using them in the context of your overall intent.

Prioritise

Make sure you have enough money to fund main campaigns, with sufficient budget for each activity in order of priority. Too often, spend is diluted across too many things without being enough to achieve a consumer goal.

Lead with effective assets

In practice, this means favouring assets with proven results, establishing and adhering to pre-testing protocols for new work, and ensuring assets are suitable for the increasingly distinct nature of different channels – don’t put user-generated content on TV, or polished video on TikTok!

Plan connections

Thinking consumer-first remains the best approach to overcoming the challenges of a disjointed media environment.

What are the key points on your audience’s path to purchase? When are they most receptive and to what message? What is the right balance of building associations and converting sales? Are you targeting an audience that includes underserved groups or are you going for mainstream, cash-strapped and fickle 18- to 35-year-olds like everyone else?

Selection criteria

Be clear on the headline metrics for paid media. Over a given period, what level of reach are you trying to achieve and with what audience? How will you manage this across platforms, informed by connections planning, and what will your approach to capping frequency be?

Some brands start by maximising reach across one media channel before adding in more to capture discrete audiences, whereas others seek reach by being broad and deep, recognising how channels work effectively together.

Attention

Though reach may remain the priority for most brands, it’s important to ensure this is achieved with a quality mindset appropriate for your brand.

Brands are waking up to the negative effects of using CPM (cost per thousand impressions), and shifting from ensuring ads are viewable on screen to understanding the drivers of attention: effective creative, audience response and thoughtful context.

Data  

Media buying is an opportunity to harvest data. As cookies crumble, brands are being encouraged to develop first-party data. Do you really need to and, if so, how will you apply this to your advantage?

Low-interest, high-penetration categories might do just as well using third-party data, and indeed evidence for the effectiveness of personalisation is far from conclusive.  How can you connect first-party customer data effectively with the creative means by which you are trying to engage and influence your audience? What’s your hypothesis and how will you test and learn?

Though perhaps more consolidated than at any point in the last 30 years, media (and the technology by which we buy and assess its impact) is dynamic, with AI no doubt poised to help with some of these conundrums. Effective media requires a learning mindset, humility and having the discipline to continuously learn, optimise and try new things to stay ahead and in control.