Media Agency

When to use a media agency and how to select the media mix?

·      What is a media agency?

Media agencies advise companies on how and where to advertise, and on how to present a positive picture of themselves to the public. Primary services include advertising, public relations and other forms of media management.

Media agencies were first launched with their main focus being the transaction of media space more efficiently than the mainstream advertising agencies, which had previously managed the process of media buying. A media agency ensures that a marketing message appeals to consumers, appears in the right place, at the right time and that the advertiser pays the best possible price.

·      When to use a media agency?

Using a PR agency doesn't come cheap - we're talking at least several hundred to a couple of thousand pounds - but there are certain circumstances when it will become absolutely invaluable for your business.

Launching your business :

·      Start by defining the objectives of your launch - whether you want customer to interact with your product, or you want them to find out about the business through media, or so on.

·      If you want some media attention when you launch your business, a PR agency, though costly, is by far your safest bet.

·      PR is possibly the most effective way of drawing people to your business and getting your brand out there.

·      It is also typically more cost-effective than advertising on a large scale.

·      A PR agency already has an established network of media contacts that can hopefully guarantee some coverage, where, unless you come from a journalistic background, it will be much, much tougher to get the same attention yourself.

·      They also know how to pull stories out of new launches to excite the press.

·      You can use an agency just for your launch. Balance the costs against how much you are overall spending on your launch and what your objectives for it are. If you're planning to publicise your business purely through PR, there's no harm dedicating 85% plus of your launch budget to paying for a PR agency.

·      Remember to maintain relationships, as it's often preferable to use the same agency for other projects further down the line than starting with a completely new one from scratch.

Launching a product or range you have invested heavily in:

·      If you've gone to a lot of expense to develop a new product or stock it, you want people to know about it.

·      Again, unless you have mature media contacts and relationships, an agency is going to get you far more media attention than you're likely to yourself.

·      Budget for the agency again according to your overall marketing and sales objectives for the product.

·      If it's a product of new service that hasn't cost you that much or that you feel your customers will discover in ways other than through the press, consider simply writing your own press releases as a support to the other means you're using to save money.

As a very general rule of thumb, if your PR budget is more than £10,000 annually, you're probably at about the level where you need to bring in an agency to help out, as this is a significant budget to handle on top of other activities. Obviously this figure will vary though, and you'll probably be able to tell intuitively when it's time to bring in an agency - either when PR is simply taking up too much of your time, or when you can see very healthy ROIs that you know would make it worthwhile investing properly in someone professional to handle it.

If you're going to need ongoing, sustained publicity for your business, consider bringing in a dedicated PR person within your business to handle things. This may be cheaper in the long-run than using an agency full-time and an employee of your business is likely to be more dedicated and knowledgeable about your brand and products than an outsourced agency.

If you use another marketing or communications agency:

·      They may recommend the use of a PR agency, or they may offer it as part of their services.

·      Always ask whether they offer PR services when you're trying to find a communications or marketing agency to begin with as using the same company for both can save you cash further down the line.

·      If you're using a professional marketing agency, it's likely you're at the level where you need to outsource your PR management too, depending on what your overall marketing objectives are.

If you're uncomfortable handling the press or are low on time. Establishing and handling press relationships, making contact with journalists, writing press releases, organising stunts and following all that up all takes times and effort. If you're struggling, a low-cost agency with experience of small businesses can really help.

Your own endeavours aren't working out. When you keep writing press releases and get absolutely no results, it's time to throw in the towel and leave it to the professionals - otherwise you're just wasting your own precious time. If your objectives are to get media coverage, it's also well worth the investment if you can't manage it yourself.

If you want to use an agency, you have to make sure:

·      Your business or product is completely ready. There's no point publicising something only for members of the public to go to find out more about it and it be incomplete. They won't come back a second time.

·      You know exactly who your target customer is and you know your market. It's not a PR company's job to research your target market. You need to have an idea of their demographics and interests so the agency can identify the publications they're most likely to read or the types of media they respond best to.

·      How to select the right media mix?

I think it’s a fair assumption that single-channel marketing is a thing of the past.  Gone are the days of direct mail only, even for old-school publishers. Today’s media mix has to bridge a broad variety of channels that might include old-school outdoor and direct mail, as well as new fast-growing channels like mobile, social and every digital channel in between.

So how can chief marketers determine the right mix for their organization across this ever-expanding set of options?  Here are few guidelines to follow:

·      Find your audience: The first step is to go to the data and find out where your audience is, both in terms of content consumption and devices used. Your audience’s consumption habits should guide your media mix: if they’re Millennials consuming hours of streaming video, video ads should have a prominent place within your mix. Are they big on news sites? Targeted display might be smart to add. Consider rich mobile ads for audiences who spend a lot of time on smart phones and tablets.

B2B marketers may face more of a challenge identifying the consumption habits of their target audience, and may want to spend more to track them down. But don’t overlook the treasure in your own backyard – recent breakthroughs in marketing technology let advertisers build a targetable audience profile based on the advertiser’s in-house CRM data. Why guess what your audience looks like when the answer is already in the numbers?

·      Align Product and Channel: Once you’ve located your audience, you’ll want to ensure that the product your promoting makes sense for the channel you’re considering. For example, brands like Starbucks and Jiffy Lube are natural fits for mobile, as they’re targeting clients on the go. The Maytag Man and Stanley Steemer might be better suited to the traditional web.

·      Consider Social: Social media is also a smart consideration for brands targeting Millennials and other audiences that flock to social sites. Social data can be an extremely valuable targeting tool, and social sharing is a very effective way to spread a message and grow an audience. But consider what you’re marketing and whether it’s appropriate for sharing: Products like trendy hand-bags and events like the Tough Mudder race will do well with social sharing, as people are proud to promote their engagement with the products. Anti-itch cream? Not so much.

·      Thinking about video? Video is also great when you’re asking more of an audience. To use the Tough Mudder example again, showing exciting footage from past races in an ad will probably inspire interested viewers to sign up for the next race – even if the registration form is two pages long and will require them to pull out their credit cards.

·      Brand safety: If brand safety is a concern for you or your client, you’ll want to consider that as you build your mix out, too. In this instance, private exchange marketplace buys with trusted online publishers is the best way to ensure your ads only run on sites that align with your brand’s values. If you conduct these buys through a full-service marketing platform, you’ll also get  deep analytic insights about the audience that you can apply to future campaigns.

Once you’ve identified your optimal mix, I recommend testing channels to understand which channel is contributing the most to conversion events. Take a measured, scientific approach. Raise budgets on channels one at a time, starting with the one that makes the most sense for your audience. Test, measure and analyze results with surgical precision, then optimize your campaigns to better reach your goals.

To sum it up simply, your audience and product need to guide your media mix. Offer valuable, relevant content for each channel you are testing. That’s the key to finding the right media mix!

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_agency

http://www.smarta.com/advice/sales-and-marketing/pr/how-to-use-a-pr-agency/

http://blog.mediamath.com/blog/data/what-is-the-right-media-mix-how-do-you-determine-this/

Social Media

How to use social media marketing effectively in building / developing a brand?

1.    How to choose the right platform for your company?

Step 1: Identify your audience 

The first step is to identify who your audience is. You want to be as specific as possible, since it will make your decision easier. Write down the answers to the following questions:

·       Who is your typical customer?

·       How old are they?

·       Are they male or female?

·       What is their income and education level?

·       What are they interested in outside of your product and service?

Use the answers to these questions (and any other pertinent questions that may relate to the business or industry you’re in) in order to help build out a profile of your audience.

Step 2: Define your goals

Once you know your audience, you need to define goals for that audience. As a business owner, your primary goal will likely be to drive sales by attracting customers—yet, there are other creative goals for social media. While some brands use social media to drive brand recognition and to develop friendly relationships with potential buyers, others use social media for customer support.

For example, on-demand media company Netflix uses the Twitter handle @Netflixhelps to address customer service issues. Not only does it free up their phone lines, but it gives satisfied customers an opportunity to promote their brand. 

When it comes to creating your social media goals, brainstorm a list of both typical and unusual ways social media could work for your brand.

Step 3: Find your audience

Now that you have your audience profiled and your goals defined, it’s time to find your audience. To do this, you’re going to determine which platform your audience uses by looking at the demographics of the users on each platform. You’ll also want to consider how active your audience is on that platform. For example, while young Facebook users may have profiles, they’re more active on Instagram.

Besides demographics and engagement, you’ll also want to look at how individuals use the platform.

2.    How to measure the impact of social media marketing?

To start, let’s agree that brand awareness is a measure of how recognizable your brand is to your target audience. For those looking to get ahead of the curve on social media measurement, the first step is to align your social media metrics with metrics your company is already comfortable with.

Also, let’s agree that the measurements for social media aren’t all that different from how you’ve been measuring traditional media. To put brand awareness measurement into the context of the sales funnel, the key areas to evaluate fall into three categories:  social media exposure, influence and engagement.

With that understanding, let’s look at how you can level the playing field between your traditional media metrics and your social media metrics.

#1:  Measuring Social Media Exposure

How many people could you have reached with your message?

In social media, this measurement is about as reliable as a print magazine’s circulation, but knowing your potential audience does have value because it represents your potential sales lead pool.

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this post, some of these metrics have to be accounted for manually, so you’ll have to balance the level of effort to track the metrics versus the value you’ll receive from them to determine their importance to your overall strategy.

A good example of where there can be unreliability in social measurement is when isolating unique users for each of your metrics. You want to avoid counting the same person twice in the list below, but realistically it’s difficult to do.

These measurements highlight the number of people you’ve attracted to your brand through social media. To mitigate the potential for duplication of users, track growth rate as a percentage of the aggregate totals. This is where you will find the real diamonds.

▪    Twitter: Look at your number of followers and the number of followers for those who retweeted your message to determine the monthly potential reach. You should track these separately and then compare the month-over-month growth rate of each of these metrics so you can determine where you’re seeing the most growth. A great free tool to use for Twitter measurement is TweetReach.

▪    Facebook: Track the total number of fans for your brand page. In addition, review the number of friends from those who became fans during a specified period of time or during a promotion and those who commented on or liked your posts to identify the potential monthly Facebook reach.  Facebook Insights provides value here.

▪    YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific period of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.

▪    Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.

▪    Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.

#2:  Measuring Engagement

How many people actually did something with your message?

Quick Adsense WordPress Plugin: http://quicksense.net/

This is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people actually cared enough about what you had to say to result in some kind of action.

Fortunately engagement is fairly easy to measure with simple tools such as Radian 6, Biz360 and TweetEffect. These metrics highlight who you want to target to retain on social media channels.

For a starting list of key performance indicators for engagement, this post by Chris Lake is a great start.

•   Twitter: Quantify the number of times your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, and your hashtag was used and then look at how many people were responsible for the activity. You can also track @replies and direct messages if you can link them to campaign activity.

•   Facebook: Determine the number of times your links were clicked and your messages were liked or commented on. Then break this down by how many people created this activity. You can also track wall posts and private messages if you can link them to activity that is directly tied to a specific social media campaign.

•   YouTube: Assess the number of comments on your video, the number of times it was rated, the number of times it was shared and the number of new subscribers.

•   Blog: Evaluate the number of comments, the number of subscribers generated and finally the number of times the posts were shared and “where” they were shared (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.). Measure how many third-party blogs you commented on and the resulting referral traffic to your site.

•   Email: Calculate how many people opened, clicked and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.

#3: Measuring Influence

This category gets into a bit of a soft space for measurement. Influence is a subjective metric that relies on your company’s perspective for definition. Basically, you want to look at whether the engagement metrics listed above are positive, neutral or negative in sentiment. In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward the brand or did it create bad mojo?

You can also use automated tools like Twitalyzer, Social Mention, Radian 6 or ScoutLabs to make it a little easier, but ALWAYS do a manual check to validate any sentiment results. Influence is generally displayed as a percentage of positive, neutral and negative sentiment, which is then applied in relation to the engagement metrics and to the metrics for reach where applicable.

A great application for influence is to look at the influence by those who engaged with your brand in the above categories. Do you have a nice mix of big players with large audiences engaging with your brand, as well as the average Joe with a modest following?

If not, your influence pendulum may be about to tip over, because it’s important that you spend time engaging with both influential users and your average user. Note: many of the automated tools that track sentiment and influence are not free. And many times, you will need a combination of tools to measure all of the different social media channels.

#4:  The Lead Generation Funnel

After you’ve measured through the influence portion of the funnel, you’re now creeping into where too many companies are starting their measurement efforts: the lead generation funnel. This is where the brand awareness portion of the funnel ends and the traditional ROI-driven action begins.

Understanding your reach, engagement and influence through these primary social channels will allow you to define your presence and impact, which can then be applied as a model to other social networks.

Now that you’ve tracked all of this information, how do you make it meaningful? Excel is a great tool to help organize your data. Build yourself a standard dashboard in Excel that highlights the key metrics that matter to the organization. Create a tab for a high-level overview of multiple campaigns, and a tab for each campaign for the time period you’re reporting on. Ultimately, you should put the information into the same format that you’ve used to report on traditional brand awareness campaigns, with social media as just another vehicle in the overall marketing mix.

3.    How to apply?

Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. They randomly churn for hours a day on a couple of their favorite social media platforms, with little thought given to goals, objectives, or metrics; and ultimately give up and fall back to traditional marketing approaches.

The first thing that entrepreneurs need to realize is that the process and framework for making social media marketing work are different from traditional marketing, and trial and error certainly doesn’t work. Ric Dragon, an expert in online marketing, in “Social Marketology,” outlined the best set of steps I have seen so far for the new world:

▪    Focus on desired outcomes first. Valid social media objectives for a business should include one or more of the following: increased brand awareness, lead generation, service and support, or reputation management. Obviously, the platforms and how you use social media would be different for lead generation versus service and support.

▪    Incorporate brand personality and voice. Popular culture these days expects a more humanized brand voice, and constituents are listening carefully to the tone, vision, and expertise of that voice. Think about how you can project the voice you want, and make sure it is consistently used by all team members across all platforms used.

▪    Identify the smallest segments possible of your constituents. Due to the information overload felt by consumers today, marketing at the generic segment level no longer works. Social media is the only one which allows you to be hyper-granular and drill down to micro-segments, to dramatically improve engagement levels and conversion ratios.

▪    Identify the communities for these micro-segments. Traditionally, community implied a physical grouping, but today a community is characterized by what they value, more than proximity. More important than finding a community, is creating one, with your blog and other social media engagement. The best communities then become your advocate.

▪    Identify the influencers of these communities. Social media brings all the aspects of important influencers these days, including peer pressure, authority, credibility, and in some cases, celebrities. Because feedback from social media operates in real time, you don’t have to wait months for results. You spend the months influencing the influencers.

▪    Create an action plan with metrics. Good action plans include a listening plan, channel plan, SEO plan, and a content creation plan, with activities and metrics. Social media activities span the gamut from curation to gifting, building relationships and groups, blogging, service actions, to lead conversion. Pick the ones that fit your desired outcome.

Iteratively execute and measure results. Measuring is all about return-on-investment (ROI). This can be customer acquisition cost, revenue growth, profit, or whatever other parameters are key to your success. Iterate and expect to pivot, based on results, because you can’t get it all right the first time. This is not trial and error.

3.1Trends, examples

Trends 2015:

Example: Dell (Twitter)

While many businesses are trying to work out how to make money from Twitter, computer maker Dell shows what they have done to validate Twitter as a credible business tool.

Last December, Dell claimed $1 million in sales that the company could directly attribute to their use of Twitter.

Dell offers refurbished laptops, desktops, workstations, servers and storage, and monitors and printers from Dell Outlet in the USA, with its  @DellOutlet account on Twitter a primary channel to notify followers of the latest offers.

Yesterday, Dell said that the total value of sales attributable to their presence on Twitter – both refurbished equipment as well as new systems – has now exceeded $3 million.

Sources

http://us.accion.org/business-resources/articles-videos/choosing-right-social-media-platform-your-business

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/4-ways-measure-social-media-and-its-impact-on-your-brand/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2013/08/17/7-steps-to-productive-business-use-of-social-media/

http://www.webpronews.com/dells-twitter-campaign-has-raked-in-3m-in-sales-2009-06/

http://openmindsagency.com/top-10-trends-2015-social-media-industry-report-new-research/