Mass media public service announcement (PSA) campaigns on print, billboard, and linear TV have been the status quo for years. But we can do better. Digital media is transforming what’s possible for public health marketing, allowing brands to raise awareness in a much more efficient, measurable way.
Here are five actionable digital tactics you can use to engage audiences and elicit the behavioral changes needed to support important public health initiatives.
Read more in PM360:
A luxury home ice maker brand partnered with Coegi to create a B2B2C strategy that would establish relationships with custom builders, designers, and homeowners, driving in-store visits to authorized brand dealers and growing their sales pipeline.
12,000
Leads Generated
68%
Lift in Dealer Visits
Consumers who were in-market for home appliances were easy to reach and wanted the client’s products. However, they could not buy directly from the brand. We needed to reach kitchen designers and renovators to close the awareness gap between consumers and professionals.
Our team had three key questions:
This home designer and builder audience had proven difficult to reach online. So, we needed to expand beyond traditional B2B channels, such as LinkedIn, to drive lead generation and build a long-term CRM growth strategy for the brand.
Digital media platforms offered limited reach to build awareness among our very niche group of trade professionals. Instead, we partnered with key trade publications to leverage their email syndication lists.
Prior to activating any digital media, Coegi worked with three leading industry publications for a three week email-blast campaign prompting website visitation. This allowed us to build a fresh, highly-qualified audience list primed through sequential messaging.
We took an audience-first approach focusing on consumers already in the consideration stage for relevant products, and drove three core audience segments to find the brand’s B2B dealers:
Coegi used Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to reach users actively searching for home renovation ideas and products. This was accomplished using a blend of contextual, interest, lookalike and retargeting audiences. We also used display retargeting and a paid search strategy to own branded search terms and secure top-of-page placement at final stages of the consumer journey.
With email serving as the awareness driver, we were able to focus on measuring core actions, such as “Dealer Locator” button clicks and contact form submissions on their website. These actions helped us evaluate if we had reached the B2B audience and then implement sequential messaging and flighting to drive conversions.
By combining the audience quality of industry publications with digital reach and measurement, this B2B2C marketing campaign drove outstanding results. It generated 68% growth of in-person dealership visits and 12,000 B2B leads to establish a first-party CRM database.
How can your wine brand stand out among thousands of competitors? It’s about more than having the most eye-catching packaging or best shelf spot — although these are important factors. To get people to reach for your product repeatedly, learn how to stand out across the customer journey using a digital-first media strategy.
To accomplish this effectively, wine brands need to:
Read more about how to drive wine sales through digital marketing on Retail Touchpoints:
It’s hard to overestimate the power of a strong influencer endorsement. Trusted creators are powerhouses for building brand equity in a non-invasive way.
They make word of mouth marketing scalable and efficient, when done well. However, many brands fail to reap the full benefits creators can offer.
Why?
But with the right building blocks,you can overcome these challenges. Here are our top five influencer marketing tips we apply to maximize our clients’ investments at Coegi.
First, define the business objective. What are you hoping to achieve with influencer marketing? Do you want to generate mass reach? Build market share within a specific niche? Or, are conversions, sales or leads the desired outcome?
After defining the goals, you can determine the mix of creators necessary to achieve those objectives:
Remember – bigger following does not always equal better results. Higher follower counts and millions of impressions comes a higher price tag and a less precise audience. Timing is another consideration, as larger-scale creators often have longer lead times due to heavier editorial calendars.
Learn more on how to choose the best influencers for your brand from one of Coegi’s account supervisors and influencer marketing connoisseur, Natalie Carson:
Selecting the right size of creator for your goals and budget is important. But, finding the perfect creator match goes beyond surface-level numbers.
Finding creators that already fit your general brand standards will make the partnership process more streamlined and the content creation more genuine.
But the real magic happens when a creator becomes an ambassador who truly knows and advocates for your brand over months or even years. You can nurture these relationships through evergreen discount codes and affiliate links, which will incentivize the creator while helping you track actions taken by their followers.
Users are becoming more perceptive to blatant advertising and ingenuine messaging. Take stock of how strong the creator’s rapport is with their followers. Do they truly influence their audience? This is especially important when attempting to reach Gen-Z consumers, who are hyper aware of sponsored content.
Smaller creators tend to drive higher conversion rates due to having greater trust and engagement with their followers. Regardless of size, creators that organically align with your brand and are true advocates (ie. they actually use your product!) will be much more likely to influence purchase decisions.
Lastly, be sure to thoroughly vet creators and avoid those with significant amounts of bot traffic or paid-for followers. These can inflate engagement and follower numbers but are useless for building your brand.
Influencer should be woven into a holistic marketing strategy, not treated as a separate tactic or handled by a random third-party. Consolidating your paid media and influencer marketing within one digital media agency offers three core benefits:
Sharing cross-channel learnings and insights will make the overall media ecosystem stronger and allow for a more holistic, data-driven approach.
Good creators are storytellers and social media experts. They have their thumb on the pulse of social media trends. They understand the algorithms. And they know how to communicate with their audiences.
90% of consumers view micro influencers as credible, believable & knowledgeable.
Empower these partners to have an authentic voice when speaking on behalf of your brand – not a scripted actor. We’ve all sat through cringeworthy scripted ad reads on YouTube and raised eyebrows at ill-fitting product endorsements on Instagram or TikTok. And I’m betting you didn’t end up using those particular affiliate codes.
You will see stronger results if you allow creators to communicate with their followers in a way that comes naturally. Simply let them create content, not ads. You can’t build brand authenticity without allowing your creators to be authentic with their audiences.
View our Practitioner’s Guide to Influencer Marketing for more tips plus a step-by-step process on how to launch an effective influencer marketing strategy.
You’re not at war with your customers, so why are you “targeting” them with campaigns?
It’s time to shift advertising’s rhetoric and redefine what it really means to be audience first.
From my perspective, placing the consumer at the center of your marketing strategy requires marketers to stop running advertising campaigns and start creating audience ecosystems.
An audience ecosystem is the culmination of a brand’s omnichannel marketing and communication touchpoints surrounding, and informed by, a core audience group. It blends paid, earned and owned content. It breaks down the walls between marketing communication channels. This takes brand marketing to a more holistic level where the results are greater than the sum of its parts.
Each audience segment you’re looking to influence needs a unique ecosystem of media touchpoints tailored to their identities, values and behaviors. This is key to creating authentic messaging and organic placements that show up in their day-to-day experiences.
Curated audience ecosystems provide a flexible framework from which you can select content channels and nurture lasting relationships. It is a tool to focus media planning and brand messaging on audience insights. This helps avoid the rat race of clamoring for attention through one-off ad campaigns, or trend hopping to the next shiny marketing opportunity that may not matter to your consumers.
Brands need to take a backseat and let the customers drive. Your business success hinges on your ability to align with their needs, beliefs, values and personal identities. So, your media plan should be a reflection of those consumer insights. The ecosystem model serves as a playbook to sustain long-term brand growth by avoiding waste, improving brand perception, and keeping the brand top of mind to defend and grow market share.
To start building an audience ecosystem, use consumer research and insights to identify potential marketing placements within the following categories:
Depending on your brand and budget, you may not be able to tap into each of these buckets at once. But, that should not stop you from brainstorming – dream big, then scale back as needed.
Take a look at an ecosystem proposal we built around an ‘Avid Gamer’ audience for a CPG beverage brand:
This shows how incorporating media activations on gaming sites, exploring partnerships in the gaming space, and amplifying the brand presence on key retail media networks can cooperate to anchor the brand in the daily life of an avid gamer.
Now that we’ve discussed the philosophy behind the audience ecosystem, let’s discuss five practical steps you can take to begin implementing this for your brand:
First, determine what your community will find the most value from in your product. From there, craft a unique messaging strategy for each audience.
Use your intuition as a guide, then support or refute with research. I recommend social listening as well as syndicated research to strike a balance of quantitative and qualitative data. Once you understand where your audience is engaged, you can show up with contextually relevant, personalized messaging.
You don’t want to invasively interject into their lives. Instead, the goal is to align with their identity and add to their badges of self expression. For inspiration, look to brands with distinct value propositions and well-cultivated community bases like Dove, Trader Joe’s or Lego. These beloved brands truly tap into human behavior and community values – business performance follows naturally.
Next, use that consumer knowledge to show up where your personas are most present – physically and digitally. You want to show up in expected and unexpected ways. Where is there a lot of noise, and where is there competitive white space? Identify which channels you believe will create the biggest impact and strategically invest.
Remember, people don’t want to be attacked, targeted, or followed with advertising – just look at the latest changes to privacy laws. Consumers want personalized advertising that makes them feel understood, not watched.
By planting an ecosystem of media tactics around each audience, you can develop strategies to allow each channel to add new life to the ecosystem and support one another. Ecosystems are delicate and require tending to operate functionally. It will take some experimenting to find the right balance of media spend and channel mix to drive the results you want.
You can rotate attention across different elements of the ecosystem to align with timing whether it be tentpole events, product or service seasonality, socio-political climate, changing user behavior, or a variety of factors. Knowing you have the support of the greater ecosystem, you can feel more comfortable lifting focus from certain channels to lean into others.
Finally, map out and assign value to each touchpoint within your ecosystem based on the expected impact. With campaigns, the goal is direct attribution. With ecosystems, the goal is incremental improvement over time. Test and learn to see what blend of tactics keeps your ecosystem in balance. Determine what areas need more or less attention to lift up the entire system and drive full-funnel business outcomes
Also, experiment with measurement beyond media KPIs. For example, organic reach is necessary to drive business outcomes and instrumental in evaluating the integrity of your holistic ecosystem. But it shouldn’t be the media campaign KPI. You should complement reach and frequency with tangible metrics that indicate consideration such as clicks, video completions, downloads, and landing page visits.
Unlike a campaign, this process never ends. You can’t expect the audience research you did 12 months ago to apply precisely today – the environment changes, people change. Data can become stale in as little as 3 months. You have to continue to learn and refresh to avoid becoming obsolete.
This is why today’s marketing plans need to be living documents. Yearly planning and even quarterly media planning is becoming less feasible, and brands that are inflexible to changing market conditions and consumer behaviors are falling behind. The ecosystem model allows for long-term planning without injuring what is already in place on the campaign level.
With that in mind, understand that the primary challenge of the ecosystem approach is timing. Like a garden, it needs time to grow and flourish. There’s a lot of financial pressure and limited patience surrounding marketing performance from business decision-makers. You’ll likely need to balance the campaign-centric and audience-centric playbooks, but the goal should be to prioritize sustainable brand success over quick wins. Slow thinking is critical when you consider the complexity of measuring all the diverse channels in your ecosystem.
The audience ecosystem methodology makes omnichannel media planning more digestible and flexible, which is key for today’s marketing landscape. But even more importantly, it can help brands build more meaningful and lasting customer connections.
After reading, I hope you leave with these key mindset shifts:
For help bringing this transformation to your marketing strategy, contact Coegi today.
Want to dive deeper? For more discussion on how to implement the audience ecosystem model, listen to our podcast episode here:
Influencer marketing campaigns pair the power of word-of-mouth with the efficiency, scalability and data-driven mentality of digital advertising.
In this guide, we share Coegi’s best insights to running more strategic and accountable influencer marketing campaigns.
You’ll learn the ins and outs of results-driven influencer marketing so you can feel confident adopting this high impact, authentic channel into your brand strategy.
Influencers can be your fast track to content authenticity, brand credibility and business results. 90% of consumers view micro-influencers as credible, believable and knowledgeable. The power they have on consumer behavior and buying decisions can’t be overstated.
Download the full guide to learn how to harness these benefits and build high-performing influencer marketing campaigns for your brand.
Need an agency partner to help craft and execute your influencer marketing strategy? Contact Coegi today for a discovery call.
