Author: Coegi

The Impact of Content Marketing on Your Brand

Posted on by Coegi

Now more than ever, consumers desire a more meaningful connection with the brands they follow. Your audiences crave behind the scenes videos covering meaningful origin and philanthropic stories, the colorful, entertaining brand voice on social media, and highly personalized written content that feels truly authentic. There is no better way to do that than investing in a content marketing strategy. From everyday people to celebrities to brands both large and small, everyone is realizing the power that content has over driving action along the customer journey. If your brand is not investing in thoughtful content today, read on to learn more about why every brand should be incorporating this into their marketing strategies.  

Why Content Marketing?

Whether you yourself are the brand or your business is the brand, content marketing is important to invest in – especially in the digital era where content is constantly consumed across multiple platforms for both personal and professional reasons. 

Here are some of the key reasons to believe in content marketing:

It’s lucrative

Content marketing can boost conversions leading to higher sales or traffic to your website, all the while signaling to google that the domain has high authority and increasing your rank in search engines. More content + more exposure = higher ROI. Invest in high quality content and your audience will invest in you.  

It’s a relationship builder

While content marketing may ultimately lead to higher sales, it shouldn’t be  about selling, but rather helping. By taking this approach, content marketing can help you increase loyalty thus building trust and creating a sense of community surrounding your brand. Make sure you are tailoring your content to your audience’s biggest questions and what they value. 

Your competitors are using it

97% of businesses use content marketing, and that includes 73% of marketers.. Don’t fall behind and let your competitors get the upper hand. Use multiple different types of content to be seen as a thought leader among similar brands and meet business goals at each stage of the customer journey. 

Choosing Your Content

The process of choosing which content types to lean towards looks a little different for every brand. There are a vast number of content types like social media posts, infographics, blogs, podcasts, videos, and paid content marketing with reputable publishers. It’s important to start by assessing what makes the most sense for your brand.

Take a look at the infographic below to begin aligning your content marketing goals with your overarching brand goals.

Defining Your audience

Your audience should play a large role in determining your content. Start by narrowing down your audience’s potential topics of interest and looking at which platforms your audience is conducting the most research or spending the most time engaging with. 

Developing your message strategy

It’s important to set content goals to measure how well your content is performing. This can help you decide which pieces of content or messaging themes are performing well to refine your strategic approach moving forward. 

Aligning brand goals with content formats

As you pinpoint your target audience and set content goals to develop a sound messaging strategy, you need to identify your brand goals. Pinpoint the primary KPIs you’re looking to measure to determine which types of content best serve your purpose. 

Overcoming Tricky Hurdles

While there are many reasons for brands to invest in content marketing, it is important to understand that there are a few hurdles to overcome to see the ROI brands desire. 

Benefits aren’t immediate

If you’re thinking about tapping into content marketing with expectations of immediate success such as high engagement and conversions, you need to temper your expectations. Building a content strategy is a time consuming period marked by trial and error. It takes great time and resources to discover what makes sense for your brand and for your audience in particular. Don’t rush the process. 

Maintaining originality

With 97% of businesses already using content marketing, it’s clear that the industry is highly competitive. This can make it difficult to differentiate your brand from your competitors. Your competitors are often creating similar types of content on the same platforms and channels, trying to capture the attention of the same types of consumers. Make sure you aren’t spending too much time trying to “keep up with the Joneses” and are instead focusing on creating content that creatively showcases how your brand can make the consumers’ lives better. Tap into your creative juices based on consumer insights to find ways to make your content standout.

A shortage of ideas

Constantly coming up with new content ideas can leave marketers feeling burned out. But while the instinct may be that new content is better and more exciting to your audience, it’s important to think smarter not harder. Find ways to revamp your existing content, and find ways to make it more valuable – both to your audience and Google.  

Overall, content marketing is a great investment for your brand. It’s lucrative, builds that connection you’re looking for with your audience, and allows you the space and opportunity to grow your brand like never before. So begin exploring content marketing efforts today – whether you’re handling in-house or outsourcing through a trusted partner.To learn more about content marketing, be sure to check out:

Simple Strategies for Sustainable Marketing

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The digital advertising community is facing a growing imperative to face our own carbon footprint. For decades, talks of the environmental impact of advertising have largely focused on tangible waste produced by old vinyl billboard wraps and extravagant PR mailers, much of which ends up in landfills. However, with recent estimations that a typical digital ad campaign emits around 5.4 tons of CO₂, the industry is stepping up to promote sustainability, develop best practices, and build greener technologies. With even more sustainability solutions expected on the horizon, it would be premature to overhaul your entire digital strategy. But if carbon-consciousness is one of your businesses objectives, here are five innovative approaches to think through now: 

Build Your Sustainability Roadmap

Sustainability transformation requires a holistic understanding of where your brand stands today. 

Before you make large changes, plan time to reflect on historical advertising practices, discuss which areas of sustainability you would like to prioritize as focal points, receive alignment across all relevant teams – ultimately determining what a transformation engine could look like at your company and what it would take to empower action and collaboration across teams and partners. 

Building this roadmap prior to tackling any specific changes will increase likelihood of long-term success. 

Choose a Trusted Measurement Partner

Take it from performance marketers: you have to plan your strategy with measurement in mind. 

Currently the best solutions for understanding your campaigns’ carbon emissions are outside of your performance platforms, so you’ll need to evaluate the sustainable ad tech landscape and determine the ideal partner to challenge and support your transformation. Organizations like Scope3 and Good-Loop have been vocal drivers of ad industry change; Good-Loop has partnered with IAS to enable the seamless tracking and viewing of end-to-end carbon emissions alongside other crucial metrics such as brand safety, fraud, and viewability. 

Ultimately, partnering with a reliable measurement provider, like some mentioned above, helps mitigate the risk of greenwashing and ensures your sustainability claims are backed by robust data.

Establish a Baseline and Set Benchmarks

Before establishing goals to minimize your carbon emissions, you must understand how your current approach measures out.

It’s become essential for you to answer this question: can we accurately gauge the impact of our efforts on reducing carbon emissions in a significant way?  To effectively address this question, you must possess a holistic view of the data points emitting carbon emissions throughout the entire lifespan of your digital ad campaigns. Gathering this information sooner rather than later will allow for the identification of necessary benchmarks to properly evaluate future sustainable marketing efforts and ensure progress is being made.  

Ensure Existing Tech is Minimizing Waste

Your commitment towards sustainability means having to consistently assess and enhance your technological framework and operational procedures to ensure movement towards the reduction of your carbon footprint across digital advertising. 

The good news? Cutting back on impression waste should lead to more cost-efficient performance. Aim for highly viewable impressions, whether through programmatic viewability minimums, programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals with these guarantees, or via environments that are naturally more likely to be seen and watched to completion, like Connected TV. 

A greener future represents the need for a collaborative effort between yourself and each stakeholder within your supply chain. 

Experiment with Attention and Engagement Metrics

By optimizing to look beyond what viewability and reach can offer, you can prioritize “attention time” for a more definitive view on who actually saw an ad. This will help you maximize your understanding of consumer engagement while also increasing ad quality. 

According to a study by WARC, successfully optimizing toward  “attention time” can have additional environmental benefits without putting your overall marketing results in jeopardy. This is achieved by eliminating between 20% to 25% of the highest carbon-emitting domains and by placing online ads in destinations where messaging and context align. 

In the end, this approach makes attention measurement a win-win for performance and sustainability. As the consumer demand for brands to address environmental concerns intensifies, our industry has the opportunity to enact meaningful strategies to make our efforts more sustainable. 

Moreover, in reevaluating the status quo with a strong roadmap ahead, marketers can contribute to building a future that creates value for brands and their audiences while minimizing the impression waste contributing to our collective carbon footprint. 

For hands-on guidance in crafting your brand’s marketing sustainability plan, reach out to a Coegi strategist and download the white paper to understand more about the key steps for building a sustainable marketing practice:

  1. Form a Holistically Supportive Transformation Engine
  2. Establish an Understanding of Your Baseline Emissions
  3. Choose the Right Measurement Partner
  4. Build Your Roadmap Toward Sustainable Transformation
  5. Ensure Your Existing Tech is Minimizing Waste
  6. Experiment with Attention and Engagement Metrics

The Drum – Attribution Matters: Navigating an ‘Uncomfortably Complex Topic’

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Attributing results to particular channels or campaigns is arguably digital marketing’s most dogged problem, with an array of approaches mutating as platforms change. Coegi’s SVP of Marketing and Innovation advises that “it’s not just GA4 that will upend your attribution models. The latest iOS17 update will reportedly strip link trackers from being passed through message, mail, and private browsing. It’s yet another action chipping away at the scale and effectiveness of last-click attribution and website analytics.” Learn more from Ryan and other experts here.

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The Drum – Stop Making Ads, Start Creating Content

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Our industry has come a long way from the days of every banner flashing ‘Click Here’ or ‘You’ve Won a Free iPod’, but true creativity is still being shackled by the perception that ads meant to drive performance have to look and feel a certain way. In reality, everything a brand releases to the internet plays a role in how that brand is perceived, so why is there still such a disconnect between brands’ organic and paid content? Coegi’s Savannah Westbrock argues the real future of creative is not ads but content – performance-driven, consumer-centric, and driven by cross-discipline teams.

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Breaking Down The Barriers Between B2B and B2C Marketing

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Bringing Humanity to the Core of Your Marketing Strategy

Digital transformation has definitively blurred the lines differentiating the traditionally siloed B2B and B2C marketing practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re purchasing products or services, for a business or as consumers — we’re all human.  By focusing our attention on what matters most, the people, it becomes clear that the concerns we have aren’t unique to B2B or B2C marketing; they’re mutually shared. 

Understanding that these two worlds converge allows marketers to identify and evaluate emerging technologies and trends from a lens of humanity, creating space to innovate and avoid false limitations of what qualifies as a B2B marketing strategy and what is more “appropriate” for B2C. 

Deloitte’s 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report offers a perfect roadmap to reframe our mindset and humanize B2B marketing.

  1. Answering economic instability with marketing investments
  2. Driving growth through internal sustainability efforts
  3. Using creativity as a force for growth
  4. Adopting rising marketing technologies 

Here’s how marketers can apply these four trends to create a human-to-human (H2H) strategy and bridge the gap between B2B and B2C marketing.  

Weathering Economic Uncertainty With H2H Marketing

We’re faced with the challenge of trying to plan without fully knowing what lies ahead amidst uncertain economic times. Value becomes more important than ever when times are tough. We need to find new ways to add or communicate value and meet human needs through personalized experiences. This is where smart use of data becomes your secret weapon, and is actually expected by three-quarters of consumers, according to McKinsey.

“Data will lead us to the points of contact with advertising [that] are increasingly personalized and more relevant” In other words, how can we make each touchpoint in an omnichannel marketing ecosystem feel authentic and personal? Once we pinpoint what drives the biggest impact and makes people feel valued, we can tailor solutions based on those preferences. Put this into practice by strategically investing in conversational marketing. While customers appreciate personal, human interaction, they don’t want to give up the convenience of automation. We can offer the best of both worlds by pairing a human-centric strategy with innovative technologies like targeted marketing, live chat and AI.

Trust, Sustainability and a Human-Centric Culture

In the wake of 2020, B2B and B2C marketers alike were faced with some of the most disruptive crises in recent history. Fast forward to 2023, and “trust, values, and integrity are at the forefront of what customers expect from businesses they shop with. Customers expect brands to demonstrate rich and solid values in 2023, prioritizing ethical, social, and environmental responsibilities.” 

Marketing leaders from both disciplines have a lot more riding on their shoulders with 88% of consumers awarding trust as their top value during times of change. And out of that pool, 78% of their purchasing decisions are influenced by businesses’ environmental practices. It’s no longer simply about growing revenue; it’s about growing your business responsibly. Having a true Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policy in place can not be an afterthought or a nice-to-have. It is pivotal for long-term growth.

Deloitte highlights three core strategies to build intentional ESG marketing practices:  

  • Implementing more sustainable internal marketing practices 
  • Making long-term commitments towards reducing the carbon footprint, and
  • Promoting more sustainable product and service offerings

The best way to take this on is to utilize one of the core tenets of the H2H approach: self-awareness. Taking the time to measure and evaluate your sustainability practices requires effort and forces you to take an honest look at your business practices as it relates to carbon output.   

Here are some great examples of eco-friendly practices that support this human-centric approach:

Driving future growth is dependent on a commitment to  sustainability— or at least, that’s what 55% of marketers are saying. Making a commitment to ESG programs opens the door for brands to mend broken relationships, form new connections, and nurture trust across audiences – both B2B and B2C. 

Creativity is the Main Character in Brands’ Growth Paths

49% of marketers believe the ability to integrate sophisticated analytical capabilities into marketing strategies is critical for long-term success. However, marketers must act on their analysis in a human way to maximize impact. 

Cristian Cabello, CMO of Derco, illustrated that ideology by saying, “Brands should blend data with human-centered methodologies to create a more complete picture of the customer, prevent mistakes an algorithm can’t always understand, and cultivate connections with the customer.” In other words, data is simply data if you fail to tell an emotionally compelling story with it. 

Research shows that people want to hear stories from brands and over half are more likely to buy products from brands whose stories they love. Messages built around a personal story are:

  • More memorable and easier to process 
  • Break away from corporate language and technical jargon 
  • Enable honesty and transparency with engaging analogies
  • Use authenticity to knock down barriers

As professional storytellers, B2B marketers should make content relatable and personable to build deeper connections with prospects and stakeholders. Consider using channels from the B2C playbook, like influencer marketing. Lean into this era of co-creation and explore new partnerships and platforms that will generate a stronger brand community. 

Adopting Rising Technologies with a Human Touch

We can’t help but pay attention to industry chatter around emerging trends and technologies. But, over-investing in something unproven can be unwise. Finding the balance between the hype and worthwhile investments could mean the difference between creating a competitive advantage or falling behind.

In the coming year, B2B marketers should consider:

  1. Taking advantage of AR/VR for experiential B2B marketing interactions: This strategy allows for data-driven decisioning and delivers on the growing expectations for more personalized and engaging consumer experiences. For example, Nestlé Purina Petcare has implemented 3D VR technology to assist retail partners with better in-store merchandising.
  2. Exploring the metaverse’s role in the customer experience: Data shows that those who fail to create a strategy to join the metaverse may lose the opportunity to become a leader in the space. 17% of US marketers are active participants, whereas 40% are laying the groundwork to expand engagement and experiences in the metaverse.
  3. Using blockchain technology to strengthen data privacy: Blockchain offers new possibilities to bolster privacy and give control back to consumers. For example, in the healthcare sector, blockchain technology can store, share and utilize data to communicate with patients without sharing data with a third party.

Customer expectations are shifting, and with them, the distinction between B2B and B2C marketing is collapsing. Taking this in stride by prioritizing a holistic human-to-human approach is a future-proof way to respond to the perpetual disruptions caused by digital transformation and technology. We can stop over-complicating things and opt to simplify our approach by bringing it back to what matters most: we’re all human. 

The Drum – Your Data Strategy Can be a Community-Building Strategy

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How do the world’s most beloved brands like Lego and Trader Joe’s earn lasting spots in the hearts of consumers? They use consumer data the right way, creating meaningful experiences that build relationships between individuals and the brand. Not to simply create transactions.

You can do the same (even without the theme parks or Hawaiian shirts).

Read more on The Drum:

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PM360 – 5 Digital Media Tactics to Amplify Public Health Marketing

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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:

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Driving 12K Leads for a Luxury Home Appliance Brand

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Brief

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.

Highlights

12,000
Leads Generated

68%
Lift in Dealer Visits

 

Challenge

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: 

  • How can we reach this niche audience beyond traditional B2B channels?
  • How do we evaluate if we effectively reached this audience?
  • How can Coegi set up the client for long-term success with this audience?

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. 

Solution

Building Awareness With B2B Audiences

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. 

Driving Action From In-Market B2C Audiences

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: 

  • Influencers: Custom builders and designers seeking a luxury ice maker producer for clients
  • Explorers: In-market consumer audiences already considering the brand 
  • Kitchen Buyers & Remodelers: In-market audiences with a history of purchasing luxury home goods but lacked brand awareness 

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. 

Implementing a Full-Funnel Measurement Strategy

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.

The Results

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. 

Key Learnings

  • Digital technology and tools that may not be top of mind for B2B marketers can be used creatively to solve problems
  • Understanding who your audience trusts up front leads to smart partnerships that take the guesswork out of your strategy

5 Essential Influencer Marketing Tips

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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? 

  • Influencer marketing is often siloed or disjointed from overall business objectives and media strategy. 
  • Content performance can be difficult to quantitatively measure. 
  • And, with seemingly unlimited choices, it can be hard to identify the best influencers for your brand. 

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.

5 Essential Influencer Marketing Tips

1. Align influencer selection with business goals

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: 

  • Mega influencers (1M+ followers): Ideal for driving mass awareness through celebrities or other large personalities. 
  • Macro Influencers (<1M followers): Reach engaged followerships in a more authentic way than mega.
  • Micro influencers (<50K followers): Ideal for driving consideration and conversions from more curated, but scalable, audiences. 
  • Nano influencers (<10K followers): Ideal for building brand community through long-term partnerships and driving action within niche interest segments.

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:

How to Choose the Best Influencer for Your Brand

2. Find influencers that resonate with your brand style

Selecting the right size of creator for your goals and budget is important. But, finding the perfect creator match goes beyond surface-level numbers. 

  • Does your brand tone match the influencer’s personal brand voice? 
  • Is your product or service offering aligned with their follower interests? 
  • Does their content style and visual aesthetic complement your brand image? 

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. 

3. Prioritize creators with strong follower communities

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. 

4. Don’t treat influencer marketing as an “add on” to your media strategy

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:

  • Measurement and Accountability – By integrating influencer with digital media, you can measure influencer campaign success using the same performance lens as other channels. 
  • Cross-Channel Budget Fluidity –  Centralization empowers marketers to move budget with agility where performance indicates – whether across channels or within creative rotations. For instance, through smart contract negotiation, a viral influencer post can be turned into a paid campaign from the creator’s handle or amplified by the brand. 
  • Seamless Audience Targeting – Media agencies can upload first-party data segments used across other channels to understand which influencers your audience already engages with and synchronize targeting to reduce media waste. 

Sharing cross-channel learnings and insights will make the overall media ecosystem stronger and allow for a more holistic, data-driven approach. 

5. Let your creators create

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. 

The Practitioner’s Guide to Influencer Marketing

Build Audience Ecosystems, Not Campaigns

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The New Approach to Audience First Marketing

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. 

What is an audience ecosystem? 

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.

How can the audience ecosystem benefit your brand?

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.  

The Audience Ecosystem in Practice

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:

Gamer Audience Ecosystem

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. 

The 5 Step Process to Creating Audience Ecosystems

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:

#1 – Research & Planning: Aligning with Identities and Community Values 

First, determine what your community will find the most value from in your product. From there, craft a unique messaging strategy for each audience. 

  • Which of your brand’s value propositions matters most to this audience? 
  • What pastimes or hobbies does this persona participate in? 
  • How does this audience self identify – and how does your offering compliment that?
  • What type of media do these people watch, read, listen to, and engage with? 

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. 

#2 – Channel Selection: Surrounding Your Audience with Meaningful Touchpoints 

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. 

#3 – Activation: Bringing the Ecosystem to Life

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. 

#4 – Optimization: Fertilizing to Fuel Brand Performance

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. 

#5 – Rinse and Repeat: Continue Learning and Refreshing

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. 

Remember These 3 Key Mindset Shifts When Going from Campaigns to Audience Ecosystems

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: 

  1. Place the audience, not the brand, at the center of your media plan 
  2. View marketing efforts holistically, rather than through a campaigns lens
  3. Use marketing to add to your audience’s identity, not your brand’s status

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: 

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LS803s3sODg7WJgwR8Nl9?si=b23ba776323e47db
From Campaign to Ecosystem Podcast Episode

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