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:
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:
The vernacular of the marketing campaign — implying that consumers and brands are at war against each other — is antiquated.
Advertising shouldn’t exist if its goal is to simply influence and manipulate consumers into short-term purchases. Most people are too smart to fall for that anymore, but more importantly, it only serves the brand’s short-term interests.
Instead, modern marketing must exist to benefit the brand, the customers, and the world at large. Very rarely does one message, one piece of content, one execution, do that.
Is your marketing measurement strategy founded in business intelligence or in media metrics?
No single marketing metric can equate to business success. Likewise, no single marketing measurement strategy can translate success for all brands. You need a custom solution to accurately track and measure holistic brand health – based on your unique definition of success.
This is why we believe every brand needs a performance scoring model.
A performance scoring model uses multiple, weighted data sources to define your media’s impact on business goals. This model should combine media data, business data, and advanced measurement studies, weighting each of the data points per their significance.
Then, you can use this custom formula to create an overall brand performance score. By standardizing reporting and insights from both the granular campaign level to a broader business strategy perspective, this will allow you to make smarter, and more results-based marketing decisions.
Here is a simple example of how this formula can look:
Lift in Unaided Brand Awareness (45%) + Location Visits (20%) + Clicks (10%) + Sales (25%) = Performance Score
Advertising needs to be held more closely accountable to business outcomes. Marketing leaders are feeling this pressure more intensely now than ever. It’s uncomfortable and challenging – but these are necessary growing pains. As the industry navigates increasing consumer data privacy regulations, marketing plans require more complex planning and measurement.
Simply put – today’s business challenges require more than basic in-platform forecasting and metrics. Media data – impressions, reach, cost-per-click – are too in the weeds to illuminate the full landscape. A performance scoring model incorporates both media and non-media data enabling marketers to make smart business decisions and more accurate predictions.
It is simply a living, breathing business dashboard that allows marketers to accomplish three key things:
Data aggregation is at the core of this marketing measurement strategy. You may already be using measurement tools to combine media channels in one dashboard. But, business challenges require taking that a step further to reveal brand insights.
The scoring model gives you a new understanding of marketing performance across the business using both conventional, and unconventional, metrics. This levels up your data analysis to go beyond engagement rates or a cost per action. You can add context by bringing in factors such as economic indicators, health trends, or any other data points impacting the business or consumer behavior.
It’s not necessarily a tool to drive new sales or leads. But, it does allow you to frame conversations about multiple KPIs in a concise, digestible way. It can guide your marketing strategy so the media can perform better, which will impact long-term growth of bottom line metrics. Ultimately, it resets expectations and aligns teams on the incremental impact of media on business decisions.
“With the custom scoring model, we work to see a holistic view of performance, setting meaningful KPIs and holding media accountable to business goals.”
– Ryan Green, VP of Marketing & Innovation, Coegi
The custom scorecard offers a more objective, quantifiable number you can use to communicate to key stakeholders. Communicating media’s value to non-marketers can be challenging at best, especially if you’re speaking with acronyms that do not apply to their daily jobs. By standardizing disparate data sets, you will be able to more easily achieve buy ins.
For example, which of these is easier to understand?
OR
Ultimately, the custom performance scorecard is a more tangible way to showcase directional return on marketing investment, in particular for stakeholders that aren’t in the marketing department (like finance or operations). Plus, it’s a very flexible data model. You can easily change the weights of each factor in your scorecard formula to accommodate input from other stakeholders or changing business needs. (We’ll get to how to create your custom formula in the next section.)
Finally, you can leverage custom performance scoring models to evaluate and identify leading indicators of success. You can use it to identify which parts of your media strategy are working in near real-time, rather than waiting months for results. Depending on the non-media data you incorporate, it can also help you make real-time pivots based on external factors.
For example, you can use this model to identify highest performing DMAs. Then, you could distribute your budget and adjust messaging in softer markets versus stronger markets. Alternatively, you can swap geographic region as the optimization point with different audience groups. You can break down audiences to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each segment. Then again, strategically decide whether you will double down on strong audiences or focus on weaker audiences.
Ready to create your own scorecard? As you begin, media metrics are your most readily available and straightforward data points, so it’s fine if they make up the majority of your scorecard (at least initially). However, it’s important to pull in some external data as you iterate on your model over time. Otherwise, you’re siloing your marketing from other business factors. It’s like driving while wearing blinders.
Outside perspective from non-media data guides smarter media decisions. Having that additional context can help you determine optimal frequencies, efficiencies, and top-line analytics goals.
And this is just scratching the surface. You can get creative here and pull in more obscure data as long as it’s relevant to the success of your business and able to be analyzed at statistical signficance.
How do you determine what weight to give each input? I recommend leading with your intuition. But it should also be a group effort. Collaborate with the people closest to the data as well as the people closest to the brand. To avoid biases, be sure to gather input from several stakeholders:
As you have these discussions, remember it is an iterative process. The first formula you create certainly will not be the last. That’s the beauty of this custom model. It is adaptable, flexible, and increases in accuracy and relevancy over time as your data collection grows and your formula improves.
Here are three ways Coegi has applied the performance scoring model to our clients:
Point-of-sale data lets consumer packaged goods brands see exactly how much was sold. However, the problem is speed. You often find out results weeks after a campaign. This is far from the real-time results you need to make agile marketing decisions.
To identify CPG marketing ROI, brands typically need to go back and attempt to attribute that sales lift. Was it from your media spend? The media people certainly think so. Or did the economic boom really do all the work? Maybe it was the in-store displays… The custom scorecard model measures all of those things at once giving you a better idea of what drove sales.
If you locate those leading indicators of success, you can have an idea of what’s working in real time. Then, when the sales data rolls in 4-12 weeks later, you can confirm what you assume to be true and adjust as necessary.
The travel and tourism industry is impacted heavily by macro-environmental factors. How is the weather? What are flight tickets and gas prices? Is there a health pandemic halting travel? These kinds of factors influence where media should be placed for maximum results.
This was especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used the scorecard approach for a state tourism client to create a “COVID-19 Scoring Model”. This scorecard gave each county in the state a score indicating level of opportunity for travel in each market. Using it, we were able to inform media decisions and ensure the strategy aligned with public safety. You can read the full case study here for more details.
Quick service restaurants operate in a competitive, cluttered space. Customer loyalty and share of wallet are major factors driving long-term QSR success.
Knowing this, we create a performance scoring model for a QSR client factoring in brand lift attributes, visitation, and point of sale data. We even included data on how highly customers rated their french fries. Using this model, we were able to allocate budget to top markets and tailor messaging to boost market share among loyal customers. Read the full case study here.
There are infinite ways to apply this methodology across any industry and any brand. At the end of the day, the performance scoring model is about getting to the WHY to inform the what – making our marketing strategies stronger and our clients even happier.
For help applying this approach to your brand, contact Coegi today for a discovery call.
Cookies have been the underpinning for most digital marketing performance measurement for over twenty years, which has allowed advertisers to measure post-click conversions and attribution for sales impact. As a result, channels like paid search and display retargeting typically stand out as ‘performance channels’. Simply put, cookie deprecation takes away the easy button of using off-the-self audiences and straightforward conversion tracking. However, without third-party pixels, determining clear return on ad spend will become more challenging, especially for marketers who continue to rely on click-based attribution models.
Without cookies, it is imperative that you develop more meaningful ways of understanding how customers make decisions and how it impacts business results, a topic we recently covered on The Loop Marketing Podcast.
In this new paradigm, marketers will need to rely more heavily on strategy to get the greatest and most accurate ROI.
The ability to calculate marketing ROI starts with having a strong measurement strategy in place prior to campaign launch. Smart marketers know to look beyond online conversion data and search for correlations with business performance to determine true directional success. Advertising campaigns need to be set-up to achieve business goals rather than just vanity metrics. It’s important to know when to incorporate more robust analytical solutions to understand what’s impacting your bottom line.
Some methods for measuring media campaigns in the cookieless future include:
Place less emphasis on media efficiency metrics and more emphasis on effectiveness. Look at correlations between business and media data to identify incremental conversions compared to your company baseline.
To achieve this, marketers will need to identify leading indicators of success by channel and tactic and optimize towards those metrics.
Walled gardens, such as Facebook and Amazon, leverage their own first-party user data. As a result, cookie deprecation will affect them less in terms of targeting.
Within platform confines, advertisers will still be able to track individual users, though the windows of attribution can vary. Due to this, walled gardens allow for brands to conduct some closed-loop measurement. That being said, there will be limitations on attribution, and less deterministic targeting as privacy laws continue to become stricter.
Walled garden pixels will have limited ability to pass back data to the platform once cookies are gone. We can expect front end marketing performance metrics to decline, even if backend business performance remains the same. Plan for shifts in attribution, using strategies like those laid out above, as we get closer to cookie deprecation.
Begin testing and learning today to proactively understand what will and will not be effective in the cookieless future.
The deprecation of third-party cookies will undoubtedly impact the way marketers approach digital media. But a data-driven media plan tied into a holistic cookieless attribution and measurement solution will ensure your business continues to grow by reaching the audience in the right place at the right time.
You couldn’t run a successful business without a diverse team with unique skill sets. So, why would you attempt to launch a global marketing campaign without the same care; without assembling a team of experts to help you navigate the complexities of cultural nuances and regional platforms and publications?
Continue reading to learn how to build your own ecosystem for international marketing success.
In today’s world, we have access to the global marketplace with much less friction than in decades past. Previously, it was very difficult to initiate an international marketing launch without local people on the ground. You had to know who to call to get your ads placed.
The growth of digital was the biggest catalyst for globalization at the turn of the century. We gained the ability to conduct business, advertise and communicate from one location to another with ease. Access to the international marketplace means boundless opportunity, but can also be overwhelming for brands and marketers.
Thankfully, digital advertising and content promotion provides the flexibility to test, adjust, and be nimble with your marketing campaigns as you learn the nuances of a new landscape.
It allows you to:
Taking a digital-first approach lowers many logistical barriers to entry for a new market launch. Oftentimes, traditional advertising mediums involve lengthy contract processes, upfronts and lead times.
For example, in Japan, one media conglomerate owns the majority of all traditional media in the country. If you want to activate traditional ads in Japan, you must partner with them in order to penetrate the marketplace. On the contrary, digital offers a much quicker way to market, with much less red tape and upfront cost. Once you have digital campaigns up and running and understand what is working, you can begin to supplement with traditional media placements. This allows you to have a well-rounded, data-driven strategy.
With digital advertising, you can understand your ability to scale with your target audience in a new market before making a major investment in buys that offer little flexibility. To do so, lean into a test and learn approach to allow your marketing initiatives to fail forward.
However, don’t be too timid. If you only dip your toe in the water, you will not have enough information to know if your campaign is making an impact. Do the upfront research to create a strategic plan and then put mechanisms in place to test and track media success and pivot quickly as needed.
Look at the population of the country and the specific audience you are targeting. The goal is to reach a percentage of the audience at a high enough frequency so they know your brand. Typically this is around 6-12 exposures, depending on creative strength. Once you’ve reached this threshold, use a measurement framework or consumer study to understand the effectiveness of your campaign. Did it create strong brand recall? Was there a lift in brand affinity?
Some brands will also need to consider non-paid media ways your brand has been exposed to audiences in a given country. Have you had any positive or negative press? Are there any Google trends to inform changes in interest level?
Another benefit of digital marketing for international brands is the ability to quickly pull media out of market. In today’s climate, certain contexts can quickly become problematic due to changes in current events or world news. Even if there aren’t major world events impacting your marketing ecosystem, be sure you’re staying nimble in your approach to culturally relevant messaging, swapping out creatives based on what is and is not resonating.
Comparing marketing metrics across various countries will never be apples to apples. However, digital ads will give you quicker results and show clearer signals of success. Real-time platform data can give you a baseline understanding of what’s working, rather than waiting for post-campaign result readouts. This is especially critical during the testing phase.
To see a more holistic view of your advertising results, aim to have a unified measurement strategy in place to benchmark long-term success. Start by understanding what you can and can’t track in various countries. Then, consider filling in any gaps with these methods for gathering meaningful insights:
As you plan your international market launch, start with a digital approach to be more nimble, timely and informed. But, achieving maximum scale across a full country profile will require you to eventually incorporate traditional channels into the marketing mix.
For help preparing your international marketing launch, contact Coegi today to get started.
To read more, view Ryan’s second article on The Drum: The Key to Breaking Into International Markets
Launching a brand in a new international market is no easy feat. Thankfully Ryan Green, vice-president of marketing and innovation at Coegi, shares some of the key challenges and considerations to make the transition as seamless as possible.
From a technical standpoint, you have to consider possible language barriers, time zone differences, dynamic advertising regulations, platform preference and availability, and more.
From a cultural perspective, there’s even more to unpack. What’s considered funny in the United States could be completely misunderstood, or even offensive, elsewhere. Holidays and lifestyles are likely to vary dramatically. The consumers’ day-to-day behaviors and perspectives are, simply put, nuanced and distinct. Because of this, the most important component of an international marketing strategy is cultural relevance.
In a cookieless world, the easy button is dead.
Long before acronyms like GDPR and CCPA, brands turned to the broad reach of ad networks and Facebook’s ever-knowing, ever-changing algorithm. Many gave it a blank check, seduced by the reach, click-through rates, and amassed conversions brought on by Wild, Wild West retargeting approaches. Brand safety wasn’t discussed.
This mentality fed right into the programmatic narrative: Learn as you go, let the data make the decision. Media planners, especially those who weren’t digital natives, were intrigued by the ease of it all. Innovation meant testing new programmatic vendors against one another. Success was measured by whatever metric was the easiest to track and achieve. The battle for last click and last impression attribution was in full force, customer experience be damned.
However, savvy programmatic practitioners have always understood there was no easy button.
So where do we go from here?
According to some, ‘influencers’ are out and ‘creators’ are in, heralding a shift from glitz and glamour to craft and artisanship. At the same time, regulators are ratcheting pressure on creators. So what does this moment really mean for online creators – and how can brands and conent-makers adapt to the shifting landscape? Coegi VP of Marketing and Innovation, Ryan Green, joins other industry experts in answering this question.
