Determining the Right Media Mix for Your Ad Campaign

Today’s digital media advertising opportunities are more niched, numerous, and fragmented than ever before. Key target audiences are scattered on streaming TV outlets, online video sites, social media platforms, cable TV and elsewhere. The goal for marketers is to find the most efficient, accurate, and targeted blend of media to use in digital display, mobile ads, in-video advertising, web-only channels, and others.   

Let’s have a look at some of the elements that go into determining the right media mix for your next advertising campaign. 

Find the Right Media Mix

Using multiple advertising mediums to promote your products and services is often a great idea for a campaign, but it’s important to get that mix right. Different combinations work better with different audiences. It’s essential that you understand your target audience to determine what media mix to use to use. The choices you make in your media strategy will determine how successful you are with your advertising strategy.

Here are two key thoughts for guidance with your eventual media mix: 1) defining your target audience with a reasonable amount of certainty, and 2) backing up your choices of media with accurate and current data of your audience’s media consumption habits.

Define the target audience

Defining the target audience for your product or service should take into account basic demographic data like gender, income, age, location and education levels. You should also know who are likely customers for your offering. Your team can develop customer personas to further drill down on your likely target audience types.

Use good data to choose media targets

Collecting more data on your target audience increases your opportunities to see relevant media matches, across formats, platforms and time zones. This should be clean data. This data can include organic research, industry research, competitor audits and more. Learning how to gather, analyze and effectively use data is one of the most important tools in any digital marketer’s toolkit.

Check the data from media viewing research sites including comScore, Nielsen, and local network affiliates, depending on your product or service. Collect specific data on gender, income, and region. Using the right data can provide the insight needed to boost engagement among target audiences and increase return on investment (ROI).

Omnichannel approach

Marketers are increasingly adopting an omnichannel approach to online advertising. Instead of narrowly focusing on a few niche channels, advertisers are going wide across the board. This means using retargeting, web ads, email marketing, online display ads, direct mail, social media ad programs, and pay-per-click channels to gain the attention of online customers.

The ultimate goal in an omnichannel approach is to spread the touches with your customers. The more times they see your ads, the more attention you can bring to your product or service

Use different media effectively

Maybe your budget doesn’t allow for for a wide omnichannel approach. Maybe your target audience stays glued to YouTube sports clips every evening. You’ll find this out by analyzing the YouTube viewer data for your preferred target customer. If that’s the cae, you can concentrate a portion of your ad spend on this particular platform. In another example, Instagram may be your preferred ad location if you are trying to reach a high concentration of educated adults across social media. 

While using different ways to advertise is often a great idea for a campaign, it’s important to get that mix right. Do solid research, gain key data points and spread your campaign around different platforms to develop your next winning ad campaign.