How to Focus on Your New Media Plan?

The novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted businesses round the globe, with media planners being hit exceptionally hard. In a short period of your time , consumer behavior rapidly shifted, leading to 24 percent of media planners pausing their campaigns to avoid appearing tone-deaf to the new reality set in by the pandemic. Unfortunately, this uncertainty seems to point out no signs of stopping, as a whole 64 percent of media planners were unsure of the way to adjust their media plans for the rest of 2020.

Despite these feelings of uncertainty, there’s still many opportunity. We all know that buyers are still consuming media – and a few are even consuming more content than ever before. Media planners, and therefore the teams that support them, got to acquire the knowledge and capabilities required to find out where their audience is, and determine what they need to listen to .

Let’s examine how certain processes and technology can help your team create the foremost impactful campaigns possible during these changing times.

In the immediate weeks following the pandemic, many businesses experience a dramatic shift in customer engagement. For instance, retailers experienced instant drops in pedestrian traffic as stores across the country were forced to shutter their doors. This unfortunately made many of their previous KPIs irrelevant, since they were often supported store visits or in-store purchases.

We recommend that each industry, especially retailers, put a stress on consumer behavior first and foremost. This may help them better understand how consumers are reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, and from that time they will begin to link those feelings to buying behavior. Unfortunately, this is often not a one-and-done process. In a volatile environment, consumer opinions can easily change on a week-by-week or day-by-day basis – and having an incomplete understanding of where your audience is engaging or how they feel can have both financial and reputational repercussions. Consequently, marketers got to regularly reassess consumer behavior and scrutinize its link to buying behavior.

Given the very fact that a lot of offline channels will remain volatile for subsequent year or two, it’s worth re-evaluating your media plan within the context of adjusting consumer behavior. However, there’s no got to scrap your strategy altogether. Instead, make sure you always have a backup plan by engaging in scenario planning.

Using Scenario Planning for Flexible Media Plans

Bringing multiple departments together to interact in scenario planning will help your team determine the simplest thanks to pivot your media plan counting on uncontrollable factors like localized outbreaks of COVID-19. Start by looking forward a minimum of two years and detect any planned advertisements that include an offline element. So, if you were planning on advertising throughout the 2020 NFL season, you'll want to research other ways to succeed in customers within the event that the season is postponed, canceled, or otherwise adjusted.

Envision the best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios for your offline campaigns so you've got an instantaneous plan available within the event of an interruption . For instance, believe any in-stadium advertisements you'll have planned for the upcoming NFL season.

Best-Case Scenario – The season will resume as planned, perhaps with some minor limitations. Your current advertising plan will work if minimal adjustments are made to stick to current customer attitudes.

Moderate-Case Scenario – The season will resume, but with no live audience. Rather than getting to purchase ad space within the stadium, bid on ad space during the live broadcast.

Worst-Case Scenario – No sports are going to be broadcasted. At now , you'd want to closely evaluate the interests of your audience and determine new ways to succeed in them. For instance, many purchasers are watching live television shows or playing video games instead – ponder tactics for reaching them through these channels.

Marketers should avoid making hard-and-fast commitments to a particular scenario unless they need conducted a radical risk assessment and understand the potential drawbacks of creating the incorrect decision. However, don’t wait until the eleventh hour to get ad spots, either – many marketing teams are going to be during a similar position as your team, and it's imperative that you simply stay before them. Otherwise, you'll find yourself paying a premium for subpar ad placements.

Test and Learn together with your New Media Plan

Before executing on any a part of your media plan, confirm that you simply have the capabilities in situ to gather campaign data in near-real-time. With consumer attitudes changing rapidly, it’s difficult to believe historical data that's even a couple of weeks old – so supplying a gentle stream of latest data is an efficient thanks to lower your reliance on outdated insights.

Once you launch a campaign and start collecting data, it’s time to interact within the cycle of testing and learning. Here’s an overview of how it works:

• Collect & Validate Data – confirm you're basing your decisions on an appropriate amount of high-quality data.

• Understand the info – Combine the facility of human intelligence and data-driven marketing solutions to research raw customer data and obtain actionable insights about the behavior and attitudes of your audience .

• Validate Insights – confirm the insights from the previous step are realistic by creating a pilot campaign designed for alittle segment. If it's successful, expand your strategy.

• Evaluate the Recommendations – check out your results, and measure how they helped you meet KPIs.

Consider ways to enhance the campaign supported its performance. Then restart this four-step process using new recommendations for your next, improved campaign.

If you perform this analysis and are a touch skeptical of the outcomes, confirm you've got access to large volumes of high-quality data. Low quality or limited data can certainly skew a campaign. If you’d wish to use historical data to tell your media plan, look for a media planning platform that gives advanced capabilities like Bayesian Learning and Forgetting. This framework leverages machine learning to work out which customer insights are still relevant today, and which aren't , supplying you with access to larger quantities of reliable data to help together with your media planning efforts.

Final Thoughts

For subsequent few years, media planners are likely to experience higher levels of uncertainty. While this is often a big hurdle that they need to overcome, it's not an impassable barrier. To supply the foremost value during these uncertain times, media planners will got to work diligently and find new ways to plan and style ad placements.

Keep in mind that these new skills and techniques are going to be useful not only within the short-term, but within the future . The world is an uncertain place, and COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last major disruption that media planners experience throughout the course of their career. By investing within the skills and capabilities required to beat the challenges posed by COVID-19, media planners won't only still provide value for his or her organizations, they'll have all of the tools they need to be prepared for the next disruption.

Interested in learning more?

Designate has consistently increased conversion rates for its clients by engaging the most sophisticated metrics and tools to acquire, engage, and convert target audiences across domains. Get in touch to know how we can boost your ROIs.

We’d like to get to understand you.