Marketing mediums are how businesses convey their brand, message or products through advertising. Where do you want your advertising dollars to work for you? Marketing is as old as gossip. But as populations grew and became more educated, advertisers began focusing on visually attractive and readable mediums to tell the world about their businesses. Signs, banners and printed ads in newspapers, brochures, pamphlets and posters became wildly popular. The old days were simpler!
Choosing the right advertising medium for modern marketing campaigns and promotion is a vastly different challenge today. Word of mouth will always be your least expensive marketing tool and traditional mediums like print, radio, television, direct mail and even email, are still very effective when used for the right audience. Additionally, a proliferation of online mediums are the cutting edge of marketing and include social media, pay per click (PPP) marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and mobile marketing. How do you know you are choosing the right medium for your message?
Focus on Your Audience
The first step in choosing the right advertising medium for your business is getting a laser focus on who your target audience will be.
- Who are the people you want to reach with your products and services?
- What media do these people use most frequently?
- How should your message be crafted in order to most effectively communicate to this target audience?
- How will your product or service most benefit your target audience?
When these questions about your audience are answered then your business will have a much better chance of reaching your target audience. Still more work needs to be done.
Crunch the Data
Once your target audience has been isolated, there is a lot that you can learn about them by collecting data about how other businesses market their products to them and what methods have been most successful. Collecting this data will involve researching everything you can learn about your target audience, examining reports from your industry competitors and wider data collection from media viewing websites that isolate data by gender, income, geographical location, education level, etc.
When this data has been collected it is time to crunch the numbers! Analyzing and evaluating data is a vital part of effective marketing. The data tells a story, and when you are able to read and make sense of that story you will gain valuable insight into how to most effectively connect with your target audience by choosing the right medium for your message.
Find the Right Mix of Mediums
When your business has your target audience in mind and has data-driven analytics on how to most effectively connect and communicate with that audience, your next step is to find the best marketing mediums for your campaign. It will be important to find the right mix of these mediums because putting all your eggs in one basket won’t get you the desired results.
For some business campaigns with large budgets, choosing the right advertising medium will mean choosing them all (or at least many). A new trend when your business is intent on choosing the right medium for your message, is to strategically use them all to reach your audience. What this looks like in online marketing is the use of pay-per-click ads, web ads, online display ads and social media ad campaigns, as well as blog articles and other SEO best practices to maximize your online presence. More traditional advertising mediums, using the same design, branding and messaging, would also be used to complement and accentuate your marketing campaign in TV ads, print products, billboards, etc. This method is called the omnichannel approach and creates a uniform message across multiple mediums.
Because this approach is not practical for every business, sticking to just a few of the best marketing mediums for your target audience is more realistic. This is where the research and a great marketing agency will help you find the right mix of mediums to effectively engage your audience. By identifying where your target audience spends most of their time you will get a great idea where to place your ads; YouTube, Radio, Instagram, Facebook, TV, Twitter, TikTok or more likely a select combination of these mediums.
Maximize Your Exposure While Staying Within Budget
When searching through the vast number of advertising opportunities for the best medium for modern marketing campaigns you are wise to begin with a clear understanding of your target audience. By doing extensive research on the habits of your audience you will gain valuable information on how your business will most successfully reach them with your brand, products and services and campaign messaging. Based on this research you can identify the best marketing mediums for campaigns and audiences that you have prioritized. By following these steps, your business can maximize your exposure to your targeted audience while staying within your marketing budget.
Because finding the best marketing mediums, among the many niched and fragmented options,is harder than ever before. Key target audiences are scattered over various streaming TV outlets, online video sites, social media platforms, cable TV and elsewhere. Your goal when marketing your business is to discover the most efficient, targeted and on point selection among marketing mediums for campaigns to find the right mix for your needs and budget.
Conclusion
Sometimes it is really nice to turn the work of marketing your business over to people who do it for a living. To place the responsibilities of a targeted marketing campaign into the hands of a capable full-service marketing agency would relieve much of the burden of research and strategizing. The big question is, how do we afford agency prices? At zö agency we will get to know your business, define your target audience, identify the best marketing mediums and stay with your campaign marketing budget. Not only are we great at what we do, we love our clients and work hard to bring you into the tribe! Visit us at www.zo.agency today!
