Blog. What defines strategic advertising campaigns and what can your brand expect from an agency?
Some thoughts on intel, strategy and channel selection
Posted by Liam Farrell
Strategic advertising campaigns require analysis of real business issues, careful consideration of the brand, its competitors, the media opportunities it owns or can earn from its audience and how best to create value and ROI from its marcom activities. We look into some of these key issues in this post. Read on!
How can strategic advertising campaigns best utilise paid, owned and earned media?
This was a question asked of us recently by a client and it was a great question to answer because so few people actually consider this in their advertising. To harness the best engagement opportunities requires deep understanding of the clients media ownership and its audiences media consumption. Each client’s brand has different media possibilities and each has to be assessed on its merits. Brands with Software presence such as telecoms (how are literally in the face and hands of their consumers) have many owned media opportunities to leverage but in doing so the brand must ensure it doesn’t frustrate the consumer. Delivery of great content into the media mix is essential to leverage the audience’s willingness and desire to share its own focus of fascination with its social groups.
Paid media has to be put to work to ensure other media opportunities are leveraged fully by presenting the brand at key opportunities it would other wise not be present in. By presenting insight and alternative angles on products and services, brands can engage its audience to represent their marketing content as ’share worthy’ material and in turn increases the ROI on their paid media usage.
Strategic advertising campaigns employ careful channel selection
Content for media channels has to be developed according to the capability of the channel and the audience who is likely to use the channel. Expecting to push the same content through the same channel has inverse efficacy – it works against the interest of the brand. Put simply, we create great content and let the audience vote on how great it is by sharing it and earning the brand media. We use paid media when we need to generate awareness or can’t expect a high degree of audience participation but always try and create content around the paid media which amplifies the audiences willingness to share and thus earn media for the brand.
Strategy is the key ingredient in effective strategic marketing campaigns - having no intel or plan of action is like trying to make a cheese toasty and leaving out the cheesy bit.Anon
Proactively mining competitive data and intelligence improves the efficacy of strategic advertising campaigns
We use reports from clients and their media partners coupled with online tools (Analytics) to gauge the noise competitor brands are generating and provide intelligence from this to our clients.
We know that understanding our clients competition is key to building or maintaining advantage but ultimately knowing why customers choose our competition over our clients brands is more important than what competitors are doing. Data is king and we take full ownership of the online media review using data tools to review online reach and engagement that non-customers are involved in.
Understanding consumer behaviour is key to enhancing strategic advertising campaigns
From our analysis of online data we can understand what is key to consumer behaviour and what we need to change to increase our brand’s engagement. We can provide analysis of online activity and engagement to our clients on a hourly basis if required. Similarly, for customer experience we undertake secret shopping activities both in retail locations and via chat lines or online support to review the customer experience our client’s competitors are providing. For offline media usage (OOH, Radio and TV) we rely on intel shared by client media companies who provide this data. We then review the findings and present key learnings to our clients at regular account review meetings.
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