Brand promotion: Brand media placement methodology!

The growth of every brand is inseparable from media.

Advertising is a compulsory course, but it is not easy at all. For almost all companies, media placement costs account for the bulk of the marketing budget. In the boss's eyes, every penny you spend is a cost, and the brand manager must issue a military order as to how much conversion this cost should bring. Therefore, when Party A gives the budget to the agency, the effect must also be evaluated based on KPI.

The saying widely circulated in the industry:

"I know that half of the budget is wasted, but I don't know which half."

It is still regarded as the truth today.

Not only that, in today's Internet age, this 50% waste has also risen and is firmly believed to be a 90% waste. Perhaps because of this, few people are not nervous when spending this money. So how should brands place media?

Here are some of my experiences.

01

If you don't have to invest, don't invest

This statement has two meanings. First, not all companies need to rely on investment to solve sales problems.

Such enterprises are mostly concentrated in the 2B industry. For example, for those 2B companies that engage in high-precision technology research and development and production, many times we may never know their names unless they send out public relations releases to investors because they are about to go public. Another example is advertising companies. In fact, very few companies will advertise for themselves. It is their works that bring them clients.

The second group is those companies that are still growing rapidly by relying on channels . Such companies can also appropriately reduce their media spending budget when making their annual marketing budget. Advertising will only play its due role when channel growth is weak and brands are needed to drive preference, repeat purchases, or even premiums.

Cash is a company's most important asset and must be budgeted where it is most needed for business growth. If advertising is not the most appropriate option for the company at the moment, it should not be done if it can be avoided.

02

Every penny you spend must be spent on conversions

First of all, I want to give a point of view here: there is no such thing as media placement for the purpose of pure exposure in this world . If someone tells you so, he must be fooling you.

After all, not all companies are like BMW, where the supply is already saturated enough and they need to educate those who cannot afford a BMW for the time being to buy one when they have money. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the global brands, even those that we are familiar with, are far from well-known enough. As long as your ad appears in front of potential users at the right time, they are likely to consume from you.

Accurately deliver advertisements to target consumer groups. This sentence is simple to say, but it is actually quite difficult to do it well.

For those who are familiar with performance advertising, taking Tencent’s information flow as an example, there are a series of keywords to choose from each time an ad is placed, such as gender, youth, city, mobile phone type, interests and hobbies, etc. But even with such precise screening, the people who ultimately receive your ad may not necessarily be your target customers. An entire industry has been created just to improve the conversion rate of this type of advertising. At the end of 2018, the hottest topic among everyone was “brand-effect integration”, which actually means that the investment must be converted.

From my own experience, to improve conversion, the most important thing is to understand both ends. On the one hand, you must understand your consumers, know who they are, where they are, and what they care about . There is not much to say about this; it is the basic skill of marketing.

On the other hand, you need to be familiar with the properties of various media.

For example, when I choose a public account KOL to place a message, I usually ask around first to see what netizens have to say and recommend. After selecting a few potential accounts, I will look through their previous push notifications and message interactions. We will track at least 5 or so pushes in the future before finally deciding whether to launch the campaign.

If it is offline media, in addition to studying the background report of the media company, you'd better go to the scene in person to take a look at the surrounding environment, the flow of people, and what product advertisements are nearby.

Only when you have done all this, you will have an idea of ​​who will be watching your ads and the scenarios in which they will watch them. Only then can you determine whether your content is distributed to the right people and whether the way this content appears is the most appropriate way for them to accept. Of course, there are many other techniques that can improve conversion rates. We will talk about them slowly when we have time.

03

When the budget is sufficient, do single media saturation advertising

To translate this sentence, it is also called penetrating a single channel. For example, you can book a subway station, a train, all the bus stops in the city, all the light boxes in the target city's high-speed rail stations, all the elevator frames in the city, and so on.

This is why when we were advertising for Aidi Palace, we booked a subway train; later we took over the elevator frames of most of the high-end residential areas in Nanshan District of Shenzhen; and when we were advertising for Weilu, we always booked a theme station of a subway train.

Another similar successful case is that Toutiao once booked all the bus stop advertising in a city. In its advertising campaign to escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Flight Steward only chose elevator frame ads.

When you have enough budget, penetrating a certain channel will create a scale effect. This experience is actually summarized by many media developers themselves, so when we consult about media placement combinations, they often provide short-cycle full-coverage solutions.

However, when your budget is limited, this is also a very cost-effective way of delivery, which will form a scale effect in a local area. The impact of this concentrated outbreak on consumers is incomparable to that of dispersed investment with the same budget.

04

If you know where consumers are, you can try to build a contact dome

In my previous push, I gave the example of Li Jian’s concert tickets.

Li Jian was going to hold a concert in Shenzhen at the end of last year. One day on my way to work, the host of the traffic radio station broadcast this advertisement, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Then when I was waiting for the elevator downstairs in the company, this advertisement also appeared on Focus Media’s advertising screen. I still didn’t pay much attention to it, but I thought they had invested a lot of advertising.

Then, after lunch, I was lying on the sofa and browsing my phone. When I opened Zhihu, this advertisement appeared in its information flow, so I opened Tao Piaopiao and bought one.

This is almost a perfect delivery dome . The person who makes the delivery strategy knows who his fans are, where they are, how they get to work every day, where they pass by on the way to work, and which apps they may open during their breaks. But does this set cost a lot of money? Actually, not necessarily.

I call this delivery strategy contact point advertising . Later I found out that Luckin Coffee also used the same advertising strategy. You thought they spent a huge advertising budget and their ads were everywhere, but that’s not the case.

05

Where your ad appears represents the value of your brand

There is a view that the core function of a brand is premium.

In my opinion, media also has the ability to command a premium. If an original public account has beautiful layout and always has opinions and tone when speaking, then I believe they would not want to accept a draft when accepting an advertisement.

Conversely, where your advertisement appears represents the value of your brand in the minds of consumers. That’s why we often see advertisements for various luxury goods in our Moments, but they will definitely not appear in Baidu’s information flow. What are the most popular ads in Baidu’s information flow? There are advertisements for various health-related products, clubs, and health products, as well as games that require you to cut your level with one cut. These industries are the ones where advertising in Moments of Friends is prohibited.

A long time ago, I analyzed the advertising strategy of Shenzhen Bay No. 1, the most expensive house in Shenzhen, which would use the most expensive airport outdoor billboard in Shenzhen. In the era of traditional media, we see that various automobile, clothing, and cosmetics brands choose offline media and will definitely consider the surrounding environment.

It is because of the location where your ad appears that it represents the value of your brand .

06

If you only have a million, spend it all on content

This is the last point I want to make. Although a good advertising company must be well versed in the logic of media placement (in fact, media is also the most profitable part). But given the limited budget, I still hope that everyone can allocate more resources to content production.

After all, within the million-level, the quality of the content is still positively correlated with the amount of the budget. I have seen too many companies with advertising budgets of millions but are reluctant to spend even tens of thousands of dollars on content.

I believe that the overall aesthetic standards of the nation will become higher and higher, and no consumer is a fool. If you throw shit into the market, the market will definitely give you the same return.

The above, I hope it is useful to you.

Source: Ordinary Faith (ID: OBA_SZ)