As a digital marketeer, we all have at one moment to define a strategy to promote our product, services or other on the internet. This is not an easy task, the digital landscape brings endless possibilities and unlimited strategies. Also, the perfect plan doesn’t exist. But we have defined 4 easy steps to help you build your strategy by taking into account the most important elements.
1. Define your north star metric
Before starting any strategy, you should make sure to know what is your objective and how you will assess the success of your campaign. There are different north star metrics possible depending on your objective. This should be defined depending on which part of the customer journey we want to activate: awareness, Consideration, conversion or retention and all of them could be assessed by different North Star Metrics (NSM).
A first example is if your objective is to raise awareness of your brand or product, you could give as NSM the volume of reach or the percentage of views on your video’s. You could also decide to make a brand lift study that will tell you if your campaign had an impact on the knowledge of your brand by the users.
Another example: If your objective is to drive action and sell as much as possible to the users. Your north star metric could be cost per acquisition or the volume of conversion for example. You could also decide to focus more on the revenue and look at the ROAS.
As you can see, it is all a matter of appreciation and knowing what is important for you. But you can not start your media plan without having a clear alignment on your north star metric.
2. Define the right combination of Audience x Media x Message (AMM)
This is the core of your media plan and the three components should be completely aligned to have a successful media plan. You should have a message that is aligned with your media and audience. You should also decide on your media activation depending on your media and message, etc. This should all be correlated and decided together.
To decide on your AMM, you should take into account your north star metric. If your north star metric is cost per acquisition, you should decide on a message that is more promotion oriented, a media that will drive action and an audience that is qualitative as remarketing for example.
If your NSM is to raise awareness, you could decide to focus on having the highest reach possible by choosing media and an audience that will help you get that. But, you should be careful with that. You should not forget to consider the quality of your audience or your media according to the price of the channel. Only focusing on the lowest price could cause being present on not qualitative placements that won’t have a real impact on the appreciation of your brand. Focusing on qualitative reach is important.
3. Attribute your budget
This is not an easy task and we should take into consideration that a budget should be optimized during your campaign and shouldn’t be 100% fixed once launching.
Knowing this, you should, once again, focus on attributing your budget according to your objective. If your objective is to drive sales you should first allocate your budget to the channel and audiences that drive the most sales and make sure these ones are fully covered. Once it is done, you can consider adding budget to more upper funnel channels.
Don’t hesitate, if possible, to always allocate a part of your budget to tests (10% ideally). This is the best way to make sure you make your strategy evolve from one media plan to the other to get as close as possible to your objective.
4. Calculate a forecast
Once all your decisions are made, you should make sure it is aligned with your strategy by calculating the forecasted numbers you should achieve. To do so, you should look at your previous campaigns or look at benchmarks of the channel ideally for your market or overall. The closer to reality you are, the better you can define your strategy in advance and adjust all the decisions you made previously.
Floriane Defacqz
| LinkedinThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
