We’ve all heard the PSA asking, “Do you know where your children are right now?” What you didn’t know is that the same could be said for your buyer.
As a B2B customer engagement agency we are always thinking about the buyer and the customer. What are they reading? Where do they get their information? At what point during their path to purchase do they proactively engage a brand? Knowing the answers to these questions (and more) are critical components to building an effective marketing communications plan. If you don’t know your buyer better than they know themselves you need to reevaluate everything you’re doing.
From an advertising standpoint, a brand used to be able to deploy a media buy strategy in the top three trade publications in its industry and feel pretty good about reaching its target audience. That is no longer the case.
Not only has the rise in technology broadened the marketing vehicles for which to attract an audience but it also has made it more difficult to pinpoint where your buyers are. Believing that they consume media through one vehicle is no longer effective. Yet at the same time, technology has made the ability to track and monitor your media spend more efficient. It helps to answer “what part of my advertising budget is actually working?”
This increase in tracking capability has brought the static nature of many traditional ad buys into question. The opportunity here is to use technology to truly understand what is real when it comes to knowing where and how buyers consume information, whether it be via traditional or digital vehicles.
We recently had a long-time client in the building products industry suggest we eliminate all print ad buys for 2015. Rather than take the red pen to it immediately, we conducted a little more research. By tracking their print ad buys in 2014 we found out that one of their audience segments was much more responsive to print than the other audience segment, while all of them were responsive to digital in some way. In this instance, if we didn’t utilize tracking data to give us the insights we needed to make a strategic recommendation, we could have eliminated a medium that was still relevant to an important segment of the client’s audience.
Knowing our client’s buyers and utilizing tracking data enabled us to develop a more effective media plan containing the perfect mix of traditional and nontraditional vehicles. Now when the client gets asked “Do you know where your buyer is?” they can say yes, with complete confidence.
Not sure where your buyer is or want to reevaluate your current ad spend to see if it is effectively reaching your target audience? Drop me a note and we can do some digging to find out. The data geek in me will be very happy!