How to Use Attest to Become a Master of Dynamic Media Planning

Consumers come into contact with media at almost every point of almost every journey they make through their day-to-day life. Make your brand stand out above the fog by using Attest to treat offline advertising in the same, dynamic way as you already treat the online space.

Consumers have never been more exposed to adverts. Turn on the TV, and there’s Barry Scott’s gleaming bathroom. The bus pulls up at the bus stop, and there’s an image of the beach you wish you were on, rather than heading to work on a cramped, sweaty bus.

In fact, research suggests the average person now sees well over 5000 ads a day (and that number was taken over 10 years ago, so it’s quite likely double that now.)

Consumers come into contact with media at almost every point of almost every journey they make through their day-to-day life. This makes the advertising arena a noisy place for both brands trying to break through, and consumers trying to make decisions.

Staying at the forefront of the minds of consumers who matter most to you is a priority for brands. Find a way to reach your potential customers as they move through life, interacting with various forms of media, and you stand a chance of being remembered above the fog of other brands.

As a result, buying the right media through which to advertise your brand is more important today than ever before.

Now you can pinpoint the consumers that matter, hone in on the right media, and truly resonate using well-tested messaging, all with Attest’s scalable intelligence platform.

In this post we’ll talk you through how Attest can help you approach the media buying process in a new and more powerful way, and how you can become one cut above the rest by injecting dynamism into your strategy. Because nobody gets anywhere by standing still.

Stage #1 – Defining your Audience

The first stage in any media planning process is to define, and then fully understand, the vertical or segment that your product is to be sold to. A powerful way to approach this is through creating consumer segmentation models.

It’s a given that you’ll need to focus media spend on the channels that will  drive your target consumers in store or to your website. So immediately after you’ve got your key segments in place, you need to establish what media those consumers are interacting with on a daily basis.

Redefining Offline Advertising

Dynamic targeting has been increasingly possible for digital media channels, with the proliferation of software that analyses online behaviours, interests and demographic details. Tracking can occur in real time, allowing brands and agencies to act quickly in response to viral trends and current affairs, as well as justifying media spend in the online space (with Facebook and Google being the major beneficiaries).

Using Attest, you can now get a more granular and real-time understanding of offline media behaviour and habits. This helps brands to get the transparency needed to plan above-the-line, non-digital media buying in the same agile way you might buy digital.

With a diverse audience of 100 million consumers, brands can use the Attest dashboard to speak to over 65s religiously tuning-in to their favourite TV programmes, just as easily as 20-year-olds catching the Victoria Line Tube to work.

Apply multiple detailed demographic filters, segmentation statements or other criteria such as attitudes and self-report behaviours. Then you’re ready to answer questions on your target consumers’ media consumption habits, their purchase drivers and anything else under the sun.  

Get thousands of responses in as little as 24 hours. Suddenly, out of home media planning becomes as flexible and responsive as digital.

Skip the Middleman

One of the key benefits of speaking directly to representatives from your consumer segments is that you can circumvent the restrictive world of Big Media’s predefined verticals.

It’ll be nothing new to the seasoned media buyer that brands are required to shoehorn their segments into broadcasters’ 20 different buying and trading audiences, increasing the level of generality and decreasing the concentration of your ideal consumers within that pool.

While a TV broadcaster might be up to scratch on the ratings driven by their ‘Housewives’ audience, they’re much less able to identify differences between the tens of thousands of sub-segments that make up that audience.

By speaking to your segment directly you can know exactly the media that they are interacting with, up to the minute, and how that’s changing over time. This allows you to buy the space that you’re confident will be seen by your ideal consumers, not just based on a broad (and potentially outdated) demographic, but based on your actual segments planned and recent viewing habits

For example, imagine your core consumer audience don’t watch much live TV, and spend most of their time on Instagram and Netflix. Most of your budget will go into digital. But what if they suddenly love a TV show that’s on for a 10-week run. Will you know to switch up spend and try and grab a piece of the action?

The same goes for podcasts that suddenly hit the big time, or once-popular radio shows that have gone off the boil. You might not realise your segment tuned out months ago, so you’re now effectively wasting money.

Media habits are as dynamic as the general population – your budgeting and media planning needs to keep up for it to drive the best possible Return on Investment (ROI)!

You can also streamline cross-channel strategies, avoiding the confusing lack of common language and standardised segmentation methods between different media outlets and channels.

Instead of having to buy overly broad, homogeneous segments defined by TV/Radio/OOH sellers, you can instead buy against specific time slots, programmes or locations that you know match the behaviours, preferences and viewing habits of your target segments.

By conducting your own consumer insights also gifts the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone; while you’ve got your segment within your reach, use additional questions to establish the killer messaging and creatives that will most appeal to them.. Your creative team will thank you for the opportunity to optimise pre-launch!

Stage #2 – Analysing Competitors

With your consumer segments in place, and media buying opportunities established, you can go one step further and analyse the reception of adverts run by your key competitors.

You can add a level of confidence to your creative strategy by understanding which messages and approaches within your market are more- or less-well received.

It’s key to also understand the media channels where your competitors are finding success in speaking to your target audience., and whether there are similar segments unengaged with this offering and ripe for you to target yourselves.

See our Competitor Intelligence Survey Template for advice on where to start.

Stage #3 – Testing Creatives

By this point you understand your audience, have spoken to them directly, and now know the media channels they interact with most. Perhaps you’ve also established some of the motivations and priorities that drive them towards, or away from, your product (or your competitors).

Now comes the time to test your creatives and settle on the images, story and copy that will, fundamentally, sell your product to the people you’ve identified as primed to buy it, designed specifically for the mediums where it will be consumed. Where it’s video, audio, visual or text – everything can be easily tested and refined on Attest.

See our recent blog on key tests for your creatives, to understand how Attest can help you complete this stage of the media buying process.

Stage #4 – Track and Optimise for the Future

There’s simply no need, and perhaps significant disadvantage, to being static when creating media plans for today’s audiences.

News of current affairs and viral sensations take off quickly, and change course daily. So you need to be prepared to change your media buying plans up to the last minute. With Attest’s tool you can keep on top of consumer preferences in record time, allowing you to take a dynamic approach to all media channels, not just the online space.

Ad fatigue is also a real danger to today’s advertising teams, who need to strike the balance between consistency and freshness of creatives. Tracking your media adverts, and the wider market, with Attest will allow you to put budget towards refreshing ideas at the right time for peak impact and avoid buying outdated media channels for your target segments.

This dynamism applies cross-channel, so that you can be aware of the comparable results of different channels within each campaign, allowing time to redirect budget to those succeeding in real time.

Conclusion

Attest can bring a new approach to media planning, allowing dynamism in offline channels to more closely match the experience of  online channels.

This way you can stay on top of changing trends and respond to shifts in media consumption, ensuring you get the most bang for your media buck and improving effectiveness.

To discover more about the ways Attest can help you get closer to your consumers than ever before, to validate important business decisions, get in touch with us today.

Attest

Content Team 

Our in-house marketing team is always scouring the market for the next big thing. This piece has been lovingly crafted by one of our team members. Attest's platform makes gathering consumer data as simple and actionable as possible.

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