Media planning & buying for data‑driven campaigns

Example: A marketer who needs to reach home contractors may know that they are often moving from site to site and that they can use radio ads and mobile device advertising while their target customer is traveling or working. But if a marketer needs to reach a new customer segment or aims to grow their business in the new year, last year’s budget may not have the guidance for budgeting that they need.

Our Approach to Developing Your Ad Budget

Here’s how we can help you develop a media plan and inform your marketing budget.

1. Define Your Target Audiences: Based on our experience, expertise, and access to specialty media and marketing data sources, we’ll paint a picture of your ideal audience segments that represent your most likely customers.
2. Go Beyond Demographics: If you know the demographics of your customers, you’re really only seeing part of the picture. That’s because your customers can be described by more than just gender, age, and other basics. We’ll tell you about the interests, behaviors, and media consumption habits of your customers.
3. Segment Your Customers: Inside your customer base are multiple segments of customers who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Perhaps most of them may be Millennial-aged women. But maybe the smaller segment of GenX males has more spending power or influences other customers with that spending. These are the kinds of insights we’ll be digging into as part of your media plan.
4. Choose Formats and Platforms: We’ll suggest the types of advertising that your audience prefers and provide a calculation on the number of times (frequency) that your prospects will need to be exposed to your message to drive them toward action.
5. Provide a Firm Cost: We’ll look at the months ahead and tell you how much it will cost for us to execute your campaign.

We Pledge Allegiance to Agile Marketing: Our campaign proposal is just the end of the beginning. If you approve our plan, we’ll begin executing and show you progress as quickly as possible. We don’t expect to set it and forget it. Instead, based in part on the business results you share with us, we can revise our execution – with your consent.

Budget Guidance from Gartner Analysts

Marketing leaders will spend a little more on marketing in the next year, according to Gartner's annual survey of marketing leaders.

Across industries, businesses spend about 7.8% of gross annual revenues on marketing efforts. Challenger brands and crowd industries will need larger budgets, according to analysts.

Marketing leaders are facing intensifying pressure from executives who expect them to deliver business growth at a scale that 73% of marketers describe as “high,” “very high,” or “overly ambitious.” To meet their goals, marketers are putting more into paid media, which is now 31.4% of marketing budgets. Investment is increasingly focused on digital channels and customer acquisition.

Additionally, most industries spend more than 60% of their marketing budgets on digital channels, according to Gartner's annual survey of marketing leaders. Digital display advertising -- banners and other ad units that show on websites and mobile apps -- has overtaken social media platform advertising in terms of the ad formats that marketers prefer.