Marketing Mental Models (aka MMM) for young marketers. Post # 5:
👉 Today’s topic: Media planning.
(All posts under this series can be found here: https://harish.blog/topics/mmm/)
💡 The Simple rule of Media $$ allocation: Follow customer attention.
This is a golden age for marketers/, where we are able to uniquely target our key customers and tell customised stories to them, thus increasing relevance at the point where they are most receptive. Digital media make it possible for us to work towards a ‘n=1’ mode of storytelling, vs a ‘n=millions’ mode on TV or print.
But this abundance of choice comes with fragmentation. Customers are spoilt for choice and their attention (our attention) is all over the place. So what’s the right balance? How granular to go? Where to spend?
💡 Follow the customer’s attention and time spent. 1) See where your customers congregate and talk to them when they are most receptive. 2) Be helpful to them when they listen to you. These two rules will drive the most efficiency in any media plan. (This applies to startups with no media budget also).
If they spend most of their time on mass entertainment on TV, spend $ on TV. If they spend their attention listening to influencers in your category, spend $ on Instagram or YouTube. If you are a B2B startup and are looking for your first few customers, maybe you’ll find them in meetups.
But usually a media plan is a mix of many channels, how to create a cross-media plan? This is still an evolving science, but I will cover this in a future post.
p.s. A corollary to this: the term ‘Digital marketer’ will also not make sense very soon. It is like calling someone a TV marketer or a Radio marketer. A marketer is a marketer, they chose media based on the customer and the brand / product.