There is an enormous variety of digital media channels to choose from. Why should you invest in search, rather than display? What is the optimal social media strategy? Isn’t viral the best way to advertise because it’s free? How do I determine the potential split of my digital media budget, given the vast preponderance of available opportunities? Below are the seven most important issues to consider when embarking on a digital media campaign.
1. Choose the right internet sites to advertise on
There is no such thing – within reason – as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ media; only media that is well or badly priced. A site that ‘only’ produces one conversion every million impressions can be a good site if you are able to advertise on it at next to no cost (including adserving). With brand campaigns, perhaps, there might be some sites that you want to steer clear of if you think that the mental association between your brand and their content is undesirable. However your customers are on the site then they presumably think that the content is acceptable – so it is always necessary to think about how the audience views the site (and by association your brand) not just how you personally react to the content.
2. Think about your targets
Do not fall into the trap of optimising performance campaigns by pure efficiency alone; unless you take overall volume into account as well as Return on Investment efficiency, you might be in danger of running at 10 per cent of your target cost per acquisition (cpa), but only getting 50 per cent of the volume. Sometimes it is necessary to relax your cpa rules in order to hit your volume targets.
This is even more important when setting the cpa for a third party – give them the highest cpa possible, you can always reduce it later, sometimes a cpa which is 5 per cent higher can get you 300 per cent more conversions.
3. New isn’t necessarily better
Try not to be overly reliant on ‘the next big thing’ – everyone is clamouring for eyeballs in the social space at the moment, so conventional display advertising is experiencing a slow-down in demand; it may, therefore, represent better value in the short term.
4. Try before you buy
Try not to arbitrarily rule out any specific channel – let the channels available select themselves by testing them all.
5. Budget properly
Try not to plan your digital media spend (either by channel or supplier within specific channels) purely on the basis of using only the most efficient channels from last month. Always keep a proportion of the budget back for testing new partners, ensuring that you do not rely on any conversions from those test partners. Otherwise, if you get to a month within which all the previous months’ partners have no availability, or suddenly become inefficient, you will have nowhere to go
6. The beauty of digital marketing means you can re-evaluate
Always keep 10 per cent of the budget back for mid-campaign up weights. This means you can re-evaluate what ad placements are working best a few weeks into the campaign, and spend the remaining budget there, meaning the overall campaign will deliver a higher return on investment. You will generally either get the same or better rates on such up weights (very rarely worse) and you can ensure that you maximise overall value this way.
7. Use the full spectrum of digital media channels to optimise your campaign
The best digital campaigns will use the full gamut of opportunities; display, social (both media and engagement activity), video, email, search (seo and ppc), mobile, gaming. And of course, if you can find one partner to deliver on all of those channels then why not use them.
