Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Engagements, Conversions, Landings. These are just a few of the dozens of metrics we as media folks are completely engrossed with on a day-to-day basis. But what happens when you have a client who wants to run a traditional medium with no tracking, but you’re still on the hook to showcase how those hard-earned budgeting dollars benefitted your client?
We’re working and living in a time when we as advertisers cling desperately to the instant gratification of a digital metric. And there’s nothing wrong with that—being able to show instant success or make a quick judgement call to optimize is the primary way we have to do our jobs nowadays. But the truth is, no one medium is going to always be the best avenue for every marketing campaign that your client throws at you, and sometimes that means you can’t solely rely on digital efforts.
When you’re trying to help a brand change their perception or simply build awareness, you can’t underestimate the power of a perfectly placed OOH execution around a conference or an event sponsorship. That’s not to say that you can’t utilize digital media efforts to support or boost these placements, on the contrary— you should utilize them as much as possible to make that offline to online connection. In order to determine how a traditional buy is affecting your brand’s success, you need to make these placements flashy, memorable, and share-able. According to AdWeek, shared content outperforms traditional advertising by 10x, as users are more likely to engage with content if their peers are already telling them it’s something they should be paying attention to. So, you have to make sure that your marketing plan plays to that notion, make people want to share this with their colleagues and spark conversation around it.
A perfect example is the ever-popular Chick-fil-A “Eat More Chicken” play. When the well-known food chain placed the billboards with the cows encouraging users to go for poultry over beef, the billboards were shared via social media streams for months and months, bringing a digital aspect to the traditional medium. The whole point is, you have to make sure all of your efforts help drive that user down the funnel, and sometimes that means that they have to make that connection themselves- You just have to look for those points and connect the dots on the back end. Did our efforts go viral? Is a certain hashtag trending? If so, people are more likely to share across their social channels, only bringing more awareness to your brand and encourages users to do more research on their own.
Trying to understand how these channels are affecting each other can be daunting. But you just need to take a step back, think big picture, and try to envision yourself as the consumer and how you’d react to certain messages. Just ask yourself: would you click share?
K E R R Y M C C O R M A C K
Media Account Manager
Citation: Hayes, Katherine. “‘Shared Media’ Is the Future and Will Disrupt Media Buying As We Know It.” AdWeek, 22 Aug. 2016, http://www.adweek.com/digital/katherine-hays-vivoom-guest-post-shared-media/
Richards, Katie. “Chicken With a Beef: The Untold Story of Chick-fil-A’s Cow Campaign.” Adweek, 17 June 2016, http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/chicken-beef-untold-story-chick-fil-cow-campaign-171834/
