Today, consumers are bombarded with messaging across online and offline channels attempting to connect them with products and services. From billboards to radio; social media to online streaming, marketers are pushing messaging across a variety of channels in a race to win attention.
Given the overwhelming amount of advertising that consumers receive daily across numerous touchpoints, they’ve grown accustomed to ignoring those that don’t apply to them on an individual, person-level.
To optimize efforts across online and offline channels, marketers need to align their media mixes with consumer demands—reaching them where they prefer, while connecting them with the right products and services in an oversaturated marketing landscape.
What is Media Mix Optimization?
Media mix optimization is one of the first steps marketers need to take in order to provide consumer-centric marketing. For any given campaign, marketers utilize a variety of channels to reach audiences across all stages of the sales funnel. Media mix optimization leverages a variety of marketing analytics and measurement strategies to determine where along the customer journey target audiences are most likely to engage with communications. From there, marketers can use that data to plan, budget, and implement the ideal media mix that’s catered to their target audiences.
Think of it this way: if marketers are aiming to engage digitally-savvy, younger audiences with print and radio advertising, chances are their efforts aren’t providing the ROI they’re looking for. However, if marketers knew that their target audiences were engaging on mobile devices and computers most frequently—and understood which channels consumed most of their time, brand marketing efforts would drive better results.
The Importance of Media Mix Optimization in Today’s Marketing Landscape
Modern consumers are now in the driver’s seat of their own marketing experiences. As noted earlier, consumers have grown accustomed to completely ignoring marketing efforts that don’t provide relevance to their unique needs and interests. Now, consumers decide what they want, when they want it. As a result, campaigns need to be able to quickly adapt to the ongoing changes in consumer trends that dictate how to best reach target audiences. Marketers that fail to do so will not only lose current or potential customers, but will also lose money on wasted time and marketing efforts.
Exploring this further, consumers today expect several key elements within marketing efforts in order to warrant their attention.
First, marketing efforts need to reach consumers on the channels they use most. Second, the variety of channels across the media mix that consumers engage with need to provide consistent, simple customer journeys. Finally, consumers want marketing messages at the most appropriate time.
Optimizing Media Mix for Today’s Consumers
In order to provide relevant and consistent marketing that consumers have come to expect, media mix optimization needs to be backed by measurements that can highlight where and when consumers prefer to be engaged with, while testing the creative messaging that resonates with them most.
To do this, marketers need a media planning strategy that remains flexible amid rapid changes in consumer trends, preferences, and behaviors. Specifically, marketers need to leverage a modern marketing analytics platform capable of gathering and organizing the specific insights required to find opportunities for media mix optimization. Once marketers have secured the right analytics platform, they can begin combining metrics into a unified measurement solution, which provides a holistic view of top-down and bottom-up insights that can indicate where, when, and how to best reach customers.
Using the Right Data for Media Mix Optimization
Like any effective marketing strategy, decisions need to be accurate and data-driven. For effective media mix optimization, it’s important marketers unify their various measurement efforts to provide a total view of how consumers engage with media across the marketing mix. Specifically, marketers need to combine long-term, aggregate measurements like that of marketing mix modeling, with granular insights into specific consumers that highlight how they interact with touchpoints across marketing channels, like that offered by multi-touch attribution.
This unified approach to measurement provides insight into the trends, preferences, and unique interests/needs of consumers that can help marketers optimize their media mix for the most impact possible.
Final Thoughts
With an overwhelming amount of advertisements geared at engaging consumers, marketers need to optimize their media mix to maximize relevance and ROI. Leveraging unified measurement and a modern analytics platform makes online and offline media optimization possible, helping marketers break through the noise of the competition.
