How to get the best from your media budget
With digital marketing driving sales is it best to spend time and money on establishing a brand or selling products. James Holmes of Flykartel® looks at how media budgets could be spent effectively.
Brand building or sales?
Depending on where your retail business is in its lifecycle, your digital marketing strategy will have one of two purposes: expanding brand reach, or conversion and profit. Before you start to burn through your media budget, determine which is your goal and establish KPIs to measure the success of your campaign.
Do you want to get you an extra 500 followers on instagram, or shift 500 units of your product? It is worth considering (and I have learned this the hard way), that the latter is unlikely to happen without successful execution of the former, so do question the strength and reach of your brand before you commence your sales campaign.
Focus on brand experience as your product, and your product as a commodity
In his book ‘The e-myth’, Michael E Gerber makes an interesting distinction between commodity and product. He posits that the commodity is what you make in the factory; the product is what your customer gains by buying it. For example, Lego makes building bricks (commodity), but what they sell is endless creative opportunity (product). By shifting focus from your commodity, to understanding what its acquisition means to your customers, you can quickly gain a deeper insight into your brand experience and create empathic comms that will resonate deeply with your audience.
Do more with less
Rather than blanket marketing, focus on communities and micro-trends around your brand pillars. Become a totem for the attitudes, interests and opinions of a like-minded consumer group or culture, and deliver relevant content to foster brand engagement.
Encourage user-generated content (UGC) to improve your brand reputation, and establish a community around your brand or product by using branded hashtags on Instagram. Sharing stories from real individuals through customer outreach is a great way to improve brand reputation and engagement and is more meaningful than a product-focused sales campaign.
Millennial market? Keep it experiential and meaningful
If your target demographic is millennial, you will need to ensure that the tone and aesthetic of your content is more experience and image-led than product or sales-led. On Instagram for example, images of locations, interiors and food tend to foster the most engagement.
Consider that almost 80% of millennials would choose to spend money on an experience or event over buying something desirable (Harris Study, 2019), and suddenly your product-led marketing comms start to feel less targeted, spammy and easy to dismiss.
Make it personal
While this is a broad and complex topic that is beyond the scope of this article, it is a crucial consideration in amplifying your digital marketing activity. Done well, marketing personalisation has the potential to deliver up to eight times ROI on media spend and lift sales by 10% or more. In essence, marketing personalisation is about reaching the right people, at the right time, and saying the right thing, and is achieved by leveraging data discovery, automated decision-making, and content distribution.
Marketing personalisation has seen widespread adoption from larger retailers and is a sophisticated component of modern digital marketing methodology. Take time to explore the technologies that allow you to personalise your content and engage your audience with meaningful, targeted comms to really fortify your digital marketing strategy.
James Holmes is Co-Founder and Creative Director of Flykartel® an independently owned, design-led techwear lab founded in 2016.