We've come a long way since the olden days of advertising in magazines.
Back in the mid 90’s before the internet and all things digital, we had to rely on magazines and newspapers, TV and Radio and Billboards to get our clients’ messages across. It was a confusing world because we couldn’t track or analyse anything. We had to rely on cobbled together data from the media companies on how many newspapers were sold, how many people watched a certain show (this wasn’t accurate either as only a few people had the special box that tracked their viewing habits) and how many people tuned into the radio station. The only demographics we could use were the reader analysis of the magazine or the listener profiles. A fairly sketchy, mostly unqualified profiling technique, Loaded magazine was 18-25 year old boys (apparently) who liked sexy looking photos of women, fast cars and booze. I worked with Lynx deodorant back in the day and this was a perfect place for us to advertise. (Again, apparently) We had to rely on these 18-25 year old boys to see the advert, get excited about what attraction qualities it delivered and then get a bus to the shop and go buy it… hmm. Funnily enough, massive cosmetic brands still believe this is a good way to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds. Good for them I say. Keep the big bloated ad agencies in trendy coffee and yukka plants.
Today we live in a much smaller world, a world where we can analyse every swipe, every click, every movement of the mouse, socially profile our adverts to be delivered to exactly who we want, when we want. We can track and analyse buyer profiles, journey analysis and what channels attributed to each stage of the sale or enquiry. Our abilities to drill deeper and deeper into our target audience ensures we can be extremely precise about our targetting – social media channels give us a wealth of information on our audiences, their age, sex, hobbies, location and the things they like. This is a good thing because now we can deliver people interested in golf in Manchester, golf-related information and adverts. We don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands, we can run a series of very cost effective adverts specifically aimed at the audience that will actually pay attention, and hopefully, go on to purchase or make an enquiry.
Marketing is becoming an art form, understanding demographics, user journeys and attribution, running split tested adverts to gauge which message resonates the best and then rolling that out across the suite of marketing assets we create; continually assessing data and never sitting still, always changing, always refining. Marketing isn’t putting an advert into a magazine and waiting three months to get the reader figures back, it’s an always-on, agile process that gets more effective day by day, re-evaluating and refining as the campaign progresses.
If you’re struggling with understanding how to spend your marketing budget or unsure of where to allocate your spend then get in touch. Our team of digital marketing experts are here to guide you on how to turn your marketing budget into sales and enquiries.
Si
CEO
