A media mix is a marketing term for the combination of channels a business uses to meet its marketing goals. It can include billboards, email, websites, and social media. Businesses might refer to their marketing mix when thinking about how to hit future campaign goals.
Media mix optimization is the process of analyzing the performance of those channels.
By incorporating a media mix into your yearly planning, you can narrow down what resonates with your audience.
Media Mix Stats in 2022
In January 2022, HubSpot surveyed over 600 media planners to discover their strategies, goals, and challenges. Here are some interesting findings:
84% of media planners surveyed leverage a mix of organic and paid media.
Email marketing is the most leveraged media channel, used by 1 in 2 media planners.
41% of media planners surveyed will change their media mix in 2022, while 45% will keep it the same.
14% of media planners currently leverage non-fungible tokens (NFTs) while 16% plan to use them for the first time in 2022.
39% of those who use NFTs in their media planning say they have the best ROI of any channel in their media mix.
39% of marketers surveyed say determining the most effective media mix is the biggest challenge of media planning.
Media Mix Optimization
Media mix optimization provides businesses with an understanding of how their messages are coming across to customers. It allows a brand to invest more time and money into marketing strategies that are best suited for their audiences.
But, while media mix optimization is a powerful opportunity for methodizing data collection online, it's not the best strategy for marketers who employ a lot of traditional marketing techniques, since you can't really measure the success of a billboard or newspaper ad.
However, to make guided decisions such as what font to use in creative design, when to publish social media posts on various channels, or where to invest resources, this method can be helpful.
Optimizing a media mix means looking at the analytics and ROI of various marketing strategies. This can be anything from engagement data on social media platforms to views on the newest commercial.
Tips for Optimizing Your Media Mix
Collect personal level data
The goal here is to find and focus on analytics that will help provide an accurate picture of how customers engage with your media mix.
However, having too many metrics can be confusing and lead to inaccurate data. The best plan is to have an idea of which metrics need to be tracked so they can be right at the beginning.
A normal media mix optimization process can take anywhere from a few months to a year. So, collecting the right information at the beginning contributes to getting the most accurate information overall.
Have a robust reporting process
When using a media mix, you often combine online and offline strategies. With this in mind, it can be more difficult to measure the impact of a billboard compared to a paid social ad.
That means you’ll have to think outside of the box when evaluating your media mix. For instance, while an online ad will have clear conversion rates you can find, a billboard may require some creative tracking.
Perhaps, you can track the uptick in branded search volume or improved brand recall.
This requires having a robust reporting process that accounts for the events you’ll be tracking – both online and offline.
Choose the right platform
Marketing teams that use CMS or analytics software are already ahead of the game. Software like this is essential to optimizing a media mix because it can give you numbers that would otherwise take some time to figure out manually.
A brand can analyze its media mix with the use of platforms that collect engagement data in real-time and compile that data into tracking reports.
Look for a platform that can give a holistic view of results across the board, so results will maintain consistency. It's also good to choose software that specializes in the marketing channels being used at the time.
Because optimizing is measuring a lot of different data at once, stick to as few systems as possible.
Analyze the data
We've been talking a lot about the kind of data and analyzing that needs to be done in a media mix optimization, but another important factor is being able to interpret and understand that data.
It's no secret that in the marketing world, there is an abundance of processes and acronyms floating around. While first getting into the groove of understanding them and what they mean can be intimidating, it's important to know the data being collected and how to use it to your advantage.
Consider public perception
Knowing how the public perceives your brand can help fill in some interpretation gaps during the modeling process. In the media mix model, think about how to fit in customer opinion. That way, the numbers will have some customer opinions to define them.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
To better understand your brand perception, monitor your brand mentions on social media. Take note of the positives, the negatives, and the questions. You can also create a survey to know how your customers feel about your company and its services and use a net promoter score.
An NPS asks customers how likely they are to recommend a business to a friend. Knowing this will aid in figuring out how business fares among the competition in the market. It will also assist in future marketing endeavours.
Media mix optimization can help your marketing team figure out which distribution channels will best promote an upcoming campaign, and can ultimately help strengthen your marketing strategy as a whole.
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