Show Notes
- Traditional media requires a different strategy than digital media.
- We recommend listening to episode 18, Aligning Content With Your Customer Journey for added context.
- Digital allows marketers to mix first-party and third-party data to target an individual. Traditional doesn’t afford that luxury, outside of direct mail.
- The customer journey state is broken into different states, See, Think, Do, Grow and Give.
- The journey state is not always known of our audience targeted with traditional media. In general, it’s mostly See.
- Every traditional medium — TV, radio/podcast, print, outdoor, direct mail — has its tradeoffs, which we will explore.
Charity of the Week:
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson, and with me, as always, is the animated and visually interesting Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Robinson: Good. Do you think I am grasping now for descriptors?
Elizabeth Earin: It’s getting a little interesting, yes, yes it is.
Steve Robinson: I get a pass. I get a pass because I am on vacation today, I think.
Elizabeth Earin: You think you are on vacation or you think you get the pass?
Steve Robinson: I think I get the pass.
Elizabeth Earin: Okay.
Steve Robinson: Although I am working on vacation, so perhaps I am not so certain about that either.
Elizabeth Earin: Well, we’ll see if we can get you out of there a little early today and you can have some good family time.
Steve Robinson: Excellent, excellent. So if the audio and video quality are a little different today, it’s because I am in Michigan, hanging out with my family on the beach. Well, not on the beach at the moment, but this afternoon. So what are we talking about today?
Elizabeth Earin: Today, we are going to talk about aligning traditional media with your customer journey. For those of you that tuned in last week, we talked about how we align our digital media with our customer journey, and now we are looking more at the traditional side.
Steve Robinson: And if you haven’t listened to episode 18 yet, you are going to want to jump back two episodes actually because that’s where we talk about aligning your content with your buyers’ journey, and that’s equally as important and probably something you want to look at first before you start looking at aligning your media channels.
Elizabeth Earin: So today we are going to get into, like we said, the traditional media and sort of how that requires a different strategy. We are going to talk about the different traditional media channels that you can use to deliver your content to your audience based on where they are in their customer journey, and then we are also going to review how we measure this, and then sort of wrap this up with — I think the best way of saying it is it’s a sort of a challenge to marketers that we need to start approaching traditional media in a different way going forward, and we’ll talk about that a little bit at the end of the episode.
Steve Robinson: So before we get into the individual media channels, we should probably kind of outline why traditional is different from digital when we are doing this alignment.
Elizabeth Earin: So I think we talked about this last week that digital allows us to mix both first party and third-party data to target an individual, and we have a lot of very precise targeting methods. When we move into traditional media, we really don’t have those options, although we have got a little bit in direct mail and we’ll talk about that later. But for the most part, we are hitting a mass audience and we don’t have the luxury of being able to hit that very targeted, very segmented audience. So when we start talking about targeting our traditional media based on where our persona is in their buyer’s journey, it gets hard to try and figure out how to align that with your traditional media.
Steve Robinson: So in general, you have to assume that the audience is sort of made up of your general mix of audience, so the bulk of the people that you’ll be reaching on any given traditional channel are going to be in your See state, whereas there will be a smaller group that maybe is in Think, and then a very, very, very small group that’s in Do, and you have to keep that in mind as you are figuring out your mix of content and how you are going about using these traditional channels.
Elizabeth Earin: And so I think you hit on something that’s important, and that’s that a lot of your messaging is going to be See, but we are going to have some exceptions, and as we dive into each of these channels or mediums, we can really talk about where those exceptions lie. And so why don’t we get started with probably the biggest of traditional advertising and talk about TV.
Steve Robinson: So TV is a unique media in that it is interruptive. So when you are watching television, you are there to see the program, and the commercials come in and interrupt you and prevent you from seeing that program. So, this means that it can be really good for getting in front of your See audience who isn’t looking for your message in the first place. So when you are looking at aligning television with your customer journey, the focus generally should be on See. And the other reason for that is because it’s lean back. Do you want to explain lean back a little bit, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: Sure. When the audience is consuming our content or consuming content in general, they are only consuming it. They are not engaging with it. They are sitting back, they are passive, they are watching. On the opposite side of that is leaning forward, and that’s when they are consuming and engaging with it. And we see that – we see lean back more with traditional TV and what they are doing when they are sitting on their couch, and we see lean forward more when they are engaging with something that requires a little bit more of their involvement and we see that along the lines of YouTube.
Steve Robinson: And because this is lean back and they don’t have hands on a keyboard or a mouse and that they are not really in a position to interact with the device that they are consuming the media on, asking the audience to do something is a bit of a stretch because you are asking them to stop watching the television program that they are there to watch (a), and then (b) you are asking them to go and find another device, although chances are they have a mobile device in their hand while they are watching television, but — and go and engage in a different way, and so for that reason, when you are aligning television with the customer journey, you generally want to focus on that See state and limit the times that you are asking them to think or do, because they are not in a mode to consume your content for Think stage and you are asking them to stop what they are trying to do, which is watch a program, and engage with you on a different medium if you are asking them to engage and do.
Elizabeth Earin: I think it’s interesting, because you just said that we shouldn’t ask them to think, which kind of ties a little bit into See when we are trying to create content that entertains them and is aligned with what it is that they are actually doing, watching TV to be entertained, so I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but I definitely caught that.
Steve Robinson: So let’s jump into radio. And if you are advertising on podcast, it’s going to largely follow the same rules because it’s digital, but it’s really no more measurable or connected than radio is.
Elizabeth Earin: So radio is also interruptive. The advantage of radio is that, typically, the messages can be longer, and so when we have got that captive audience and we can buy a little bit more air time, we have the ability to produce something state content in a way that we can’t necessarily do in a 10- or a 15-second spot on TV.
Steve Robinson: And that’s especially true if it’s a sponsor read, right? So if you are getting the host actually do the read, then the audience is already engaged with that host and is there to listen to that host, so chances are you are able to get more into Think state at that point.
Elizabeth Earin: I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that the majority of radio content is being consumed outside of the home. It’s when people are driving or they are out and about and interacting with friends and family, and so one thing that we want to keep in mind is that anything that we ask this audience to do, anything that we ask them to do that’s an online task is going to be much harder for them because, gosh, if they are driving, hopefully they are not also checking their phone but they may not even have it available to them to do that. And so that’s something that we want to keep in mind when we are thinking about content for this channel.
Steve Robinson: And that’s counter to a lot of what you’ll hear, particularly if you are listening to podcast and the sponsor reads that occur on the podcasts, because there, the advertisers are generally most focused on trying to measure the impact of that advertising because it’s a new medium and they are not really sure if this is working or not. And so oftentimes, you hear a lot of “go to the website and use this promo code” or “use this special URL,” when in reality, that’s a little bit counter to the way that the audience is consuming the media.
Elizabeth Earin: So again, much like TV, the focus for radio and podcasts should really be focused on See state, and then when you have got some longer spots available and when it’s appropriate for your audience, then you can look at some Think state offers. But again, keep in mind that everyone is going to hear both. We don’t have any way of segmenting them. So whatever you are putting out for your Think, make sure that you are not turning off your See.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. Let’s talk about print here. Print is a bit unique because print can really apply to See, Think or Do audiences depending on the context, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, and I think it’s important here to note that when you and I kind of started talking about this episode and were like, “Oh! it’s super easy!” And then we started kind of debating back and forth on print. We realized it’s not that easy, and we are going to provide some examples I think here in a little bit that will help show that it really can be applied to See, Think or Do.
Steve Robinson: I think what makes print unique is it’s a matter of aligning the message with the context or the expectations of the audience at that point in time. So depending on what type of print media the audience is engaging with, their expectations as to what part of their buyer’s journey that content is going to align with change. So, for example, if I am browsing a glossy magazine, I am not really expecting Do stage offers. I am not expecting coupons in there. I am not expecting “buy now” or you are going to lose this opportunity. I am really expecting more of the See or Think stage type of content, right?
Elizabeth Earin: I think it’s important to note that that doesn’t mean you are not going to see them. I have noticed, after we had our conversation, I was flipping through my family magazine and got to the back and there’s that black and white section of the ads and there’s a lot of Do state ads at the back. I have also never paid attention to those before, so I am not quite sure how effective they are, but it really does come down to a matter of context and expectations like you said.
Steve Robinson: And then you have advertorials that will pop up in various magazines or newspapers that you are reading. And in that case, that’s going to be a little bit more of your Think state content, right? Because it’s a longer form ad, they are trying to get you to think about some topic and hopefully it’s not too salesy and edging into Do, otherwise it’s not really an effective advertorial native advertising if you want to call it native print. It’s edging kind of into that skuzzy kind of salesy end of things. And so you are going to focus on Think if it’s a longer form, really copy heavy sort of advertising.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think there’s two ways. You have got your traditional advertorials that have the tiny little print at the top that says ‘This is an advertisement,’ and it’s pretty straightforward what it is. But then you have those ones that are a little more disguised, and they are typically a pay-to-play article tied to some sort of media buy and they are written by someone at the publication or maybe they are written by you, and they may or may not have a byline on it, and those ones are a little bit harder. But again, that is your opportunity to get something content and they are keeping in mind, again, the expectations of the reader. If they are coming to that magazine to be entertained, then you need to balance entertainment with some of that Think to copy.
Steve Robinson: And then flipping all the way over to Do state, if you are browsing the circulars looking to do some coupon clipping, you are obviously expecting Do stage content at that point, right? And if you threw in some ad that didn’t have a coupon in there, you might actually annoy the audience more than anything else. So coming back to context and expectations, coupons are all Do.
Elizabeth Earin: Now where we kind of, I think, got a little held up was when we started talking about our daily newspaper. And I subscribe to our local paper here, and had pulled that up and we were kind of going through the paper together, and we were really surprised that there was a lot of advertising that was targeted to Do state content.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. We will kind of get to this a little bit later when we talk about sort of our call to action for the industry to start looking at traditional media differently, but it was rather eye-opening and surprising when we started looking at newspaper advertising as it aligns to the customer journey, because so much of it was focused at the latter, the last tail end of that customer journey which, when, you think about it is your smallest segment of that audience in many cases. So, those limited time offers saying “buy now or interest rates are going to change,” or “stop in the next two weeks before the sale is over,” all of that Do stage content, it may not be the best place for it, but we will talk more about that later.
Elizabeth Earin: I think that it’s important to note that there are some exceptions, though, when we are talking about this Do state, and that applies to products that people need all of the time. Laundry soap is a great example. It’s purchased so frequently and by so many people that the number of people at any given moment that are in Do state is large enough that advertising may make sense.
Steve Robinson: Counter that with a siding contractor. How often do people need to replace the siding on their home? It’s not necessarily all that often. So in that case, you need to make sure that you understand exactly what percentage of your audience is ready to buy at any given moment before you choose to make the investment in that advertising to know whether it’s going to have a positive return on investment.
Elizabeth Earin: And I am so glad you said that, because we are not necessarily saying don’t ever do Do state advertising. There’s definitely a place for it, Do state content. There’s definitely a place, but as long as you, as a marketer, are aware that you are only talking to a small portion of your audience. And with your limited media budget dollars, is this how you want to be spending it? If this is, then great, but if it’s not, this is your chance to kind of take a look and step back and re-evaluate that plan.
Steve Robinson: So let’s talk about outdoor. Outdoor is really kind of the worst targeting you get. It’s a very powerful medium. We are not saying don’t ever use it because it’s very powerful, but if you think about it, you have no control over even which persona is looking at that. You have got two year olds looking out the window from their car seat just as much as you have got your target audience looking out the window as they are driving down the road. So from that standpoint, it can be a very challenging medium because you can’t even target on persona besides buyer’s journey state.
Elizabeth Earin: Well, and I think it’s challenging too, because when you look at what you can target on, you can target on See and you can target on Do, but Think, it doesn’t make sense. Just the nature of outdoor advertising and how it works is you can’t have a paragraph on there. You can’t have multiple points trying to sway someone’s opinion, which is what you are trying to do when you are in the Think state. And so it’s sort of — Think state gets completely ignored by outdoor advertising, and so we are really focusing on See and we are focusing on Do. And See makes sense. It applies to the largest possible audience. We are trying to build an affinity for our brand, and so we when you don’t necessarily know who it is that’s driving by your particular location, then See makes sense.
Steve Robinson: Coming back to our episode 18 where we talked about aligning your content with your customer journey, if you recall, your See state content really only has one purpose or two purposes. One is to keep that brand top of mind, and two is to attach that brand to some big idea, right? And so when you think about the limited space and time that you have on an outdoor advertisement, it’s ideal for that Do state. You really have to focus on an offer that can be really clearly communicated in almost no words and simple pictures. So your McDonald’s Dollar Menu works great. It’s a juicy hamburger a dollar; I get it. And then the same thing would be for, like, a room rate at a hotel. Well, okay, that makes sense. The key is that you have to have some brand advertising on the other — some See state and possibly some Think state advertising elsewhere in order to make those deals make sense, because if I don’t know who McDonald’s is, seeing that Dollar Menu burger, I just think, “Wow! A burger for a dollar. That’s got to be awful.” The same thing would be true for that room rates special. I now am attaching any value to the price that’s on that board, or whatever limited time offer is on that board is all I know about that brand, which it might entice me to get into the store, but unless I see the value on the other side and that’s been communicated through some other marketing, it’s wasted. So Do state with outdoor is great if you have got other media supporting the rest of the customer journey.
Elizabeth Earin: What about direct mail?
Steve Robinson: Direct mail is — it could, in theory, be the most beautiful thing, right? Because we, in theory, can target direct mail exactly the same as we target digital. The databases exist. We have the data. We can match up consumers at their physical address back to the attributes within our first party database, our CRM system, our marketing automation system or the third party data where we purchase lists of the people that are in market for X, or even which zip plus 4 is most applicable to our particular target persona, our audience, right? Where things fall down is with digital. You can run things at very small scales and still make them cash flow positively. With print, when you start running things at very small scales, you run into problems because your most cost-effective print advertising is when you have a large run of print material and you are doing a mailing on a per route basis rather than on a per home basis or per business basis. So from a cost-effective standpoint, you have to make sure that your strategy aligns with the potential return on that investment.
Elizabeth Earin: So to your point, it is possible to tie direct mail to a journey state. The question is how do we personalize that message to the journey state of the prospects in that particular point in time. And there’s a couple of ways that you can do these things to keep in mind, and the first is to tie it to your marketing automation system.
Steve Robinson: A lot of people don’t even know that this is possible, but just as you can tell your marketing automation system to send an email, you can actually tell your marketing automation system to send a single piece of print mail as well. The trick is to tie the system into a provider such as Lob or FPL. Both of those are great providers that will actually let you do this one off mailings based on exactly where that particular prospect is in their journey at that particular point in time.
Elizabeth Earin: With marketing automation, direct mail becomes very easy and can be a very effective solution, but what happens if you are a business that doesn’t have marketing automation? Because a lot of the platforms out there are pretty expensive, and if you are a smaller business or you are a smaller company, you may have not explored marketing automation yet. When you do send mailings in this scenario — when you do send mailings, you want to be aware of the journey state and you can track that through your CRM. It can be as simple as adding a field and knowing that someone is in it, that your sales team is updating this or you are updating this as you are working with your contacts, and just kind of understand — be aware of the probability of your audience at any given time of where they are in the journey state. So when you combine your CRM and when you combine sort of this understanding of where your audience falls in general, you can start making some very educated decisions and actions using direct mail.
Steve Robinson: So I think this is a great time for us to take a quick break and help some people. When we get back, we’ll talk about measurement.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I would like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor, and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Natalie in Colorado. Natalie asks that you make a contribution to the Girls on the Run organization, inspiring girls to be joyful, healthy and confident through experience-based curriculum that creatively integrates running. Learn more at girlsontherun.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And welcome back. So we went through a litany of traditional media methods before we jumped into the break there, and now I think it’s important to talk about measurement because, on the digital side, it’s really easy to measure the effectiveness of our advertising, especially if it’s direct response because all we have to do is count the clicks, right? What about on the traditional side?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, it’s not so easy, because typically, we are asking our audience to change mediums, and so how do we track that? How do we track that from they have seen something on TV and now we are asking them to take an action, and so we need to find a way to link between the medium they left to where we have asked them to go.
Steve Robinson: And the key here is to have a unique call to action. So for every placement you want to measure, you want to give them a unique key. And so that key changes depending on which medium you are asking them to engage with. If you are asking them to pick up the phone, you are going to give them a specific phone number, usually through a call tracking service like Mongoose Metrics or Call Rail. If you are asking them to visit a website, then you can give them a unique URL and we recommend it be its own domain name, not just /something special, right? Because people will often Google things or skip the slash, and chances are this isn’t going to be something that’s going to be in Google anyway. And then if you are asking them to engage in SMS or text messaging, then you give them a specific short code. And then finally, if you are asking them to actually physically visit the store, then you give them a coupon and so that coupon becomes trackable back through your point of sale system back to that particular source.
Elizabeth Earin: I think one we left off, I think that’s important too. And we see this used all the time and very effectively is promo codes. Promo codes are a great way to be able to track that, and you see that a lot in radio advertising. You see that in TV ads as well, and so that’s another way that you can tie that back to a digital experience.
Steve Robinson: In general, everything we described is going to be applied mostly to your Think and your Do state. Measuring See state is just as ambiguous digitally as it is traditionally, and that’s where you get into market research and brand awareness and even just measuring how often your brand name is Googled and some other hacks that we have come up with over the years in order to get some rough measurement on the return on the investment. But really, when we talk about this measurement, we are talking about measuring Think and Do state response.
Elizabeth Earin: So at the beginning of the podcast, we talked about we wanted to challenge marketers to think a little bit differently about traditional media, and now we are going to kind of get into that a little bit. When we take a look at traditional media, the landscape has changed, and in response, we need to change how we are approaching traditional media.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. I think a lot of marketers out there have a tendency to focus on Do state when it comes to any advertising in any media, and I think that focus really comes out of a desire for measurement. Do state is infinitely more measurable than your Think or your See state advertising because we just measure the number of sales that come out the other side. But in doing so, I think that a lot of marketers are short-sighted because, depending on what your objectives are overall, traditional may not be the best place for that Do state advertising because it may not be where your audience is when they are in Do state. And so I think the key is making sure that you understand how you are measuring that response. And if it is Do state, make sure that your measurements are actually real measurement and not just anecdotal. Well, how many people do you think came in this week off the radio ad, but actually measuring it, right? And then make sure that, strategically, you are aligning the right media with the right state of that customer’s journey.
Elizabeth Earin: You mentioned that you thought a lot of it was driven by measurement. I think a lot of it is driven by the fact that we want and we need action now. We have got our executive team and our CEO asking us what we are getting for our media spend and we need something to tie it back to, so we run to Do state because those people are ready to convert. Those people are ready to take action. The problem is that audience is so small that when we only target them, then we are leaving all these other people on the table. That while they may not be ready to buy today, they may be ready to buy tomorrow or next week or next month, and so if we think about that and we include that in our strategy, then we are able to not only drive those sales now with Do state content, but we can drive those future sales as well, and we get into a very nice rhythm or just — we keep feeding that pipeline. And so I think one of the key takeaways that we hope that all of you, all of our listeners walk away with today is question your strategy. We are not saying you have to throw your strategy out, but take a look at your strategy. Why are you doing it? Where does this particular ad fit into your customer journey? What percentage of your audience is at that point in the customer journey? And then is that really the best way to spend your money or is this the best way to talk to them? Or should you reevaluate? Maybe we shift some dollars around, shift some messaging around. So again, we are addressing people in every single state throughout the customer journey.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. I think that’s a great point for us to leave things off at, so I want to thank everybody for making time for us this week, and until next week, onward and upward.
Elizabeth Earin: If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then, onward and upward!
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