Strategic Paid Media Planning
At The Nest, we believe that strategy sits at the heart of all of the most effective marketing and advertising. Marketing Strategy gives businesses a plan of action to achieve their objectives and Media Strategy brings a brand’s marketing strategy to life within their paid advertising. Setting the right Media Strategy can be the difference between advertising delivering real life results or simply getting lost in the noise of the competition and fading into the background.
Our Planning Process
We have condensed years of experience and the best elements of strategic planning processes to develop a straightforward approach to building effective Media Strategy. Focused on getting to the core of a brief as quickly and simply as possible, without compromising on quality of output, our four step approach is flexible enough to be applied across industries and objectives. It is designed to work with budgets from ten thousand to ten million.
Understand
It all starts with the brief. A clear marketing brief will lead to advertising campaigns that deliver the desired results. When The Nest receive a brief from a client, we don’t just take it at face value. We interrogate the objectives, budget and information provided to ensure everyone is aligned on what success looks like and the steps needed to get there. If a business hasn’t already written a brief, we will run a workshop to help understand their short and long term business objectives and communication objectives and write the best paid media brief for the campaign.
A cohesive brief is a critical element of the approach, which we have too often seen undervalued or neglected. We aren’t afraid to have honest (and sometimes difficult) conversations at this stage, or to hold ourselves accountable to targets agreed.
Explore
Once the brief is agreed, we analyse and audit a business’ category, consumer and the brand itself to develop insights that can inform our Media Strategy.
When looking at Category Insights we deploy industry leading tools including Nielsen to understand what the competition are doing with their advertising. We review their spend, the channels they are using, and the messaging they are putting out. We are adept at utilising market reports which clients subscribe to – whether from Mintel, Kantar or others – to help build our understanding of the immediate and wider competition.
Consumer Insights are all about understanding the current and potential future customers of a brand – their target audience. The Nest utilises the Kantar Target Group Index (TGI) Survey to build audience profiles and segmentations. This helps us identify how a target audience consumes media, what TV stations and social media platforms they use most often, what tech they use to engage with brands, and much more. We also work with our client partners bespoke research into their own customer base, and with output from all of the major segmentation partners including Experian Mosaic.
The final piece of the Explore puzzle is Brand Insights. What makes a client’s brand unique? What will help it differentiate from the competition? What are the lessons they have already learned on their marketing journey to date – or the work we’ve previously done with them? Research input at this stage includes research looking at a brand’s website, their brand guidelines and creative, previous campaign results and brand trackers.
Formulate
Based on the insights identified in Explore, we Formulate the Media Strategy. A great Marketing Strategy is clearly grounded in insights about a brand and its position within a market and its consumers, and Media Strategy is no different. The Nest utilises Paid Media Strategy to give campaigns a clear direction with guiding thought that feeds through into the media channels we deploy and where we deploy them. We tailor how we approach strategy from case to case, depending on the client’s requirements, the budget and the timeline for the campaign. We are comfortable developing strategic platforms that can be incorporated into wider brand universes that guide marketing activity over multiple years. We are equally able to distil insights into a simple one line strategy that can give a clear focus to a Marketing Campaign.
Activate
Once we have the clear direction provided by a strategy, we entrust our Channel Experts to activate the campaign with tactical deployment of media channels that are best suited to deliver the desired results identified in Understand. You can find out about all the multitude of channels The Nest experts can deliver in our Services section.