At a time when cutting costs is the order of the day and companies are rethinking every expense from ground up, marketing budgets and advertising, in particular, are the first to get the axe. Yet, every marketer knows he cannot do without a minimum level of media spends.
In a survey of high-growth small-medium enterprises, conducted by 9.9 Media, one out of every two respondents said they planned to cut their marketing expenditure this year. The majority – 75 per cent of those surveyed – however, agreed that media marketing was likely to remain a critical part of their overall business strategy.
“A small business can manage by concentrating on its immediate environment but this is not the case for bigger organisations. Once organisations reach a certain size they have to look at the wider environment and any plan to grow has to involve media,” explains Dr Shikha Sharma, managing director of Nutri-Health Systems Private Limited.
So how do you get more from less? Here are four ideas from our media experts:
Focus on better buys
We intuitively push our media agencies to negotiate lower rates with media owners; after all, it’s a game of demand and supply. But in the complex world of media numbers, lower is not always better. So the marketer should be aware of all the possible factors that could and should be looked at in a media deal and ensure that he gets the maximum value from his advertising spend at every step of the buying process (see figure below).
For instance, higher % discounts are not attractive if coupled with an increase in base card rates, or drop in readership of the media vehicle. Media brands will also reward you (higher discounts, waivers on premiums or size upgrades) if you
commit the lion’s share of your media spends to them or advertise in their multiple city editions, or are flexible in your release dates (ROS).
CPT, which translates to the cost of reaching a thousand members of your core target, is a good metric to use when comparing two diverse publications with different rate cards and reach among your target.
Focus on ensuring that your plan is in line with the marketing task
A media plan should always be in the context of the marketing and communication task for it to be effective. A print plan is a print plan is a print plan...right? Wrong! Even a basic print plan changes with the changing context. For example, for a brand launch we should take high reach, attention grabbing positions such as front page solus ads in newspapers or back cover in magazines (more relevant for B2B products advertising in trade journals), colour ads in large sizes (at least 800 sq.cm in newspapers and full page in magazines) to rapidly build brand awareness and establish the brand image.
A promotion plan, post launch, needs to be supported by smaller, higher frequency advertising (minimum OTS of 2 per week) that compels the consumer to participate during the short promotion period. On the contrary, the media plan of a well established brand needs to focus more on spreading the budget to get continuity (more weeks/months of media presence) versus a very heavy media burst in any one short period. A new product concept (eg. Probiotic curd) needs to have a more educative approach with advertorials in magazines making full use of the credibility of editorial and the content versus ad platform. A media plan should be crafted only in the context of the broader marketing plan and communication task for it to be meaningful and do what it is supposed to do!
Focus on the solution and not the medium
Most MNCs and large firms have large budgets and larger market areas to cover. An SME brand does not have to ape the high reach, mass vehicle strategy of these brands (and fall short on budgets and visibility)! Fragmentation of audiences which we have been told is a bad word, actually works brilliantly for us! Fragmentation happens because the consumer now has choice – both in his media consumption and his leisure options, which he chooses from basis his context, his lifestyle and psychographics playing a major role.
If we are able to go beyond demographics and arrive at a clear and focused target group for our brand, there are multiple media opportunities we could use to have a meaningful dialogue with our consumer. A brand of Club wear shirts trying to get away from the mother brand ‘formal’ wear image with only Rs. 50 lakhs to spend in a context with competitors spending 10 times the amount, targets not Males, 24-35 years, SEC A but the ‘Party-animal’. There is no element of conventional mass media in the plan – page 3 ads in city supplements, college activations through FM radio, lots of on-ground events and contests in pubs, discotheques, night-clubs, multiplexes and a heavy Internet presence. All this translates to delivering 50% more than the target sales at the year-end of launch.
The concept of being focused on the task and being completely platform or media neutral, to change the message to use a particular medium in the best way is actually a solutions approach which is finding wider acceptance with marketers.
Focus on the result and not the deliveries
With rising costs and lower deliveries, companies have begun to focus their attention beyond media efficiency to media effectiveness. Measurability of media efforts is now focused less on the delivery of GRPs and reach, and more on results, such as the awareness generated, footfalls delivered or habits changed. As Sanjay Goyal, the CEO of ACL Wireless Limited puts it, “The cost of customer acquisition has always been a critical element of our media strategy and we believe that more and more companies would move towards performance-based models with quantifiable accountability parameters.”
Marketers are now factoring in a response measurement to their plans in order to measure effectiveness of the media activity. Retail marketers have fine-tuned this to an art. Their media activity is spread out with minimal overlaps (for instance if the print plan has 4 publications with 5 insertions in each, no 2 ads are scheduled on the same day) and footfalls to the stores are monitored and related to the advertising to analyse and arrive at what works best or is most effective and the media plan is modified accordingly.
In conclusion
If there is one trend that emerges now, it is simply this: the show must go on, but with a deeper understanding and involvement from the marketer on how he can get more from less.
Ashvinder Singh, Managing Director, UniStyle Images, drives home the point with great clarity. “The most important thing is to be visible and make our presence felt, more so during these difficult times.”
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