3 Tricks to Avoid This Halloween to Make Your Next Marketing Campaign a Treat

By Chris Fehrmann, VP of Digital Products at TEGNA
Marketing can be scary at times, and brands can make some pretty big mistakes that can haunt their dreams or keep them up at night. Luckily, the experts at TEGNA are here to help. Chris Fehrmann, VP of Digital Products at TEGNA, is here to share the tricks to avoid that will make your marketing campaigns a treat.

Trick #1: Not understanding their consumer journey.

We all know the consumer journey is not linear and changes for each consumer. However, advertisers should measure and learn their own consumers’ buying behaviors and let that inform their marketing plans and strategies.

Treat: It all comes down to what is the ROI you are receiving on your advertising spend and how that interacts with the cost of sales within the organization. If an advertiser understands their consumers, how they interact with the brand and how their business attracts new customers, they can make an impact through their advertising plans/strategies. They will understand that their consumers interact with multiple pieces of media, advertising and branding before making purchase decisions. They will also understand how different media types work together along that journey and how they must invest in multiple advertising solutions.

Trick #2: Not having a grasp on the measurement and attribution of your marketing channels.

Proper attribution will allow you to not only measure the ROI of specific marketing channels but also understand how channels work together and your overlap or incrementality of reach.

Treat: Proper attribution will provide the data to help inform the consumer journey and decisions by not only showing the last piece of media the consumer interacted with, but other media they interacted with along the way. Attribution will also help ensure that the advertiser is not only reaching the consumer across different media but also areas to have incremental reach for new business.

Advertisers and agencies should be focused on getting the plumbing of their campaigns correct to gather and report on the data necessary to make informed decisions. Once they have attribution data from their campaigns, including applying their own costs and determining an ROI, they should look at their marketing both at the specific channel by channel basis, but also in aggregate. They need to be able to recognize if a certain channel is impacting their ROI and how that impacts their total ROI. Hidden secrets lie within the data that can uncover optimizations.

Trick #3: Not knowing the industry trends and adjusting marketing plans and strategies.

Our industry is changing rapidly, and in some cases with large swooping changes are having an immediate impact on ROIs, as well as long-term impacts. Staying on top of these changes will allow advertisers to not only maximize current ROIs but prepare themselves for the adjustments ahead.

I am seeing too many advertisers not adjusting their budgets according to changes in the industry so they can maximize their ROI. For instance, social media platform CPMs are at the highest in history and are going to continue to increase while their targeting capabilities decline. This would be an indicator to start reallocating budgets to other media to maintain your current cost of sales from marketing.

Treat: Advertisers and agencies should stay on top of industry changes. This starts with taking the time to read industry trades. However, I highly recommend participating in industry groups and consortiums. Not only will you learn, but you will be able to participate in efforts to make real changes that will help your business, as well as others.

For advertisers, this may be groups such as the American Marketing Association. For agencies, it may be an organization like the 4A’s. A great digital advertising industry group could be IAB.org, and some specific groups like the Brand Safety Institute.

Beyond industry trades and industry organizations, I am a big fan of reading both quarterly earnings and yearly reports from large publicly traded publishers. You find a wealth of information within, including understanding where their strategy is heading and major projects they are working on. You may also get a peek into their financial strategy and if you should expect an increase in marketing costs, for instance. These could be from Facebook, Google, or even someone like TEGNA. There is no doubt that publishers and media companies are moving in the direction in which consumers are moving and advertisers are able to follow along.

Why Choose TEGNA for Your Next Big Campaign?

TEGNA’s mission is to serve the greater good of our communities. We do so through our trusted, impactful, and innovative news content, helping our communities stay informed and safe. We also do that by providing advertising and marketing solutions to businesses that will allow them to grow their business, and have positive impacts on their customers, their employees, and their community.

TEGNA’s award-winning team of marketing experts has driven results for thousands of businesses across the country. Because of TEGNA’s massive reach with our content, we have the pulse on where consumers are moving, viewing, and buying habits. We use that data to stay at the forefront of new technologies and advertising media.

TEGNA also has an industry-leading attribution solution that provides deep insights to prove the value of linear TV, CTV streaming, and other digital marketing solutions allowing advertisers and agencies to measure their ROI. You are able to measure real-world outcomes such as website visits and visits to brick-and-mortar locations.

However, setting the award-winning products and the massive nationwide reach aside comes down to our people. “Good Data, Good People” is a tagline we commonly use. Because all the data and technology are only as good as the person and the wisdom they bring to utilize it properly.

Sound Good?

Contact TEGNA today to find out how we can improve your brand’s marketing strategy.