People use social media to talk about their experiences, interests, wants, likes and dislikes. What they’re saying on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere represents a trove of information that can help guide media planning.
The traditional planning cycle still holds of course. You have to define objectives, set strategy and tactics, continually refine your plan execution, and measure results. But now the social conversation is a vital input to that process.
Networked Insights can help you gain unbiased, unfiltered access to the minds of customers and prospects as they interact and opine in social media. We take social media analytics to a new level, tapping an extraordinary spectrum of sources to unearth hot topics and rich conversations. Our unique combination of insight-rich content and spot-on demographics can help you sharpen your audience focus, identify and predict trends quickly, and gain a powerful competitive advantage.
Learn how you can use social media analytics to transform your media planning process and gain the results you want from your spend at the minimum effective investment. In other words, let us help you get more bang for your media buck.
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How To Guide for Revolutionizing Media Planning
1.
2. How-to Guide for
Revolutionizing Media
Planning
At Networked Insights, clients often ask us, “How do your
capabilities fit into our media planning process? Where
can your expertise inform us, broaden our view and help
us influence buyer behavior?”
With the increasing amount of content people are
generating through all the unstructured data available
on the Internet — via blogs, micro blogs, social media
sites like Facebook and Twitter, user forums, and other
places — there’s a whole new realm of information that
can be mined to inform the media planning process. The
challenge isn’t necessarily accessing this data — there are
plenty of ways to do that. It’s figuring out what to do with
it once you have it and, in the case of media planners,
using it to inform the strategic planning process.
Traditional media planning is a five-step process, wherein
you 1) set your media objectives, 2) develop a media
strategy and then 3) design media tactics. From there
you 4) optimize the plan to include any adjustments for
improvement and then 5) evaluate it by measuring the
results against your goals.
Networked Insights can help
inform every stage of the cycle.
It’s a cycle that calls for adjustments throughout, and
Networked Insights can help inform every stage of
that cycle.
Media Objectives and Strategy
The first step in setting your media objectives is defining
your target audience. This is traditionally approached by
using demographics and psychographics based on values
and lifestyle segments.
Networked Insights can help define your primary and
secondary audiences based on topics they discuss and
their brand-related conversations. This information can
also be used to determine generational cohorts (Baby
Boomers, Gen-X-ers, etc.) — data that can be leveraged
to identify TV, digital and other properties that resonate
with the target audience.
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3. Next, we can get an excellent pulse on your target
audience’s product and brand usage by looking at
where, when and how they discuss these topics.
As you begin defining your communication goals, you’ll
start posing specific questions. How many people do
we hope to reach? How many gross rating points do we
want? These are the things you’ll measure against after
a campaign is complete, or gauge for optimizing while a
campaign is running.
We can provide clear benefits in this area, producing
data for metrics like brand lift, to show how brand or
category-related conversations have changed throughout
a campaign. We can also monitor your campaign’s effect
on earned media, specifically the added PR that’s
generated in articles, on sites and blogs, and through
social media streams.
Time to plan your media strategy? Based on when and
Maximizing paid, owned and earned
where your target is engaging in conversation, we can
media is all about sequencing. One
help you determine effective flighting, aka the best times
of our clients was ready to launch a
and places to deliver your content. We refer to this as
next-generation gaming product.
sequencing of paid, owned and earned media, and done
We analyzed the $30 million launch me-
with the added insights provided by social data analysis,
dia plan for their previous generation
it can help extend the value of your media buys.
product and discovered that once they
(Download our CFO report)
stopped spending, awareness plateaued
— but shortly afterward awareness
Should you advertise on one TV network or choose a
numbers took off again on their own.
variety of different programs across the spectrum? Do
Based on this insight, we modeled a
you heavy-up content on a few websites, or go wide
media plan for the new product that
because the topic is being discussed broadly? We can
shifted the order and emphasis of paid,
help you formulate a media calendar for when to
owned and earned media.
communicate what.
The result? Greater awareness and a
As you can see, the capabilities we provide go far beyond
savings of $12 million media spend.
the traditional “set it and forget it” mentality. We can give
you immediate insight into what’s relevant to your target
audience, allowing you to adjust messaging at any time to
get the results you want.
Media Tactics
Some organizations think of designing specific media
tactics simply as buying media. However, we like to take a
more holistic view of this step, expanding the definition
of media beyond traditional TV, radio and print to include
other opportunities.
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4. For example, a media tactic could include selecting the
best celebrity to represent your product. It could include
identifying content that you can acquire and leverage
across various forms of media.
Buying media is not something Networked Insights does,
but the insights that come from our social data analysis
can help make this step more strategic for those who do
buy media.
Optimization
The next step of the media planning process, optimization,
occurs after you begin measuring performance against your
media objectives. Customary methods are surveys, tracking,
observation and feedback. The latter two are distinct
capabilities of Networked Insights. By capturing and
analyzing consumer feedback on your brand or category,
we can help evaluate your campaign effectiveness and make
recommendations that “tweak” your strategy.
At this stage, much of our value comes from how fast we
can respond and help you benefit from either shifts in the
How can you increase the certainty that
conversation, or unexpected or breaking news-type
you’ll capture the target rating points
occurrences. For example, we can quickly identify a distinct
you’re going after — and more? The
spike in online discussions on a subject your audience cares
television networks say they have great
about. What’s being said? Is it relevant to your messaging?
“social reach,” but they have no proof.
You’ll know almost immediately.
We do. As an agency or as a corporate
brand, you can take advantage of our
In addition to identifying these events, we can measure
social intelligence today. Being the first
how fast and far the discussions are occurring. For optimiz-
to have this data will give you solid first-
ing your media plan, this gives you a timely opportunity to
mover advantage over your competition.
place content in strategic places. It can also equip you with
informed predictions of what will happen with that infor-
mation. In short, we can help you be much more nimble
when it comes to adjusting and optimizing your plan.
Evaluating Effectiveness
At the final stage of the media planning process, you begin
measuring your performance against your objectives. This
is similar to what you did at the optimization stage, but now
the campaign is over.
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5. Were your goals met? For instance, if you wanted to see a
shift in brand conversation, did you have that impact? Did
brand awareness grow in social media? Did you have a
presence on more sites? Was there an increase in
discussion about your brand?
Networked Insights provides innumerable opportunities
to measure and evaluate your success, using data to make
adjustments for greater results.
A Summary of Our Benefits
Networked Insights can help you target an audience by
providing unbiased, unfiltered access to the minds of
consumers. Where we differ from other social media
analytics companies is through an ability to bring together
a vast spectrum of sources compiling widely dispersed con-
versations. We can provide a unique combination of content
and demographics to give greater focus to your audience. Gone are the days of static segmen-
Most companies today use social media monitoring tools
tation and changing segmentation
to draw from the same data pool of Twitter, Facebook and
every 18 months. In the social media
Boardreader, which is used for searching forums. We go
age, you don’t need to conduct tens
beyond these to also leverage tools like BigBoards and
of thousands of surveys requiring
Technorati. And unlike other data analysts, we build target
months of waiting. Instead, we use
audiences using demographics from sources like comScore,
the information and knowledge-
Quantcast, Alexa and Google Adplanner. Taking the extra
sharing among your customers’ social
time to define an audience so precisely means you get deep,
media interactions to drive a set of
demographics and that show how
accurate data, while eliminating the bulk of social media
and where relevant social media
“noise” that generally exists surrounding any given topic.
conversations are happening.
Having access to this immense wealth of data gives you the
We overlay data from Comcast, Google
ability to approach problems in a different way. You can
and comScore, looking at different
identify and predict trends quickly, and gain a powerful
segments. In this emerging era of
advantage over your competition.
dynamic segmentation or hyper-
segmentation, you can reach
And ultimately, you can gain the results you want, at the
premium viewers without paying
minimum effective investment. Or in other words, you get
premium pricing.
much, much more bang for your buck.
Questions about this report? Want a free consultation
on how social data can improve your media planning
Email: info@networkedinsights.com
and other marketing? Contact us.
Web: www.networkedinsights.com
Phone: 608.237.1867
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