Building a Winning Media Strategy for Your Business

The right media strategy can take your business to the next level but it is equally important to realize that one wrong move is good enough to bring it back to square one. This calls for extreme caution in devising and executing an effective media strategy for your business. The media industry is growing leaps and bounds and it requires quite a sizable amount of expertise to utilize the opportunities existing in your business.

You need to have the right tools that may have to be further customized to suit your business needs to make the most of it. The guys at Kantar Media UK have identified a few key areas every media strategy should focus on. Here are some of the most important ones; you of course need to adapt these to your changing needs.

Audience Research

You develop content for the consumption of your audience. How can you do this effectively without understanding them? So, the very first step involves understanding the different segments of your audience, dividing them into appropriate categories and knowing their limitations. Ask yourself questions like what kind of products or services your audience would be interested in, how often would they buy it, what are their expectations in terms of pricing and quality, is it possible for you to target all segments of your audience and to what extent, etc. Take true measures of the audience and try to quantify the data to the extent possible. This will form the basis of your media strategy.

Competitive Intelligence

The next step involves finding out the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and analyzing where you stand vis-à-vis them. Who are your existing competitors and who can be the other potential entrants in near future? What perception does the market hold about you as compared to your competitors? What type of coverage are your competitors getting in different media channels and what kind of impact does that make on your brand? Consolidate all this information into a concise report and build a communication strategy based on that. It will help you get an actionable insight, interpret your results more accurately, and stay ahead of your competition.

Social Media

Social media, which used to be just another channel to target your customers, has grown into a huge platform you can no more afford to ignore. With the advent of sites like Facebook and Twitter, it can prove to be a game changer in your media strategy. Since it has the potential of affecting your business in either way, negatively or positively, it is but imperative that you have a proper social media monitoring and management mechanism in place. Measuring social media success is a complicated process and can at times get quite elusive. But with the help of right tools, techniques and expertise, you can effectively measure your user engagement and evaluate the social media reputation of your brand.

Marketing Effectiveness

Once you’ve built a strategy, you need to be sure that things are moving in the right direction. For this, you need to measure the effectiveness of your strategy from time to time. Quantifying the results will help you measure the contribution of your strategy in your growth. Some of the most common measurement metrics include number of unique visitors, number of page views, percentage of traffic from search engines and social media, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc. Analyzing these metrics will give you actionable insights and will enable you to finetune your strategy for better ROI.