Crafting a winning brand campaign: blending digital and traditional media for full-funnel success

To provide messaging that will resonate, it’s essential to begin with a clear understanding of your target audience. The first step is to define who your ideal customers are – demographics and psychographics – understand their needs and what drives them, and research how they interact with various media. A mix of first-party data (using your own analytics) and third-party research will allow you to create in-depth personas that your media plan can then be based on.

For example, analysing your customer data against your sales/performance data can identify new audiences or subsets of audiences that you may not have previously been marketing to, or to whom you’ve been marketing a different product mix. Perhaps a certain product line, intended for a more mature audience, actually drives more sales from a younger audience. Or products intended for men may actually be purchased by a high percentage of women, peaking at holiday time, perhaps indicating that those products are being bought as gifts.

Once you leverage your own first-party data in this way, you can then layer on third-party research to more fully flesh out these audiences and understand their media consumption. A thorough analysis of the competitive landscape is also critical to create an effective branding plan. Using a compilation of tools such as MRI Simmons, GWI, YouGov, Neilsen, Vivvix, Pathmatics, Google and SEMrush will allow you to source audience and competitive data to complete the view of your audiences.

As a digital-first agency, DAC understands that branding via digital channels is increasing in importance and impact, especially as audiences continue to move more of their media consumption online. Depending on the target audience you’re trying to reach – for example, a younger, more technologically savvy audience – branding programs that are 100 per cent digital can be quite successful. In fact, we have helped brands transition linear media plans into fully digital ones, with improved overall performance.

Setting the standard in full-funnel marketing

One example of this is for one of our clients. Earlier in our engagement, business mandates required a significant year-over-year (YoY) budget reduction, requiring the removal of linear TV advertising from the media mix. This shift demanded an innovative approach to maintain brand reach and health while adapting to a reduced marketing budget.

In response, DAC created a full-funnel strategy to counter the loss of linear. The strategy included using CTV (connected TV), OTT (over-the-top content delivery) and OLV (online video) to maintain efficient reach, as well as social and other digital platforms to ensure consistent brand presence and engagement, while remaining focused on search and low-funnel digital media such as remarketing to drive online leads and foot traffic. We also partnered with Google to create a search demand curve for the brand, which was used to measure the impact of the program.

The digital full-funnel strategy yielded remarkable results, resulting in growth across all KPIs:

• Exceeded digital matchback revenue goals (attribution of offline conversions to online marketing efforts), demonstrating…
• Search continued to drive YoY growth in online leads and significant foot traffic despite a 2 per cent decrease in spend
• Upper funnel media (OTT/CTV/video) increased search demand, leading to higher engagement and transaction rates
• Achieved 159 per cent of client’s reach goal in the first quarter of implementation, growing online leads by 16 per cent YoY year-to-date (YTD)
• The paid search campaign achieved a 28 per cent improvement in ROI and a 26 per cent growth in store visits with virtually flat YoY spend 

The strategy not only mitigated the loss of linear TV advertising but also surpassed Google’s predicted search demand curve for the first two quarters of execution. As demand increased, search engine marketing (SEM) effectively captured this demand and drove store visits, showing a direct correlation with our clients’ revenue. This innovative approach demonstrated the power of a well-executed digital strategy in driving significant business outcomes, from awareness to revenue.

The integration of digital and offline media

Though we have proven the success of digital-first branding programs for many brands, DAC also creates media plans that blend both digital and traditional media when the audience and competitive intelligencedictate that both should be part of the plan.

Every type of traditional/offline media has a correlating digital medium that can be considered for a blended digital and offline plan. For example, TV’s digital equivalents are CTV and OTT, while radio’s is streaming audio and out-of-home (OOH) becomes digital out-of-home (DOOH). These digital equivalents generally offer precision targeting and near-real-time analytics, whereas traditional media – including TV, radio, print and outdoor advertising – provide broad reach and can enhance brand credibility. A balanced combination of both online and offline can help achieve multiple media goals.

Among your primary considerations, budget allocation should reflect the goals of your campaign and the media channels that best reach your audience. Additionally, an MMM (media mix model) is a valuable tool to help you understand how much budget, which channels and which stages of the customer journey drive the business results you need.

High-reach awareness media, such as TV/CTV, OOH/DOOH, radio/audio and video will help to build brand awareness and trust in the Knowing and Thinking phases of the customer journey. The split between online and offline mediums should reflect the media consumption of your target audience.

Though the goal of media in the Planning phase of the journey is to sway users’ opinion and favourability of your brand or product, media in this phase often pulls double duty by also driving awareness and fostering conversion. Therefore, the importance of this part of the media plan should not be underestimated.

Demand-capture media such as search, dynamic social and remarketing will be your power players in the Doing phase, while owned media such as email will be your most useful type of media for Feeling.

It’s the message that matters

With the media plan in place, messaging becomes paramount. Once again, data about your audiences becomes critically important when it comes to being effective with your target audience. Brand “love” begins in upper-funnel Knowing and Thinking phases, so messaging at this point of the customer journey should explain what the brand is all about in a meaningful way. Great creative makes media work harder, and emotive, meaningful ads can pack a punch for brand awareness with video content, including TV/CTV. This messaging can then be reinforced through print, audio/radio, D/OOH and display.

In the Planning phase, help your audience to understand your brand or products’ differentiating values and give them comparative information so they can narrow their choices. Features, benefits, pricing, timing (for shipping or service) and customer reviews all matter in this phase. Creative testing can be especially valuable in the Planning phase, as it can inform marketers about what users are responding to in the ads.

The Doing phase is all about closing the sale. Offers/deals, time-based reminders, specific products and strong calls to action are all useful here. Beyond the media and the message, a seamless purchase experience is required. UX testing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can all improve performance at the end of the customer journey.

Feeling messaging should reinforce the good decision the user has made to choose your brand. Reminders for services due, FAQ/how-to content, loyalty discounts, cross/upsell offers and more can all be leveraged here.