At times, the most viable means to reach target audiences is a combination of paid promotion or advertising, strategic publicity and digital marketing, punctuated with engaging copywriting and graphic design. Though, most marketing managers and C-suite leaders agree promoting products, professional services or brands to mass groups of consumers – or to trade professional targets – through paid advertising and content marketing, can seem overwhelming.

We have heard more times than we can count that some marketing communication managers have a love-hate relationship with the advertising and media buying parts of their day-to-day scopes of responsibility. This is hopefully not due to disregard or disdain for the process. Rather, it is likely because of advertising’s various layers of forecasting and numerous rounds of creative and approvals, along with the sometimes-unpredictable pitfalls.

If you are like most marketers, you try to plan your advertising campaigns as succinctly as possible. When executed comprehensively, the process takes time and is many-sided. Only those who have managed media buying and planning inherently know that it is no small feat.

For some, advertising strategies involve tiers of planning that can run a wide gamut, which most often begins with strategic planning, messaging objectives and vetting opportunities. Whether in organized tandem or a get-it-done hustle, this leads to cost negotiations, budgeting overviews, and careful media buying with timely scheduling. Creative, copy and coordination come next, followed by tracking, reporting and the all-important results analytics.

For companies with both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing communications needs, the charge to create results-earning advertising campaigns, nearly always with a lesser-than-desired budget, can feel like crossing a chasm. However, advertising planning and media buying can be completely enjoyable and worth the effort when approached with a competitive and industrious mindset.

Understanding media planning and buying.

 Media planning and buying involves the art and science of researching, negotiating and scheduling advertising placements. The cause or trigger is known as paid media; the effect is, or always should be, brand awareness that translates to brand equity. Masterful and adept media planning satisfies goals to influence clearly identified audiences, targets, leads, and prospects. Ultimately, advertising-induced visibility for available products or offered professional services acts as a cornerstone of the marketing mix to achieve sales conversions.

Converting leads to sales is, at times, disproportionately thought to be the marketer’s role. Yet, while sales and marketing personnel should be dually tag-teamed for real-time sales growth; undoubtedly, a marketer who oversees media buying and planning has the capacity to conjure customer or client expansion, perhaps, like no one else in an organization.

Assuming you have a solid understanding of the types of advertising options that are possible and necessary for your business – and your messaging strategies and creative concepts are well underway – a key, initial planning factor is budget.

Achieving successful ad campaigns begins and ends with the budget your business or brand can assess and allocate. While cost-effective advertising is extremely possible to conceptualize and implement, a good grasp of what to expect with your marketplace’s ad options is essential. A realistic advertising budget is paramount to carve out a sound messaging and promotional victory.

Again, with the assumption your strategic plan for advertising is in place, move toward a systematic approach of evaluation to find and consider cost-effective media buying. To assemble a collection of cost-effective media buys that also offer potent reach and influence among your targets, you will want to research qualified media outlets and digital platforms.

This does not mean buying an ad in a print magazine or newspaper because you saw that one of your competitors advertises in it. Nor, should you jump on the first or second advertising opportunity that lands in your inbox, even if the offer says you will be missing out if you wait.

Efficacious, profitable advertising is an outcome of a nuts-and-bolts valuation, surrounding qualified and quantified audience reach at the most reasonable cost to do so. There are any number of strategies to accomplish this seemingly far-flung objective.

 Starting with a defined advertising budget begets cost-saving measures as you proceed. It is recommended to reach an upfront decision how aggressive your ad plan should be as a piece of your overall marketing communications campaigns.

 How to create an advertising budget.

The number one question we are asked about media buying and advertising budgets is, “How much should I spend on advertising for my business?” If nothing else, it is a loaded question. The answer lies in the business’s desire and need to market its products or services, and exactly what are the coming year’s revenue and profit goals.

A conservative ad budget includes a media buying budget of between 1-3 percent of your prior year’s, or forecasted year’s, revenue. By no means is this an ambitious budget, and it may verge on ambiguous. Though, at this budget level, you may keep your head at or just above water’s level in terms of customer retention.

Your company advertising budgets will be fundamental at this level, but you can unify them with synchronized public relations, consistent content marketing and basic Search Engine Optimization to have a perceptible brand voice amid the competition.

Take it up a couple of savvy-marketer notches and consider an ad budget based upon 4-5 percent of last year’s earned revenue, or next year’s anticipated revenue. If you are a seasoned media planner and buyer or your agency specializes in advertising, your percentage allocation should create advertising campaigns that will result in a fair level of customer retention and picking up new customers or clients.

At this tier, we have witnessed MarComm managers get a little too comfortable. Some perilously assume the 4-6 percent ad budget standard has them covered. To avoid this pitfall, ensure your advertising campaigns are one of several messaging formats. Support your paid media with press releases, blogs, social media, digital marketing, product demos, collateral, speaking and virtual events, networking, and the list goes on.

When working to build market share and brand voice, dig deeper into more vigorous forecasting. Budgeting for paid media at 7-10 percent has the likely power to launch your business to the next rung, possibly two or three, of your market’s or sector’s competitive ladder. This budget should focus upon prudently conceptualized and meticulously managed campaigns.

To safeguard your ad budget’s precious allocation and its subsequent triumph, media buying in this scenario must be complemented with visionary publicity and media relations programs, leading-edge digital marketing and advanced public relations. One without the other can leave too many metaphorical stones unturned in your tactical plan of action for the year.

Before crunching the numbers, there is more to consider when allocating a media buying budget. New thinking in marketing communications during the last few years proposes an even more proactive maneuver. The theory being put to work among select companies is the idea that media buying budgets should be based upon an equation of forecasted revenue and estimated profit, not anticipated revenue alone.

With a profit goal set forth for the following fiscal year, a dynamic option is to set an advertising budget by calculating a percentage of the predicted revenue and profit. This comprises many marketers’ formulas, which vary or fluctuate among industries, sectors and decision-makers.

One method we have found to be effective for determining a year’s media buying budget is 6-10 percent of the new fiscal year’s predicted revenue, plus 1-3 percent of the forecasted profit. It is worth noting that no one recipe works for every business and brand.

Understanding Cost-per-Thousand and Pay-per-Click.

Drilling deeper, no consideration of advertising budget details would be complete without at least a look at the Cost-per-Thousand model, and how to calculate your impressions at a cost per thousand ratio.

Cost-per-thousand (CPM) is calculated by starting with the total cost of advertising. This number could be the baseline for each of your individual media buys or the total advertising expenditure for a campaign, season or year. The “M,” by the way, does not mean 1 million, despite common thought. It represents the Roman numeral for 1,000.

Thus, CPM means cost per thousand. The price paid for a CPM-based media buy is calculated by multiplying the CPM rate by the number of CPM units. If you are considering an ad buy with, say, 1,300,000 impressions, and the cost is $18,000, the CPM is $13.85.

This is not to be confused with digital marketing’s common cost for performance or action, which equates to a total budget expenditure based upon how well your ads perform in terms of action taken by viewers. Actions such as click-throughs or Pay-per-Click (PPC) drive traffic to websites, where the advertiser pays a search engine or content publisher for each time the ad is clicked and the prospect lands on the advertiser’s website.

Both CPM and PPC help advertisers determine the cost and profitability of their ad campaigns. With CPM, you will pay for every 1,000 impressions (or, as we like to call them, “eyeballs” or views), and your PPC cost is your fee per click or per impression.

Mindful, strategic and creative planning of your entire annual advertising program as well as the quality and quantity of each campaign’s placements, will have a direct result on the effectiveness of your CPM and CPC.

Go it Alone or Go with an Agency.

From where, when and how to advertise to the right blend of multiparty outreach campaigns, all advertising teams should focus upon cost-efficiency, creativity and a streamlined process. Evaluate your internal team’s ability and available time for building and supervising your media buying strategies, budgeting and creative. Consider how their collective experience and strengths are weighted compared to potential inexperience or simply a lack of time.

When and where it makes sense, interview agencies to assess the ways in which their advertising and media buying expertise can balance your in-house capabilities. One of the reasons to work with a firm or agency is the cost-savings. Talented advertising agencies can acquire discounted or value-added bonus ad buys for some or most ad campaigns. A truly prepared agency should be able to increase your Pay-per-Click advertising results on average by 50 or more percent.

The advertising campaigns our Eberly & Collard Public Relations media buying and planning team manages for clients are available at widely discounted rates, given our overall ad-buying power and media relationships. Unlike many firms and agencies, we commonly pass along our entire agency discount to clients, in addition to appendage ad-buy savings and value-added bonus advertising print space, digital or airtime we secure for them.

Simplifying otherwise intrinsic advertising plans for clients to minimize their time and maximize their budgets is our advertising team’s forte. We design digital, print, outdoor, indoor, and collateral-based advertisements that inform and influence targets as well as negotiate, coordinate and schedule advertising placements to free our clients of the hassle. We have earned annual advertising awards for our ad concepts, graphic art and layout designs for their innovation, design, written copy, and creativity.

Whether you go it alone or consider the support of an agency for your new fiscal year ahead, we hope this information will lend a hand. Be inspired to generate fresh ad campaigns integrated with your public relations and converged media, ultimately engaging and converting leads to new sales.

Pursuing name or brand recognition and seeking impactful connections with others has always been the vanguard of business leaders and marketers. The endeavor began in fledgling form and has evolved into today’s essential protocol of multifaceted marketing to engage quality leads that can be converted to sales, known as Demand Generation.

Nearly a century in the making, the early mantra, “Win Friends and Influence People” verged on an initial reputation of being almost too avantgarde. But, when the mindset swiftly took hold, it became a roadmap for the ambitious that led to global acquaintance with relationship-building and, eventually, branding.

This preliminary networking mentality was an awakening that morphed into yesteryear’s traditional public relations, involving business leaders’ strategic efforts to create mutually beneficial associations, productive forms of public influence and dynamic methods for communications management.

As many business to business marketers know, present-day marketing is breaking the mold with modernized, innovative and strategic approaches for merging marketing activities and sales goals. These demand generation tactics involve meticulously tracing the customer journey from peaked interest in a service or product to initial engagement with a brand, and onto pipeline, affinity and, ultimately, conversion.

Supply and Demand or Demand and Supply?

For those who begin and end their days with the responsibility of Marketing Communications or the charge to oversee the ways in which Public Relations begets leads and prospects, never have there been quite so many challenges as the current time. The day-to-day expectations are steep. Top of mind and listed on nearly every agenda are Search Engine Results, click-through rates, brand persona, and earned-owned-paid media, all while collecting, measuring and reporting data-driven analytics that make a real difference in the bottom line.

Admittedly, many marketers agree it can be easy to get caught up in the mounting marketing tasks waiting for their boxes to be checked before looming deadlines. Also, up front and center, current events are unearthing our well-made business plans for the new year and a new decade.

Notwithstanding, this can be a time of active evolution and positive progression for brands and businesses. For the go-getter and ever-determined marketers, challenges bring about change, and change engenders solutions.

A proactive shift in thinking and a close look at the overarching objective for most any business to business marketing strategy reveals the core of marketing: Creating interest in and generating demand for products and/or services.

There is undeniably much involved in the sales and marketing process; however, whether products or services, producing demand for available supply is where it all begins.

Demand Generation: Defined.

What is Demand Generation?

The first tangible result of successful marketing is gleaning the interest and attention of qualified leads. Think about the utter power of quality leads versus the volume of leads. Start with this as your initial target mindset, conceptualizing it as the warm-up sprint. View it as the starting line to build long-term business to business relationships.

Having vetted the inherent meaning of “Demand Generation,” Eberly & Collard Public Relations defines it as the inventive and strategic practice of creating interest in and demand for a business’ products and/or services.

Managing business to business Demand Generation involves Lead Generation tactics that engage or enlighten company leaders, decision-makers, buyers, or vendor procurement managers with supportive and nurturing content. This is an element of Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation. The concept is to garner the attention of targeted sales prospects by offering information and edification to solve problems or issues they are facing.

This is with the all-important assumption the prospect or lead and the marketer are both fully cognizant of the problem, and the marketer’s solution will provide unique insight, ideas and support in the form of usable assets.

Everyone with business to business sales goals to meet has interest in simplifying their internal processes, uncovering tricks-of-the-trade, streamlining or minimizing action items that stand in the way of progress, and sourcing content that informs and improves results. Demand Generation strategies allow you to be their new go-to source of valuable, need-to-know information.

Our own offered helpmate, take a look at these brainstormed ways to kick-off Demand Generation marketing for your products and/or services.

1.) Define and Resonate.

While product manufacturers or professional service providers often think they have a clear understanding of their clients, it is worth remembering target audiences and market segments constantly change. Annual or quarterly customer and lead category assessments, combined with competitive intelligence studies, maintain valuable intel that can be put to work in making more productive connections.

Product marketing and professional services public relations are based upon a close union between brands and their customers and clients. Knowing in-depth information about them is essential.

Defining the personas of existing and potential clients, along with the context in which they work, is critical in understanding their needs. Staying in tune with the challenges and issues they experience yields a host of ways to help them, while introducing your brand. This should already be a component to your business to business public relations strategies.

Create a scheduled content strategy to distribute information, white papers, templates, infographics, industry trends, sector-focused data charts and graphs, royalty free photos, unique ideas, newsletters, blogs, and other solutions that will engage and draw them to your business.

Self-publish, post, send, and give away these in-demand resources, and suddenly your business and brand will become a paramount resource for leads and prospects.

2.) Appeal and Delight.

If your business to business marketing strategy does not include Demand Generation, chances are the foundation of your inbound marketing is cracked. Because Demand Generation produces awareness and interest in a business’ existence, thought-leadership and expertise, the core of Demand Generation is the precursor to inbound leads.

Everyone prefers to procure professional services or purchase products from businesses and people they like and trust. When there are multiple competitive options from which to choose, buyers are going to sign contracts or place orders with those whom they believe are most appealing. If a marketable service or product holds comparative value, or even sometimes is a close runner-up, decision-makers will be led to give their business to the provider that satisfies or gratifies them the most.

Since your frequent customer and lead category assessments will reveal your audience’s needs, create tools and materials of value that provide equipage or data to address their challenges. Make a practice of this in lieu of sending continuous, overly promotional offers to your targets. Appealing resources lead to higher open-email rates than repetitive promo offers, every time.

Think of this as the phrase to cultivate and nurture new contacts or those long-time qualified leads who are just not yet ready to become a client. Give them reasons to keep your social media channels and blog in their feeds. Entertain and, yes, entice them by surprising them with the unexpected article or research study you think they may find interesting.

Use the plug-ins and prompting tools in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to follow-up. Go for the long throw, and maximize the enterprise applications focused on customer and lead management, analytics applications and marketing automation.

3.) Pain Points and Healing.  

What does a Demand Generation manager do? He or she provides an advanced and gratis healing effect to subdue the common “pains” of potential customers or clients.

Among oversight of marketing strategy, Demand Generation leaders use their skillsets to harvest and develop short-term interactions with contacts and prospects, with the goal of converting them to leads and new customers or clients. They do so by offering attention-grabbing, curative assets and informational collateral.

They do not, however, assume their target audiences are itching to buy their products and/or services. Rather, Demand Generation managers build website traffic and incoming volume of inquiries, which are established by sparking the attention and earning the trust of targeted business to business contacts.

The concept resides in the model that indirect outreach often speaks louder than the direct, at least at the onset. When it comes to being successful in B2B marketing, communicating solutions rather than product lists or service descriptions has an astounding power to build brand reputation and win new business.

Assuming your CRM program is used to add, track, monitor, and foster your prospects, the next step is to point out that you understand the pain points that keep them up at night. When you communicate your understanding of the business struggles with which they deal on a day-to-day basis, a personalized link is established.

Couple this with the courtesy of pertinent case studies, provisional theories and your mindful interpretation of the situation with high-level acuity. Act with the “4-S” principle: Support them by supplying a sampling of your serviceability; then, rinse and repeat. In many cases, they will be all ears.

4.) Reach and Rescue.   

An unequivocal way to make your Demand Generation strategy produce results is reaching targets with screen time. Find them where they dwell. Now, more than ever, the majority of business professionals seek resources, data and suppliers of products and services online.

Work with your in-house team and demand generation agency to produce informative videos that highlight trends or subject-matter from your internal thought-leaders. Convey categorically distinctive insights and relevant commentary from an analyst perspective.

Take this a step deeper to plan and host a webinar series. Envision the goal of connectivity; when it makes sense, think beyond the masses. It is wise to invite segmented contacts specific to intentional webinar topics that echo your ingenuity, and reinforce the originality of your products and/or service. Safeguard each presentation’s theme holds unparalleled value to the audience. Videos and webinars should clearly offer relatable knowledge, viewpoints and anecdotes backed by data and research findings.

Record the webinars and supplement them with audio podcasts or video podcasts, making them available online. Distribute them via email campaigns with graphically designed landing pages, inviting recipients to download them. During and following campaign deployment, maintain an easy-to-find “Ask us questions” or “Connect with us now” online chat option. Utilize social media channels and blog posts rife with link-backs to germane pages of your website.

Enlist your sales, marketing and leadership teams as well as your public relations firm to collaborate in developing real-time video, webinar and podcast strategies, as the amalgamation of concepts and angles will prove far more effective than going it alone.

Screen time is key, but combining all forms of digital marketing with creative advertising and innovative publicity is the means to a rock-hard, integrated approach.

Manufacturing these beneficial resources opens the door to reaching potentially qualified leads, and delivering them as accessible commodities offers a form of rescue for those in need of such content.

Leads and Order.

There are numerous ways to increase business to business leads. Known lead generation strategies range from optimizing content that informs and engages possible prospects, to investing in automation technology and enacting outbound and inbound marketing. All deserve careful consideration and credence as part of the process, as long as they are accomplished in order of viability.

Start with solid footing. These four proven strategies to increase sales are the underpinning and groundwork for evoking Demand Generation.

Current events today are unprecedented. The coronavirus has caused chaos for many lives and businesses in ways that are nothing short of disruptive- for many, alarming or possibly even frightening.

If you are like us, you want to stay abreast of the latest and evolving news about COVID-19. Yet, the constant barrage of coronavirus information and updates is generating a level of stress some have never experienced.

Given your first priority is safeguarding your loved ones and home, and that you have created a safe and healthy environment for yourself and those in your care, perhaps your thoughts or worries are also wandering to business. If so, you are not alone. For businesses across most industries, pressing concerns include possible effects COVID-19 could have on first and second quarters’ revenue and profitability.

While the situation is undoubtedly serious, and it requires our full-and-upright attention, we would suggest that communication focus and ingenuity are two essential elements for keeping your business relevant in these distracting times.

Whether you are a business owner, member of an executive or leadership team or a communications professional, being proactive and strategic is imperative for unifying your messaging. In times of crises, internal and external communications for your business or brand need to convey clear and consistent information.

From a marketing communications perspective, being proactive is essential to cut through the noise and maintain open lines of communication to and with your target audiences.

Digital Dividends

For those of you who are facing canceled business events at venues, trade shows, design centers, or other onsite encounters, consider contrasting your marketing engagement strategies. Start by tackling the chasm in physical networking by implementing new digital marketing tactics. Whether you have an active digital marketing program or not, these times call for a vastly more robust approach to digital and viral connections.

Digital marketing has given rise to the restructured marketing of brands, products and services by implemented digital methods. Fueled through mobile phones, devices and desktops, a surge in screen-to-screen messaging, for now, can replace face-to-face networking. Best of all, when things calm – and they will – one result can be a stronger union of digital and in-person marketing for you or your sales and marketing teams.

For the foreseeable future, online display advertising, paid and unpaid social media, video series, Google Ad Campaigns, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and, yes, sometimes Facebook Ads Manager can act as a foundation for business-to-business, business-to-consumer and business-to-community outreach.

If you’ve implemented these tools in the past, now is the time to revisit how, where and when to supplement your marketing plan with them. Increase their presence and frequency in your day-to-day promotions, or start by adding them to the marketing mix.

Then, there are automated marketing programs, inbound leads generators and thought-leadership webinars, along with other best-in-practice digital mediums. Productive marketing plans involve initiating these tactile virtual events and activities for branding, regardless of canceled onsite events and meetings. Stretch your marketing muscles with a host of highly creative digital connections, and harness the power of reaching more qualified and quantified targets. Not only will this advance your brands share of voice, you’ll gain new prospects for sales by reaching them for the first time or exponential ways.

The current necessity for increasing engagement with target audiences is also rife for developing a strategy with the newly popular social video marketing, which is a digital content and distribution method driven with the support of influencers. Influencer marketing offers one type of beneficial “halo effect,” which involves a positive perception of a product, service or brand by having relatable, similar experiences, or given the optimistic view or opinion of another. Influencer marketing serves real results for brands and businesses when deployed, monitored and managed across pertinent digital platforms and online channels.

Start by identifying top influencers in your area of marketing and business. Assess their online and digital presences, gauging which could act as trusted authorities or ambassadors of your brand. When you create your influencer program, the single-most critical factor is to stay focused on exactly how your carefully selected influencers will endorse the professional services you provide to your clients, or the products you sell to your customers. These digital communications can be utilized for blogs, social media, e-newsletters, infographics, images, photos, online testimonials, online reviews, and the list goes on.

Digital Dialogs

Having suddenly entered this era of critical mass-messaging to your important audiences, we recommend the best means of developing corporate or brand messages is to concentrate on being authentic, empathetic, professional, and clear. This is the time to follow your company’s brand and messaging standards like never before.

If you do not have brand or messaging standards, read the rest of this article and then schedule a meeting with your marketing and executive teams, or with your public relations agency. Conceptualize, draft, review, and refine a set of guidelines, copy and content for your business’ communications, spanning diverse segments within your internal and external contact databases.  

Choose prudently the ways in which to communicate online by generating an advanced schedule of timely and valuable insights your business has to offer. Information-packed e-newsletters, online educational sessions, virtual product displays, satisfied-client case study videos, and Facebook Live are only the cusp of many available digital platforms you can put to use to accomplish digital connectivity.

Your personnel can post and share the information with your customer groups, sales prospects, vendors, media members, and others. The result will yield digital engagement that replaces the in-person interactions that have been lost by canceled conferences, trade shows and networking events.

Digital Decisions: Where To Go From Here?

Digital marketing can be a persuasive instrument to expertly reach wide-ranging contacts from the comfort and safety of your desk or home office. Properly managed, it can be a marketing teams’ roadmap to incorporating digital platforms, strategies and messaging power that will maximize promotions and publicity.

But, many marketers have only yet to implement one or two facets of digital marketing, whereas the reality involves vast prospects to maximize the concept. If well planned and judiciously activated, your digital marketing communications will help you reach and win new customers or clients, as well as sell consumer products and professional services.

With the pressing current events of today, all of us are distracted and concerned. Though, most, if not all of us, are online throughout the day (and night). Connectivity and the chance to interact are just a click away.

We are rooting for you as you invoke focus and ingenuity for building and maintaining new or boosted digital connectivity with your target audiences today and in the weeks to follow. If you need professional consultation and public relations support, we are here for you. Connect with us about your digital marketing, crisis communications, publicity, or just to digitally say hello.

Be well,

The team at Eberly & Collard Public Relations

 

Why Influencers are Important for your Business and Brand

 

Credit: Lando and Associates, Landscape Architecture

Our firm’s successful execution of media relations management and integrated marketing approach often results in the feature of client projects in trade publications and across several media channels within their industry. Our services create trade and consumer zeal for our clients’ businesses. The ECPR team invites you to read and view our current online case-studies content. 

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