Here, we go into detail on the various media objectives that are used in media planning, and how they are traditionally represented as part of a sales funnel.
Awareness, Consideration, Direct Response (DR)
Media objectives are commonly grouped as Awareness, Consideration and Direct Response (DR) to help us organise and focus our media activity on specific end results. There are variations of this (e.g. Attention-Interest-Desire-Action / See-Think-Do / Leads-Prospects-Customers etc.) and you can form your own version of this, but the essence of it remains pretty much the same.
Awareness: The goal of an awareness campaign is usually to ensure brand recognition and top of mind recall of a brand or product. With completely new brands or products, the first step is education - getting people to know and understand what your brand or product is about. Once the education piece is done, the priority shifts to ensuring the audience remembers the brand or product. With more aggressive awareness strategies, the aim is to make your brand or product the first thing that your audience recalls when thinking about a particular category* (e.g. when you think sneakers, you think Nike or Air Force 1s)
*A product ’Category’ or ‘vertical’ refers to specific product groups within a particular industry. For example a category or vertical of the sports industry could be sports equipment, or sportswear, and it could even be more specific such as football boots.
Consideration: The goal of a consideration campaign is to build brand favourability and active deliberation about your brand or product. Here, your goal might be to ensure that audiences have a good impression about your brand and want to be associated with it. That way, they will choose your brand over others when making a purchase, or they will suggest your brand to someone in need of a recommendation. Further to that, you might want to get people talking, thinking or even researching about your brand.
Direct Response (DR): The goal of a direct response campaign is to elicit an action from your target audience. You want your audience to perform an action (e.g. make a purchase, fill out a survey, sign up for a subscription etc.) as a result of seeing and engaging with your ad. This is often termed a ‘conversion’ as you influenced someone into becoming your customer or taking your desired action.
The Funnel Approach
Traditionally, awareness, consideration and DR campaigns are portrayed as having a linear relationship in the form of a funnel.
The idea here is that the more people know about your brand (awareness), you have more people to influence into thinking about your products (consideration) and eventually convince a portion of them to make a purchase or take an action (DR).
A brief look into Audiences
While the funnel is a great way to organise your approach to media, we have to keep in mind that people in the real world are not so linear and predictable. You could have someone not know about your product one day and be ready to purchase it the next, or someone who has been looking to purchase your product for a month, but wakes up one morning and decides against it.
As such, while categorising audiences as In-Market or Out-of-Market based on media objective aims to simplify our desired audience, it would serve us well to keep objectives fluid to audiences.
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