Managing Champagne Taste on a Beer Budget: How to Build a Sound Media Plan When Money is Tight

The issue of big dreams, little budget is a timeless tale in the media industry (ok, maybe all industries). Often times brands think they need huge budgets to be able to advertise but that is not the case. The truth is that a little scrappiness and creative thinking, pretty much any budget can work. See below for a few tips and tricks…

1. Clearly define your objectives. Is your goal to drive awareness of your brand? Traffic to site? Sales? Being very specific will help you to hone in on the media types and tactics that are most suited to achieve this goal.

2. Focus, focus, focus! You do not need to be present on all media channels al all times, so revisit your objective and consider the top one or two channels that will help you reach your goal and won’t break the bank. Paid social, search and programmatic are usually going to be the channels with lowest barriers to entry, so start there. There are lots of tactics and targeting options within those vehicles that will allow you to reach objectives across the funnel.

3. Decide whether it is more important for you to be on all the time at lower levels or on iteratively at higher levels. For example, if you are launching a new product, it might make more sense for you to focus for investment a few weeks leading up to during, and after launch rather than thinly spreading your dollars over several months. In doing this, you will make a bigger splash in the marketplace when you are “on.”

4. Don’t try to do it all on your own. When your day job is running a company, you have enough on your plate without adding on “Media Planner” to your list. It can be tempting to cut costs by taking on the media responsibilities, but you are going to save money and be better off in the long run if you enlist a professional to do it right the first time. There are different payment structures to allow you to get the service you want with a payment option that you are comfortable with.

5. Be patient. While you may see some immediate results in sales or traffic, you want to make sure that you are always keeping the long game in mind. Make sure you are not just putting out a message and then forgetting about it. For best results you should continue to foster than conversation between your brand and potential customers.

What The F*CK Is a Micro-Influencer?

If you have a pulse then you probably also have an Instagram feed. That feed is probably a mix of one million pics of your high school friend’s babies, gratuitous selfies from your newly single friends, vacation photos from boss and his partner, and celebrities hawking their collagen teas and skincare regimens. Somewhere in between all those things is another category of social media mavens, called micro-influencers. WTF does that mean? Much like social media itself, the definition is a little bit nebulous and full of room for interpretation, but in a nutshell, Micro-influencers are a group of people with higher volumes of followers than you or your best friend, but less followers than Kylie Jenner or Chrissy Teigen. The exact number of followers varies across experts, but typically between 5K-50K is a good ballpark. The key is not the volume, but rather that these influencers are extremely influential in their niches with followers that are HIGHLY engaged across social media channels. These people are more grassroots, and community based so there is a level of authenticity and relate-ability that is often lost with the mega influencers.

Why use micro influencers?

1. Scale: Rather than putting all your eggs into one celebrity basket, you can diversify by leveraging multiple micro=influencers to reach those same audiences at scale (and without the $500K/post price tag)

2. Authenticity: While this group of influencers may have smaller overall footprints, they have strong power of their group and are able to communicate

3. Flexibility: Big ticket celebrities will usually have more stringent guardrails. Leveraging a smaller scale influencer or group of influencers could give you more creative flexibility

How to Do Social Media Like a Boss

How do you make your message stand out in an increasingly crowded social media landscape? Below are a few quick tips to help you make the most informed decision for your brand.

1. Develop and use your own voice and brand personality. Social media has allowed brands to be humanized and consumers would rather do business with the brands that they like and/or align with their values. Wendy’s does a killer job of this by replying to comments in their snarky tone.

2. Make your followers give a sh*t about you. While acquiring followers is good and dandy, those followers are useless if they are just sitting there dormant. Give your followers a reason to care through engaging them through one on one communication. Reply to comments, ask consumers to share their own stories using a specific hashtag, and post content that adds value to their day.

3. Please, please, please, DO NOT plaster the same content across all social media channels. Consumers use different channels to fulfil different needs. For example, consumers tend to use Twitter to stay up to date on news, conversation, and buzz, whereas Instagram is more for quick updates and Pinterest is where they go to get inspired. You do not need to be on all channels in order to be relevant. Think about your brand and choose to focus your efforts on the channels that matter most to your audience and tailor your content accordingly.

To Bot or Not to Bot?

With the rise in smartphones comes the fall of the desire for verbal human contact. How many times have you let your phone ring only to text back the caller immediately after? If you aren’t jazzed about talking to your best friend on the phone, then you likely are way less jazzed to talk to a customer service rep from your TV provider or bank on the phone. Enter, chatbots! Messaging apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger started the chat trend and have facilitated adoption of chat from a personal standpoint and have begun using their technology for pushing out advertising. Other giants like Amazon have started to use chat technology for custom service. I recently forgot to include a quart of strawberries in my Amazon Fresh order and in a panic chatted up a representative to help make sure my missing fruit found its way into my order. How to know if you should incorporate chatbots into your business? The technology is still relatively new, so before jumping into chatbots, make sure it fits into your overall type of business and also your target audience’s consumption habits. If your product or service is targeting senior citizens and has complex instructions, perhaps bots are not the way to go yet. If you are slinging cheeky tee-shirts to millennials… get with the bots immediately!