How to Find the Best Marketing Mix: The 2024 Guide
As advertisers look at the rest of 2024 and beyond, the need to redefine their approach to the marketing media mix is becoming clearer. Growth during high inflation and an unpredictable economic environment requires a strategy more focused on retention and new customer acquisition. This is driving changes in full-funnel strategies, as well as in reporting and performance tracking.
While many plan to maintain media spending levels, most ad budgets are under scrutiny. Retailers are finding it difficult to evaluate their campaign effectiveness and are looking for efficient and reliable strategies. In this article, we will discuss how to create the “right” marketing media mix for you to hit the targets highlighted by today’s challenges.
Right media mix – DOOH as a focal point
Smart use of data with a proper media mix, creatives, messaging, and retargeting could raise conversion rates by up to 45%. As a result, a full media mix drives purchase intent, with Digital out-of-home (DOOH) playing a strong role. It is important to consider both the audience and the scale of the business when creating a successful media mix. Let’s take a national retail chain and a local boutique as examples.
For local businesses, marketers should focus on audiences specific to the community in that area. Digital out-of-home (DOOH), in combination with geofenced CTV campaigns, can yield incremental visits to the store at reasonable rates. Both channels present relatively low costs of entry both in terms of media placement and creatives, empowering mid-sized businesses to stand out from the competition and punch well above their weight. The data acquired during such campaigns may help with retargeting via other channels such as the web and in-app, extending the customer lifecycle.
A chain with locations across multiple DMAs must target a more diverse audience and maintain a consistent brand image. Such companies operate with larger budgets, introducing multiple touchpoints, which may create challenges for reporting and attribution. To solve this issue, marketers are increasingly turning to digital channels, engaging their ability to target and measure audiences effectively, along with the precision offline channels seem to lack.
By using curated audience segments, marketers can target potential customers actively searching and reading about their products based on the company’s ideal customer profile parameters and first-party data on the existing customer base. In addition to promoting geographically relevant inventory, advertisers can highlight local retail outlets in their creatives.
Audience-based targeted CTV campaigns and geo-targeted DOOH campaigns in areas close to physical stores are appropriate strategies to start with. Marketers can implement retargeting through web and in-app ads for potential customers who visited the retailer’s website or physical store but did not complete a purchase. Parallel digital audio campaigns can also emotionally appeal to the audience, driving an aided brand recall rate of 71%, (according to Nielsen). Through engaging experiences, digital advertising channels provide discovery opportunities and establish shoppable connections.
Building a successful marketing media mix will help businesses reach their target audiences through a comprehensive set of digital channels, and allow for more tailored, effective campaigns. Modern advertising platforms help clients optimize their campaigns with extensive and easy-to-digest analytics. Marketers can compare the performance of multiple campaigns by overlapping metrics graphs to spot correlations between their effectiveness and benchmark time periods of a chosen campaign.
Omnichannel is the future
As described above, combining different mediums strongly affects a marketing campaign’s success. For that reason, marketers have begun to focus on omnichannel approaches to expand their media presence and connect with customers on a deeper level. This simultaneously achieves two goals: strengthening brand exposure and introducing the audience to your unified narrative.
But what exactly sets omnichannel apart from different strategies?
The Difference
In the above example, DOOH and CTV are combined to boost store visits. With both mediums’ popularity and great impression numbers, this strategy allows us to engage as many customers as possible. However, these campaigns may not necessarily be integrated with one another, with the mediums serving just as reach expansion tools. This is the definition of a multichannel approach.
However, marketers can take things one step further by unifying the campaigns to create a seamless experience for the customer. This can still be done with as little as just two channels or stretched across every available medium; the focus is not just reach, but the customers’ journey. Omnichannel strives to reduce digital friction between mediums. For example, a DOOH impression may be followed by a personalized mobile ad that links directly to your website. Instead of a wide net, a variety of channels serve as one big funnel for your brand, familiarizing new customers with your product and providing existing ones with an exciting path.
The Importance
Omnichannel takes full advantage of programmatic advertising. From the customer’s perspective, it anticipates their next step and provides the means to take it. For the advertiser, it provides insight into customers’ relations with their brand, giving access to valuable metrics and data to reinforce their strategy.
The latter interests us the most: in omnichannel, all data is synchronized, meaning that advertisers can study customers’ lifecycles to highlight weak and strong points of their strategy and mediums. This may reduce marketing costs, boost retention rates, and increase revenue.
Targeting becomes simpler as well –with modern tools, customers can be targeted depending on their gender, age, interests, and even location – up to their postal code. This makes the omnichannel approach excel in building a consistent customer relationship for advertisers who wish to engage them. Setting up multiple channels to target the same audience in the same location greatly intensifies brand exposure, making it omni-present.
Consequently, omnichannel help reduce churn rates. With sustained exposure to the brand, customers are less likely to forget about their shopping carts and your products. It increases the lifetime value of each customer and helps you sell more products or services.
End of the line
While this strategy takes more time to build, considering the effort to consolidate all of your campaigns in a sound way, it is more than cost-effective. If taken as a standard of operations, omnichannel easily beats single-channel and often overtakes multichannel both in terms of reach and engagement.
Conversational marketing: Connect With Customers
Consumers have always preferred a personalized approach and human interaction to blanket general advertising. With the appearance and continuous improvement of neural networks, granting them that experience through AI automation and machine learning is now possible.
With this technology, you are seemingly giving control over to customers; with no intrusive phone calls or emails, they choose to interact with your brand themselves. This freedom of choice adds to the sense of purpose for customers while providing instant gratification without much input from your side.
However, conversational marketing is more than just chatbots and AI; let us dive further into customer relationship reinforcement.
A human touch
For the conversational approach to work, your brand needs an authentic and empathic persona that customers want to engage with. Before moving on to artificial intelligence, make sure to research your audience and see what points are important to them.
One good example is taking stances on social and political issues. Gen Z, known for being the most digitally active generation, takes these issues very seriously, with 70% of them being involved in some kind of social cause. For them, a company that reinforces their beliefs becomes more personal and approachable. For that reason, the first step to empathizing with your audience could be taking a stance with them. Of course, each generation has its own pressure points, so research your targets before taking action.
Following that is personalization. 66% of customers expect companies to deeply understand their needs and expectations; we need data for that to happen. Examples could include cart abandonment rates, visited pages, and times when customers opened a live chat. Data like this helps create a sequence that caters directly to customers’ needs and makes personalized recommendations.
With a strong base of data to pull from and a consistent brand persona, you can move on to the next step, which is messaging.
On humans and AI
ChatGPT continues to make waves on the Internet, and marketers are taking notes. This technology is already able to fully imitate a human conversation and provide useful pointers. What’s more, chatbots can solve most routine requests, making it seem like human input is no longer a necessity in conversational marketing.
However, that is wrong; while neural networks are powerful additions, 63% of customers still prefer to chat with a real human. Because of that, companies that are dipping their toes into AI chatbot territory need to be wary and find an equilibrium between AI and human support.
Still, when it comes to automated chatting, neural networks have several major advantages over human support. One of them is instant responses for customers expecting an immediate answer to their questions. AI is the only tool that provides a solution to this challenge. Additionally, modern chatbots can drive up conversion rates by 40% and even increase sales.
The most powerful point, though, is data collection. Artificial intelligence can manage numerous chats at once, each of which is a valuable dataset to learn more about your customers’ struggles and preferences. This can be used to reinforce your marketing campaigns and help your AI solve problems more efficiently.
With a combination of human and machine input, conversational marketing becomes a powerful tool for both attraction and retention. The only thing to be wary of is the overuse of chatbots; it’s best to leave complex queries to humans, after all.
Get ready for the disposal of third-party cookies
Google intends to get rid of third-party cookies in the second half of 2025. While this is still more than a year away, some advertisers are already searching for alternatives, while others are simply trying to squeeze out the most while they can.
Third-party cookies were always an excellent choice to gather data on customers; however, the method used was deemed too invasive, and by the end of 2025, advertisers will be left only with first-party cookies. However, these are still providing valuable data, and the landscape of advertising is not going to change drastically.
This is the perfect moment to reevaluate data-gathering methods. As Google strives to support ethical and GDPR-friendly alternatives, advertisers will benefit from exploring options that keep users’ privacy in mind. For now, first-party cookies seem like the only obvious option; however, some marketers are planning to invest in email marketing software as an alternative.
Contextual marketing seems to be on the rise, too; without a way to predict customers’ interests, the best option is to show them ads that correspond to the content they are currently viewing. The development of AI language models may positively affect this type of marketing as well, since they can help decipher the context of the page automatically.
There are other options to be explored, including device fingerprints or Google Topics, which are Google’s alternatives to cookie tracking. For now, there are enough ways to still collect user data – making plans to switch from third-party cookies to be ready for 2025 a priority
Conclusion
With all of that said, there is still no universal approach to creating the best marketing mix. One thing is certain: knowing your customers is the first step to achieving that. Regardless of whether it is geo-targeted DOOH campaigns, an omnichannel experience, or a robust contextual marketing strategy, it may fall flat without first learning about your audience.
Luckily, all of the above provide their own valuable insights alongside their primary goal of engaging customers. It’s best to utilize all of these strategies to gather data and reinforce your marketing campaigns; after all, programmatic advertising is the future.
But most importantly, do not forget to prepare for Google’s changes to cookies to avoid unpleasant surprises in 2025!
