A to Z of Marketing: M = Media

The A to Z of marketing is designed to give you a flavour of the multitude of components that need to be considered when marketing  a business.

This week we look at M = Media.

One of the key elements to consider when communicating to your target audience is which are the right channels and media to choose.

Get this wrong and your whole investment into a specific campaign is likely to go up in smoke.  It doesn’t matter if you have an award winning creative campaign, if it is not reaching the right audience it will not achieve anywhere near the maximum potential returns.

The first element is to understand who your target audience are.  What do they look like, what do they like doing, what papers or magazines do they read, what TV programmes do they watch, what websites do they visit, what shops so they visit etc?

Long gone are the days when you could place an advert on ITV and know you were communicating to roughly a third of the population.

Technology and media has moved at an incredible pace over the last 30 years.  I can remember the excitement of when we got a fourth TV channel (only to be extremely disappointed – with the exception of Countdown and Italian Football).

Today I couldn’t even tell you how many TV channels I can access from my home – I would imagine there is close to 100?  What’s more I rarely watch a programme when it is on – meaning I can whizz through the adverts via Sky+ (although there are suggestions subliminal marketing is at work here!).

In addition we now have more radio stations than ever before thanks to the evolution of digital broadcasting, the internet, mobile phones, apps for phones and tablets, iPods, Kindles and I don’t even need to go to the paper shop anymore to get the daily paper!

However all of this change is good news for marketing – and I don’t mean for the marketing industry I mean for you marketing your business.  You can now be more targeted than ever before.  If you want to target 18-25 year old females who enjoy clubbing – there is a selection of specific media you can use to reach them.  If you want to target sport loving middle aged men – again they are easy to reach!

The good news is that you no longer need to take a scattergun approach to marketing – if you know who you target market is you can use a sniper rifle.

One last comment on media is that now is the time to invest in marketing.  With the doom and gloom engulfing the world around recessions and national debts you can actually get a much better deal on your media buying opportunities.

Couple this with the fact that there is less noise in the marketplace (as less competitors are active) and that you can ensure the right audience is seeing your message (less wastage),  the net result is that marketing has never been more cost effective!