Moving from Insights to Action: How to apply your new segmentations to media buying

If audience segmentation answers the ‘who?’, then media buying strategy answers the corresponding ‘where?’. The two go hand-in-hand; segmentations instruct brands who buys their products, and media buying allows brands to reach those consumers wherever they’re hanging out – whether online or out of home.

If you’re reading this article, you’ve hopefully already conducted consumer segmentation for your brand, or are well on your way to doing so. If you’ve not considered audience segmentation yet, or don’t know what it entails, go back and read our article on the many potential uses for segmentation data, here.

Historically, it has been challenging to map consumer segmentations directly to media planning and buying. Your consumer segmentations might include a mix of behavioural, demographic and psychographic traits, but rarely provide a detailed picture of each segment’s media consumptions habits. To turn your segmentation insight into action, you need to know which media channels your segment consumes, how often, who with, on which days and times, and even how different media makes them feel.

While media planning and buying tools such as TGI and Touchpoints can provide detailed media consumption information, bespoke segments can rarely be replicated exactly in such tools. However, with Attest, you can recreate your bespoke segments exactly, and then deep dive into these segments media habits in detail, helping you make decisions on where to invest marketing budget efficiently.

How does segmentation inform media buying?

Skipping ahead to the end of the campaign creation process (for more information on how Attest can help you iteratively test your creatives and prepare them for launch, click here), you’ll be equipped with a series of campaigns tailored to your market segments. Now what should you do with them? How can you make sure your hard work in producing creative that speaks to the right people actually reaches the right people? This is where tying audience segmentation and media buying together comes in.

TV media:

TV trends can gather and lose prominence at such speed that keeping up with the latest hot topics can give media buyers whiplash.

Just think about those 8 precious midsummer weeks in 2018, where the large majority of the UK population was glued to the sofa and tuned into Love Island, every single day. A trend strong enough to grip the nation came and went in a matter of weeks.

While barb and TGI data has classically been used to determine marketing budgets, they can often be outdated or inflexible when applying this data to precise market segments, as they’re based mainly on demographic details rather than the other elements that offer a holistic picture of your consumers.

You can never very accurately predict which new TV series or special will take off, or even which demographics it will appeal to, but you can respond in record time, with Attest.

You can use Attest to rapidly determine which TV channels your key demographic segments are tuning into, and also where their interest is waning so that you can cut spend from trends on a downwards trajectory.

Out Of Home (OOH):

Knowing key demographic details about each of your segments, such as their geographic location, will go some way to determining the locations for your OOH media campaigns.

For example, if you know one of your segments travels on the metro, and lives in Manchester, then Out Of Home metro advertising would be a good way to reach them. If another segment travels to work by foot, bus or bike and lives in London, then OOH bus stop adverts would be more applicable.

Keeping up-to-date with the journeys your segments take on a regular basis can help more precisely pinpoint the most lucrative opportunities for media. You can uncover daily journeys such as their commute, other regular journeys taken in a typical week, plus unique trips taken less frequently.

Digital:

Digital campaigns are much easier to adapt at short notice than either TV or OOH media, so segmentation surveys can be run more frequently to optimise your strategy, allowing you to quickly cut focus on areas that are underperforming.

The next steps…

Consumer segmentation allows you to customise your marketing campaigns, and once these are signed-off, you’ll need to make sure they’re reaching the consumers that they’re designed for.

Don’t discount how valuable it is to treat segmentation as an ongoing practice: checking in with your custom segments regularly empowers you or your team to be more flexible with media strategies, personalise campaigns on the go, and redistribute budget to channels that are over-performing. Not only can you dive deep into the media habits and preferences of your segments, but you can follow up regularly and identify when key shifts take place.

Use the results of these surveys to inform which campaigns you serve in which channels, when and where, to be sure to reach the consumers that matter with the messaging that’s tailored to them.

To learn more about consumers and profile your segments, get in contact with Attest today.

Thank you to The Big Thinks for advising on this article. The Big Thinks have carried out a number of qualitative and quantitative research projects for start-up and scale-up clients using Attest, including customer segmentation.