The Power of an Integrated Media Mix
In today’s fragmented landscape, an integrated media mix is more important than ever. How and where people consume media has evolved drastically — and with new channels emerging seemingly daily, this trend is sure to continue.
To reach your audience effectively, it’s important to tailor your media planning strategy to their ever-changing behavior. That means you have to find the right balance of digital and traditional media to ensure your brand’s messages resonate and break through the clutter.
The integrated media mix, explained
The strongest media plans — for any budget — include an integrated media mix to help reach people at different points in their daily life where the message will resonate. To do this, you must know your audience and their media consumption habits, and you must reflect that knowledge in the tactics you use to reach them.
Pairing digital and traditional tactics creates a more holistic and impactful media campaign. While digital channels often lead in conversions, they aren’t always the first touchpoint. Traditional media can break through digital clutter to reach potential customers outside of narrow targeting parameters and capture attention in unexpected ways. Creative offline executions can also surprise and delight consumers. In a marketing campaign to raise awareness of quality programming available with Rhode Island PBS, for example, our media plan included pizza boxes (to grab attention during at-home movie nights) and coasters at local restaurants throughout the state.
Each medium (search, social media, podcasts, outdoor ads, online video, radio, etc.) has its own strengths and transmits the creative message differently to interact with people in unique ways. Choosing the right medium depends not only on your audience, but on your messaging and on your need to make an emotional impact. Video elicits strong emotions through sight, sound, and motion. Static ads (like those commonly used in display and paid search) are more limited for emotional storytelling, but can be strong drivers of awareness and engagement. As you create your integrated media plan, work with a full-service agency to avoid silos and disconnects between media buying and creative execution, and to ensure that the two work hand in hand.
The importance of brand awareness
Awareness is an essential precursor to conversions. After all, people can’t convert if they’re unaware of your brand. But increasing brand awareness should always be one component of a broader advertising campaign, not the sole focus.
Strong awareness goes beyond name recognition to communicate your brand story and build trust. It also broadens reach to prospective customers and influencers beyond your known target audience. Through our work across verticals, we’ve seen that awareness initiatives work best as ongoing campaigns rather than short-term pushes. Maintaining this baseline presence sets brands up for success when specific conversions are needed. Consistent investment like this builds brand equity, allows quicker recovery after pauses, and is essential to staying top-of-mind in competitive industries.
Measurement and attribution
While it can be challenging to measure awareness directly, a lift in awareness can often be tied to more tangible KPIs, like an increase in brand searches or website traffic. Media mix modeling is also emerging as a potential solution for valuing these awareness tactics.
Whether you’re tracking applications, inquiry form submissions, or another key action as your campaign success metric, there are often multiple touchpoints that contribute to conversions. This makes attribution complex, especially in situations that have long consideration cycles. To have a holistic view of the user journey, it’s important to track any micro-conversions people complete along the way, and to check in-platform ad engagement against any overarching campaign goals. Paid search is often the top driver of conversions in Google Analytics (GA4), but it’s important not to discount tactics like social media, display ads, audio, television, or out-of-home tactics that may have helped spur the search.
An integrated media strategy helps your brand meet consumers “where they are” across multiple channels. Whether your media mix includes two tactics or 10, to be effective it should seamlessly integrate with creative development, PR, analytics, and, of course, your strategic business direction.
