Developing a Digital Media Mindset

It’s hard to remember a time where we didn’t watch TV on demand, stream music, connect with friends on social media, run our lives from our mobile phone and be able to buy almost anything online at the touch of a button any time of day or night.

The way people consume media and make decisions about what they buy has changed massively in a relatively short period of time. Consumers expect brands to communicate with them in the most relevant way across all touch-points at the right time, and to be able to purchase products as and when is convenient to them.

Digital media growth

Reflecting this changing landscape, investment in digital media and advertising is continually growing, and now accounts for the majority of overall ad spend, with the global digital ad market expected to be worth more than $600bn in 2023.

Digital media moves quickly and is constantly evolving – there’s always new technology, platforms, audiences, best practices to keep on top of, and a multitude of opportunities for marketing your brand across paid, owned and earned channels.

As a brand or the manager of digital media ad budget, it can be confusing to decipher what you should be doing, the resources you need do it well as well as understand what’s working for your brand and how your digital media investment can be as effective as possible.

All media is becoming ‘digital’

With a huge variety of digital platforms at their disposal, your target audiences can be found in a multitude of places. This fragmentation of the media & advertising space means that being able to reach your audience in one place – via a single media channel or digital platform is increasingly difficult.

As well as advertising on digital platforms, brands are also able to have an ‘always on’ communication with their audiences through their own website or social media channels.

An omnichannel approach will ensure consistency across all of your digital touch-points; if a consumer sees similar content and messages across different posts and ads, they are more likely to remember them!

The importance of a digital first media strategy

A digital first strategy means ensuring that content and messages are specifically created for digital channels, the data and audience targeting rationale is clear, and the right technology and people are in place to manage, deliver and optimise.

In short, a digital-first strategy isn’t just adapting traditional marketing to digital, it’s developed with the target audience in mind and works to ensure they experience an optimal online experience.

Guided by best practice principles

Digital offers a vast opportunity to advertisers and is hugely important, but there is a lot to consider to effectively plan, implement and measure digital advertising campaigns.

Having a digital first media strategy to guide digital media planning and evaluation, that is also underpinned by best practices for the approach for the implementation and activation will help to ensure your digital advertising is as successful as possible.

A best practice approach will ensure:

• Planning is guided by clear objectives and KPIs
• Clarity on the people & teams you need to deliver successfully
• Brand safety is maintained and quality of ads that you buy is maximised
• Data is used effectively for both targeting the right audiences and delivering audience insights as well as evaluating media performance

Our course on Digital Media will help you and your teams to navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, understand how to implement a digital first media strategy and ensure that the implementation is guided by best practices.