No, that’s not a typo. We’ve been helping our clients with media planning for 2017, and we’re radically rethinking how media works and how we make sure it works for us.
With so many media channels, you can really, really, REALLY burn through a METRIC TON of money quickly with little to no action or traction. How can you prevent that?
Reframe the way you think about media.
I’ve shot a short video explaining it because my Mom and Francis both like to watch and listen rather than read. If you prefer to read, just scroll below the video.
The 3 Kinds of 3 Kinds of Media
Hello and greetings from my back porch in Franklin, Tennessee. I hope you’re doing well. I had a couple of calls Monday: one from a current client and one from a potential new client where we were talking about media.
We talk about media and plan media in a very different way. As we have been planning our budgets for our clients for 2017, we realized we can no longer use the same taxonomy we’ve been using.
Now, several people—including me—have written about the 3 kinds of media: paid, owned and earned.
BUT… the more we’ve been researching for our book, The First Order of Business, and the more we’ve been thinking about planning out the year ahead for our clients, it’s becoming ever more clear to me that there are really 3 kinds of 3 kinds of media.
These are not independent silos. There’s some overlap between them. It’s not as though you need to independently have 9 kinds of media. Rather this is more of a construct for you to think about media in this day and age. When it’s so fragmented when there are so many options. I think it makes it actually simpler to think of it in terms of 3 kinds of 3 kinds of media. 
As you know we have The First Order of Business that we believe in strongly. It’s a foundational approach to really reframe how you think about marketing holistically. Marketing for us is any interaction you have with a customer or a potential customer. That includes advertising where you dip into your pocket and spend. When we talk about media channels at the tip of the silo, I want you to think about it differently, you have to because there have never been more channels, apps, media opportunities available to you. If you’re not careful you could spread your money too thin or hoard too much of it and really be very inefficient and very wasteful and not get your message heard.
The Concentric Circle Media Planning Strategy
Let’s look at a circle like this that goes inward.
We’ll start with the one most people know about.
We call the first concentric circle “Real Estate.” Who owns it?
The outer circle is our paid media. That’s where we reach into our pocket and pay a third party to run messaging for us.
The second circle inside in earned media. Can we deliver an experience so good that people leave us reviews on Google? That people leave us reviews on Angry’s List. That we get news media coverage because of something we’re doing that’s truly share worthy.
Then lastly the inner circle is owned media. That is our own blog, our own website, our content marketing strategy, where we need to think about developing our own content that we own or sometimes rent because we might hire a firm that helps us get our articles placed in front of the right people. If you’re you’re a marketer to car dealers doing business to business. You can get placed in Automotive News that’s a really powerful placement for you. That’s part of your owned media strategy again.
Once I show you the other 2 concentric circles you’re going to see there is some overlap. Remember these are not mutually exclusive. These are not 9 silos. It’s just a way to truly reframe the way you think about media planning, media buying and media placement.
Let’s call our second circle “Term” – or length that we will be marketing.
The purpose of our strategic marketing is always, always to be known, liked and trusted before we’re needed. When we buy broadcast often times for clients we think of it very strategically. We plan to be doing it as long as we plan to be in business. We still continue to use radio very effectively for a lot of our clients. For some clients we use television, for some clients we use Facebook advertising. We know that we’re going to be doing these things 52 weeks a year. The purpose of this marketing is to make consumers know, like and trust us before their need arises.
The second circle is tactical. Sometimes whether it’s a holiday, or something in your community, or just slow traffic. You need to turn a spigot to turn on more advertising you think very tactically. Seasons of the year are often times when we see or holidays are when we see people be very tactical about their advertising. When we’re doing media planning we want to look at our calendar and see what themes arise, what windows might arise where we would do additional tactical marketing.
The third circle of term is social. Social isn’t up to us. Social is up to the masses. People who may speak to us, who may start a conversation with us. We must always be mindful of our responsiveness, our relevance and our credibility when we’re answering people’s questions. When we as Chris Brogan once said, “Grow bigger ears” to listen more acutely to what people are saying.” How we can help by having conversations with them?
Let’s call the third concentric circle “Signal.”
Is it a terrestrial media form? What I mean by that is, is it our traditional medias of radio and television? Do we receive it through our old school channels of direct mail. Which can still be incredibly effective. Is it billboards? Is it signs on your vans? Are they the things that we bought for years? Those are our traditional terrestrial signals.
Second is digital, which would include Facebook advertising, display advertising, retargeting, pay-per-click advertising. If you’re doing any marketing on LinkedIn or through YouTube pre roll. Anything that involves a computer, a mobile phone, an iPad, tablet or other device is part of our digital strategy. Again we may not buy all of these. We want to make sure when we’re doing our planning for 2017. When you’re doing your planning for 2017 that you are thinking about all of these.
Then lastly is personal, what events are we going to sponsor? Are we going to any home shows? Are we going to have a Christmas open house at our place of business. What kind of cause marketing are we going to do? Are we going to contribute as a team to Habitat for Humanity? That counts for lost wages. That should be thought of in your marketing budget. Again as you look at your marketing budget, I want you to think about all 9 of these.
The Spreadsheet of Media Awesomeness
When we build a media plan for someone, this is just a blank spreadsheet. Let me let it load up and we’ll show it to you. When we share these things with a client we build out different tabs for personas and theme calendars. We’ll talk about those on Thursday. Tomorrow, Wednesday is our podcast episode. We’ll drop episode 4 of Ryan and I’s Funny Business podcast. Then, on Thursday we’ll talk about this events, themes, windows, and terms. \Then words and phrases that we use. Our actual marketing budget which here is blank, but we have our formulas set up.Then a couple of other things. A Wow! Moment Map we’ll talk about someday and an idea bank.
For the purpose of this discussion I just want to talk about our media plan. Let me scroll in a little bit. You can see we’ve just got in our columns on the A column we’ve got our 3 kinds of 3 kinds of media. Then I’ve got my months across, those are my periods. Those periods may be different for you. You may have 13, 4-week windows. You may think quarterly. You may think every other week. In fact when we get to Thursday I’m going to talk to you about thinking about every other week and building out from there.
Is this a lot of work? Does it require a lot of thought?
Absolutely it does. If this was easy, everyone would be doing it. It’s simple. It’s simple to understand. If you’re willing to do the work, you can boom your business and unleash your awesomeness on your market.
Hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight into how we think about marketing – particularly media strategy and media buying at the tip of our first order of business.
We think about it very differently because the world is very different. If you’re not careful, you can waste and blow a lot of money really quickly. What we’re advising you to do is just be more mindful about the fact that there’s no longer one kind of media or even 3 kinds of media. Today in this age of rapid distraction there are 3 kinds of 3 kinds of media.