How Do You Build Impactful Campaigns in a Fragmented Media Landscape?

The media landscape continues to shift relentlessly, and so we must adapt. With these shifts comes a hurdle some marketers struggle with: executing a proper campaign when there are seemingly unlimited ways to broadcast your message. How do you succeed when each digital channel carries with it its own distinct capabilities, best practices and cultural norms? Further, how do you effectively blend these efforts with your offline marketing?

Is Your Challenge Really Strategy?

Let’s start with some tough love. If you feel like the media landscape is fragmented, it could be because your strategy is. Let’s review some fundamentals to keep you on track towards achieving your goals.   

Speaking of goals, what are they? If you don’t know the answer to this, and instead are hammering away at boosting Instagram followers, take a breather. One of the biggest luxuries digital marketing offers is how immediate everything is. Don’t let this tempt you into leapfrogging into an execution phase without having gone through a proper planning and goal-setting process first.

Next, determine what your primary message is going to be. Don’t let members of your search marketing team and your media team each come up with their own versions of this. That’s not to say collaboration isn’t wonderful; it is. But there needs to be a unified idea that everyone on your team can rally behind, one that customers will recognize and relate to wherever they encounter it.

Goals? Check. Message? Check.

Yes, there are seemingly unlimited channels with their own little nuances and capabilities. But if you never lose sight of your goals, your channel selection process practically will fall into place on its own. If a “best practice” suggests you should do something that conflicts with your goals, ignore it.

Be Choosy and Realistic

You can’t be (nor can you afford to be) everywhere, all the time. If you can’t commit to routinely updating your blog, don’t launch one. If you don’t understand TikTok, don’t post there. If your website needs work, don’t dump a bunch of money into buying clicks. Focus your energy on the handful of channels where you know you can move the needle, rather than diluting your message across dozens of accounts.

Also remember that we make decisions quickly — and form our impressions on brands even quicker. Treat every post and placement with the respect your brand deserves, even if it’s a seemingly innocuous tweet.

Measure and Report Only What Matters

Finally, be intentional with your data. Just as there are seemingly endless channels, there are endless things you can measure. If you can’t figure out how a given data point meaningfully threads back to those first goals you’ve established, don’t slap it into a report nobody will read. Your analysis should either serve to evaluate your efforts or inform next steps.

The media landscape will only become fragmented if you let it. Establish your goals, unify your message, judiciously select your channels, and measure what matters. Sounds a lot like simply doing great B2B marketing, doesn’t it?

This article adapted from an interview with B2B Marketing.