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Blending traditional and digital media sounds like a great way to get the best of both worlds and the biggest bang for your marketing budget.
But how do you do that? Especially when all the hype is about TikTok and click this and click that. Well, buckle your seat belt because today’s guest has some answers for you.
What You’ll Discover About Blending Traditional and Digital Media:
* Clarity about the different media categories.
* The advantage of blending traditional and digital media.
* How small businesses with limited budgets can target their spending when blending traditional and digital media.
* Key questions to ask when selecting an agency to partner with when developing a media strategy.
* How to know if your marketing strategy is effective.
* And MUCH more.
Guest: Mary Ann Pruitt
Mary Ann Pruitt is the CEO and President at Mosaic Media, a collection of media buying experts and creative strategists who negotiate, purchase, and monitor advertising space and airtime. Mary Ann started her career in media by working as a senior sales executive for some of the nation’s largest media outlets. After discovering her talent and love for all things media strategy, she founded Mosaic as a way to provide niche expert experience to agencies and marketing departments across the country.
Her hard work and savvy strategy skills have led Mosaic to year-over-year growth, and has expanded her impact as an industry leader in all things traditional, digital, and everything in between. Reflecting this is a 2020 award from Cynopsis Media naming her as a Top Woman in Media.
Mary Ann has helped develop effective marketing strategies for agencies of all sizes, small businesses, service businesses, private educational institutions and legal and professional services businesses along with many others. She is passionate about passing on the experience that she has gained onto eager professionals looking for actionable marketing tips.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Marketing episodes.
Contact Mary Ann and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Also visit Mosaic Media’s website.
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BLENDING TRADITIONAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA INTO EFFECTIVE MARKETING STRATEGIES
Blending traditional and digital media sounds like a great way to get the best of both worlds and the biggest bang for your marketing budget. But how do you do that? Especially when all the hype is about TikTok and click this and click that. Well, buckle your seat belt because today’s guest has some answers for you. Stay tuned.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner. Helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom Line.
I’m your host Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got great news for you today for your marketing strategy. We have someone who’s going to have great tips for how to blend traditional and digital media, because my guest today is Mary Ann Pruitt, the CEO and president of Mosaic Media, a collection of media buying experts and creative strategists who negotiate, purchase, and monitor advertising space and airtime. She’s here to share some marketing wisdom that she’s learned from her extensive career in media strategy.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Mary Ann.
Thanks, Hanna, for having me on. I’m really looking forward to it.
I am, too, because creating an effective media marketing strategy, I think, is a real challenge, especially for small and mid-sized businesses who don’t have somebody who is dedicated to it in a full-time job and who also don’t have the large budgets that larger organizations have that can act as a shock absorber for when they make a mistake. They really need to make every dollar count so.
And media can be so confusing, right? And how do how do we do it properly and appropriately? And when you have the smaller budget, you have everybody calling you under the sun telling you that they’re the right one where you’re supposed to put your budget and it can be so confusing and it’s become so specialized.
Exactly, Exactly. And before we even get into the strategy and how to pick and choose and what to look for when people are calling you because maybe some of them are the right person to deal with. You just don’t know. Could you just give us a thumbnail so we have a common understanding about what these building blocks are? What is traditional media versus digital media? I mean, we may have a rough idea, but I’d really like to have the experts’ definition of it.
Well, and in today’s world, there’s a lot of people trying to blend them. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and we’re finding that there’s a lot of people that want a piece of a pie. And so they’re trying to find ways to blend in that manner. So traditional is your broadcast linear television, radio and your print. When it is actual print that is printed on a piece of paper, that is a traditional format of media.
You also have your outdoor out of home at times can also be traditional, but it can also be digital. So I’ll get into digital now. Digital will fall under many categories. You have your Google, Bing, Amazon, PPC, SEO that have that portion. You also have your display, your streaming video, You should not be considering TV and we can get into that in a little bit here. But that is a form of digital targeting and your OTT and your connected television. You have your social platforms that’s digital, that is considered digital as well.
And then we have what we call programmatic targeting and programmatic targeting is where you can do your OTT, connected TV, your display, your pre-roll, your native advertising, all of that, but you’re targeting a specific audience and you’re programmatically targeting it. That is also digital. This is why small businesses and executives get very confused and very frustrated very easily because there’s a lot of categories split up in very many areas.
Yeah. And you can’t do it all, at least not a small business. What is the advantage of blending traditional and digital? Let’s start there.
So we always want to look at an audience first approach. Who is our audience that we’re trying to target and where are they going to be? Each tactic of media has its strengths. Traditional television/broadcast television has a strength where one strength could be local news. But that doesn’t mean I need to buy all local news spots, high frequency, constantly putting money into that unless I am targeting a specific demographic.
But what I want to look at overall and where I need to be looking, media needs to be focused and where I’m putting any pay is where is my audience and where am I reaching them. So when we’re looking at blending them, each tactic plays a role and has its strengths. And then but we need to be okay, “Who’s my audience and what’s my goal with that audience first?” And then I can dive into how am I going to use these multiple tactics together and blend them together?
All right. Well, the audience for sure. But for a small business, an entrepreneur, a startup, we’re not talking about necessarily a franchise business that may have the benefits of the mothership, so to speak, and the advertising dollars that come to that.
But let’s say a small coffee shop on the corner or a small restaurant, maybe they have more than one location, but they’re not going to have too many beyond a certain geographic area, a hair salon, maybe two locations, three – that’s already probably stretching some people. What types of things should they be looking at? Is there a common thread as far as the small organization where they might get the biggest bang per dollar when their market is relatively local?
What we used to look at was social media for those types of tactics. But now with social media, we can’t target the same level that we used to be able to. Facebook has made some changes to platforms where we actually can’t target on the same level. And that being said, Facebook still has a strength and you probably still for geographic purposes or top of funnel purposes on a budget friendly option, that’s an okay place to be. But don’t think of it as a targeting tool.
But if I am the local restaurant that has a couple of locations, I’m in a geographical area, I may find and see the patterns of where my audience or who my customers are. I have a very specific customer base maybe of families. So let’s say it’s families with kids under the age of 15.
Then I can start looking at programmatic options with even just a couple thousand dollars, not a lot of money, even sometimes less than $1,000.00 that I can look and see what options there are and what programmatic targeting is. When I started in media, we looked at demographics where we would look and say, “Oh, my target audience is an adult, 18 to 54 years old.”
Well, that’s not going to be the way we work in media today. We have to look at it and say, “okay, my target audience is a woman that is 40 years old, that has two children under this age, that she has expendable income. I can target her income levels. I can even target her job title. I can target who she is.” So when I’m looking at small businesses, I want to make sure that you’re spending your money where you need to actually be spending your money. And that’s the key piece there.
So if you’re looking at programmatic targeting, you’re looking at an individual that you’re actually looking at the data sets of the audience in which you’re trying to target. You’re not going broad shotgun brand approach. You’re targeting your buys to that level. So you’re using tactics that may have been consumed in a traditional way in the past, but now they’re consumed digitally, meaning connected TV, streaming, out of home. These are things but now I can actually digitally target them and digitally bid them.
That sounds like a lot.
It can be. Yeah. And here’s the thing. As a small business, what’s very hard is the decision making and the overwhelm. You have so many things on your plate as an owner of a business, as a manager, of a business, as an executive of a business, you wear multiple hats no matter what, and you’ll have a rep come and tell you, you need to do this, or you’ll have a radio rep tell you, you need to come and do this or print or whatever. And at times maybe it is a good fit.
But I’m a big believer and find those partners that that work with you that aren’t just telling you what you need to know. And you can tell that they’re selling you on something. You want to look at the strategy as a whole. And when you’re looking at who are my customers, who do I want to go after? Where am I finding the most success currently? You’re going to then look and say, “okay, who are my best partners to reach me here?”
It can be overwhelming and you can actually afford to have somebody help you. You just don’t necessarily recognize that you can, meaning that for the advertising dollars that you’re spending, bringing somebody on that’s a consultant or somebody like us, that’s a partner that would bring you into that and help you with that, it’s not going to cost you more than what you’re currently spending if you’re doing it correctly. And that’s where it can be overwhelming because you’re thinking, “I can’t hire somebody to do this for me. I can’t hire to do these things for me,” where in reality it may not cost you much more than what you’re already doing to just have an expert look at what you’re doing and figure out some good tactics and plans for you to best spend your money.
All right. Well, that does sound like a good approach. If I’m an entrepreneur, how do I find the right partners? What kind of questions should I be asking in order to determine whether it’s a right fit other than, “Oh, gee, I talked to Mary Ann. She sounds like she knows what she’s doing. I’ll call her. You know that gut feel?” I mean, you want to be able to have a little bit more substance to be able to make an informed decision. And maybe another way to ask it is what common mistakes do people make when they look for a partner?
Well, you want to be able to ask certain things and certain specifics. So I’ll give you some tools. And let’s talk about programmatic. And programmatic is still at times it can be the Wild West because people don’t understand it. It’s hard to understand. I know I’m doing digital advertising. It’s an AI automated format of bidding on things, but you want to make sure that it’s human driven.
But when you’re doing that, when you’re looking for a partner and let’s look in the digital space or in the traditional space, ask the questions that you feel awkward about at times, “how are you making your money? How are you doing this? What do you get paid on? Why do you think this is the best strategy for me? Why do you think that you’re the best fit for this company? How much experience do you have in this field?”
But also then the next layer is because we have multiple media vendors now that say, “Oh, I can offer digital as well, whether that’s TV, radio, print.” Okay, ask them, are you a direct seat on a DSP? That’s a very advanced question as a small business that people don’t know to ask. And what a DSP is, is a demand side platform that is serving the ads. That means that’s where you’re bidding. Okay?
You want somebody in a partner that’s a direct seat, not somebody who’s a diluted seat where there’s multiple layers between you and your ad spend. That’s a very advanced question. But if somebody can’t tell you that they’re a direct seat, then they’re not a good partner. You don’t want them. You want somebody else. If they can’t answer for you what experience they’ve had with your industry, question it a little bit.
If they ask them what their PPC experience is, what are their search word experiences are? How are they doing? Search word. Ask them if they understand top funnel, bottom funnel. You as the business owner may not understand top funnel/bottom funnel, but they need to understand that and they need to explain it to you. What does that mean? So these are all things that as a small business that none of us frankly went to school to learn. And we’ve all had to learn and adapt over time.
And because marketing has evolved significantly in the 25 years that I’ve been in it, media has just beyond evolved past that. It can be so overwhelming and confusing. So you want to have these questions that you ask when somebody is cold calling, you ask them an awkward question. It’s okay to ask it. Those are your dollars being spent.
Well said. Because you’re right, it is your dollars. And I love the advanced question because then they’re going to think you know more than them unless they can really answer it. That is precious. Exactly. That is great. Well, you know, I think one thing that may be challenging because people don’t always know how things work behind the curtain. And you’ve pulled it back a little bit.
It’s one thing to figure out how to spend and where to spend, but how do you know it’s effective? I mean, yeah, people want more people coming into the salon. They want people buying more of their products online if they do have an online store. But what’s the best way to measure it? Because the first advertisement isn’t necessarily going to bring somebody to the bottom of the funnel. It’s going to make them open their wallet and share their credit card information.
Right, Right. So there’s multiple approaches. That’s a big, big question. It seems like a small question, but it’s a very big question. And what we have to look at, okay, what are the goals of our campaign when I’m spending something. When you’re a larger brand, we work from the smallest of the small to the largest of the large.
And when you’re a larger brand, sometimes you just want brand recognition. Sometimes you just want name recognition and that’s okay and that’s a top funnel approach. But when you’re a small guy, every dollar you don’t always want just the brand recognition. You need the brand recognition for the bottom of the funnel to happen, but you want the bottom of the funnel to ultimately be your goal, right?
So how do I attribute this back to a sale? Because if I can’t attribute this back to a sale, then I don’t think I can attribute it back to anything really, right? So in programmatic and in display and in digital specifically, there are things that we can do that are attribution tagging or conversion tracking where we can actually track it back to the website that something’s happened. If somebody has clicked on that ad, that it went to the website and how long they were on the website, and we can look at it in that sense.
It’s funny to me now, but we’re back to QR coding when it comes to television ads or OTT and streaming. If you’re a restaurant, it’s a matter of check out our new menu and put a QR code even on the ad, but people are doing it more and more and we see consumers utilizing that. So that’s an option.
But you are looking and then in programmatic as well, we also look at what is the multi-device attribution as well. So if I’m in a house, you have to think multi-device structure. If I’m in a home, that it’s very rare that a home has only one device where they’re watching media and consuming advertising on or consuming any type of entertainment.
So whether it be my television that I’m watching connected TV on and OTT while I’m watching TV, maybe I’m on my phone, surfing social media, or maybe I’m looking at something completely different on my phone and I’m searching up something. Then we want to make sure we have cross-device channeling as well. And we’re utilizing those tools to be able to in that household and that IP target that I’m able to tag it back.
So how can I then attribute that ad? If that ad has been seen by me and then attributed. Hanna, I do want to give one specific example for restaurants. So in programmatic there and actually this is anybody who has a location. I guess this could work for salons. This could work for coffee shops. In digital and in programmatic, we have what’s called blueprinting. If we add blueprinting to it, we can see if somebody’s actually looked at your ad, clicked on your ad, and then we mark your location.
When they then walk into your location, we can attribute that sale back to that ad. We know that that ad worked because we were able to tag that ad with their devices and with their device, and then they walked into your location. So blueprinting is a very specific tactic to use if you have a physical location. And it’s a great tactic for small businesses because you can also blueprint your competition, you can also blueprint various things if they walk into your competition location and then you serve them your ads later.
So there’s lots of opportunities and things in today’s media space and digital space. But that’s one example I like to give back for attribution.
Well, that is an amazing example. I got to tell you. And the first thing that’s flashing in my mind is privacy. Oh, my gosh.
Yeah. Well, and that’s why we’ve seen the changes that we have in social media. That’s why social media is not a targeting tool anymore. But a lot of times what’s happening, we’re operating, starting to operate into a cookie-less world. But people are either operating and their devices of letting they’re opting in or whether or not they have the privacy and people are knowledgeable.
The younger the demographic and the target audience that you’re going after, the more open they are with their data. They’re like, whatever, it’s fine. And we do see that evolution taking place.
Very interesting. That’s really fascinating. When people are coming up with their strategies and if they don’t have a partner that can hold their hand and guide them through some of these things that you’ve discussed and you’ve covered a lot and I’m really appreciate your doing that. What are some mistakes people make when they do it on their own?
It can be very expensive. So I’ll start with Google. A lot of people will try to do their Google search words and their PPC by themselves and on their own, and they’ll watch a YouTube video on how to do it.
And I find so many business owners that when they do that, they come to us and they’re like, I’ve just wasted so much time and now I haven’t made these follow-up phone calls or I haven’t done these other things that I need to do or I haven’t done the kitchen operation change that I need to do or this week’s scheduling or any of those things because I wasted eight hours trying to figure out what keywords to put in.
So it’s okay to ask for help and ask experts for it. It probably will not cost you as much as you think it will. So that’s the number one mistake that I see, is that business owners think, “Oh, it’s just going to cost me so much more money to have somebody and have a professional help me.” That’s not necessarily true.
It’s okay to reach out and find ways for and see if that’s something that you can do. But you will find that the dollar amount that is put on you as the owner and the value that you have of your time that actually you can afford it more than you realize.
But Google AdWords, and PPC, that’s a big one that people try to do on their own and they just get frustrated. Social media can be the exact same thing with the restrictions and various things on privacy with social. It can become very difficult to do, meaning that you just get frustrated. You don’t want to do it anymore. You’re like, “I don’t even know if it’s working. I don’t know if I’m doing them right” and you get irritated.
Another big mistake that we find is when somebody builds a relationship with somebody that is selling them something and they are great at selling you something, but it’s not necessarily the right thing for you to do or you’re doing it just because they told you to or you don’t really have a plan. So I would say number two.
So number one is you think you don’t have the money to have a professional help you when most likely probably it’s not going to cost you as much as you think. But number two is you don’t have that plan to follow. And that’s where, again, having somebody help you or at least you outline what goals do I have with that. If you go down a path, you will waste more money going down a shotgun approach or an approach of,
“Yeah, no, this person seemed nice and I’m going to buy this or I’m going to try this on my own, or I’m going to try this and try this.” And that’s where you run into a problem. So if you don’t have a plan.
And then the third big thing that I see as a mistake is you don’t do it long enough. You’ll do your PPC for a week or two and go, “That didn’t bring me anything.” You’ll do radio for two weeks. “That didn’t do anything for me.” You do print for a couple more weeks, that didn’t do anything for me as opposed to following that plan that we talked about. You then can outline and say, “okay, as I’m going through this plan, this is an investment that I’m putting into my company.
“What can I look back over a 90-to-120-day period to see what lessons I learned from that.” As opposed to doing it for two weeks at a time, a month at a time, and then changing course. You really need a solid 90 to 120 days of data to make sure that you’re doing it correctly to even see what things are working and what things aren’t.
So I know that’s a lot of information, but that’s a lot of mistakes that we see.
It’s a lot, but it’s so important because this is how people get the message out in addition to word of mouth. I mean, that’s very powerful and important, but everybody wants to do a little something more and it’s like, “well, where do I start?” Oh, I’m on Facebook, I’ll do Facebook. Or like you said, reaching out to Google. And so, you know, these three things, I can definitely picture them happening.
People try to do the pay per click stuff on their own through Google. Figure it out. They don’t really have a plan. It’s a shotgun. Well, let’s try it. Throw the spaghetti against the wall, see if it sticks and not doing it long enough. That really I think drives home the point. In the time that we have left here is what else do you want people to know about blending traditional and digital media?
The big thing is if you own a company, you own a business, you have to be doing some form of outreach of some sort. It doesn’t have to be the biggest budget. It doesn’t have to be anything gigantic. But you need to be thinking about what is your paid strategy.
If you have customers and you are trying to reach customers in any way, whether that’s in business-to-business, if that’s business-to-consumer, it doesn’t matter what vertical you’re in, you do need to find a way to have a strategy for how you’re reaching customers and keeping your brand alive. Even if you are a long-established company, in today’s world, you have to have some form of ads, and they don’t have to be seen as ads.
I mean, people don’t necessarily think of them as an ad, but you need to have some sort of paid strategy. When I started in media, I think they told me, like the average American consumer had about 50 ad impressions a day. Now we’re in the tens of thousands of ad impressions a day. If you’re not reaching your customer, your competition is, they are trying to get to them somehow.
You don’t have to have the biggest budget. You just need to be doing something. And it’s okay to reach out to a professional to help you. So when you’re blending them, if you’ve ever done any kind of paid media in the past, start looking at digital. If you’ve ever done anything traditional, start looking at digital. If you’ve ever done anything digital, look at some tactics of what you can do traditional.
It’s funny because a lot of times we think, “Oh, traditional that’s dead, there’s no way it’s going to work.” But there’s some tactics, things like ads on a pizza box. That’s a traditional platform. That’s not a digital platform. That’s a traditional way of getting something to somebody’s. Mail, that’s a traditional platform. It’s not a digital platform.
But can I use a digital tactic to then track that mail? I sure can. So it’s how do we work these together? Start thinking through what you’re currently spending your money on and recognize most likely that there’s an area for you to be talking to your customers in a different way.
Outstanding. Outstanding. This has really been great. Mary Ann, I appreciate your time and the way you’re helping people figure out how to blend traditional and digital media to make the most of their marketing strategy and truly let it be effective.
If you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Mary Ann and her work at Mosaic Media, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
I know that you’ll really want to look at that transcript because it’s going to have all those questions that she rattled off about how to go finding a partner, what you need to ask, and especially if you’re walking or driving as you’re listening to this, there’s no way that you’re going to be able to write these down or remember them all. And they’re really important.
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back in two weeks with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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