Public relations practitioners understand the ways in which we communicate with our audiences have evolved exponentially. Those of us who once relied on traditional vehicles to reach our audiences have had to learn to navigate in the digital marketing sphere over the last decade – usually through trial and error.
Because more children and youth audiences are spending more time online, it’s important to include a digital strategy into a business’s marketing plan. During Lisa O’Keefe’s discussion, she stressed the importance for all marketers to understand how children and youth markets are interacting with the digital platforms from which they are seeking content.
Here are 5 takeaways about digital strategies to implement in marketing from Lisa O’Keefe’s presentation, “How MTV and Nickelodeon Networks connect brands to millennials, Gen Y and Gen Z.”
- Fragmentation: Children and youth have moved away from linear formats like television and radio, and have migrated to digital platforms such as YouTube. Because this demographic has become so fragmented, it is more challenging for marketers to reach them.
- Programmatic Marketing: The evolution of programmatic marketing has created new opportunities for marketers. This technology utilizes data sets with supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms. Programmatic advertising offers greater transparency, as compared to traditional advertising. Through programmatic advertising, advertisers can track what sites their advertisements are reaching, the type of customer looking at their ad, and any costs associated with the advertisement. The benefit is that this can be done in real-time and changed to augment the strategy or campaign effectiveness.
- Digital Platforms: There are now many new evolving platforms to reach the children and youth market such as podcasts, audio, gaming and social media.
- Messaging within Digital Platforms: It’s important for marketers to know the benefits of each digital platform available to the children and youth market and how content is created and consumed by each. Messages and content should be tailored to each platform.
- Buying Cycle: It’s important for all marketers to know where each of their messages is in the buying cycle. For example, when a marketer creates an advertisement for television or radio, it’s in the upper funnel of the buying cycle as brand awareness. Targeted digital ads, such as an email with a coupon would be down the funnel of the buying cycle as consumer activation.