Episode 6: Amplify your Inbound strategy with digital media advertising
Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2024 4:53 am
Investing in paid advertising on digital media can amplify the reach of your content and help you reach the right audiences, multiplying your results.
Table of contents
Investing in paid advertising in doctor database package digital media can take your content to another level, amplifying its reach, reaching the right audiences and multiplying your results. We will talk with our friends at La Mediática about how to make digital media advertising work for conversion, in a new chapter of #InboundDesdeAdentro
No time? Listen to the interview here
Read the transcript here
EE: Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of Inbound from within. Today I am in the offices of La Mediática with its CEO Julián Galeano, who has opened the doors to us to tell us, from his experience, how to make an investment strategy in digital media. So, together with him, we are going to talk about how we can plan a media strategy, how to design a conversion funnel using ads and many more topics related to this world of inbound with digital advertising. Julián, welcome to our program, thank you for opening the doors of the office to us.
JG: Well, thank you very much. I am happy to answer any questions or doubts you may have. The world of digital strategy is not simple; it sometimes seems simple but there is a lot of complexity behind it, so questions are welcome.
EE: I'm interested in talking a lot about what you mentioned, about the complexity behind it, and we're here to do this in a practical way. How about we start by talking about how to plan a digital media investment strategy? What's the first thing a client who wants to invest in media needs to know?
JG: I'm going to start with the obvious, but it is often overlooked. It does not end up being the duty of strategies. So you have to necessarily start with the objectives. The objectives will determine the tools.
that you are going to use later in the media, will also determine the data tools and will determine the way in which you are going to buy the media, so having a clear objective is the main thing to be able to start working in digital media.
EE: Now, when planning objectives, you not only have to take into account the number of clients you want to generate through this campaign, but you also have to design a funnel or a kind of funnel to reach those clients, because what I see is that many people think that "ok, if I invest so many thousands of soles and place ads, people will click and buy from me" and that is not necessarily the case.
JG: That is an expectation that cannot be met with digital media. Every person in every category has a decision process, and that process has to be understood from the media point of view at all its points. I have to permanently open the conversion funnel and I have to be feeding it every day with new people who are opening their decision process. Depending on the category, they will solve it that same day or several weeks later. Then I have to understand the people who are already trying to solve questions and develop a decision. And finally, I do have to take care of the people who are already ready to come in and buy.
But it is an expectation that digital media cannot meet: trying to push media presence only to people who are ready to solve.
To start, you need data, to have identified those people. If you have no way of identifying those people, or knowing which ones are ready to buy, a good part of the advertising that is put on the air ends up being wasted. So you necessarily have to attend to the people who start the process, start marking them, which is the main advantage that the digital world has and allows you to follow up until you end up closing the purchase process with that person .
Subscribe to the chapters of Inbound from Within
English: EE: You talk a lot about people and this has to do with the definition of the buyer persona , so if we don’t fully understand who we want to target: what their purchasing behaviors are using data, what their interests are, their needs, their concerns, we can’t design a purchasing journey that allows us to achieve the objectives that we have defined, or that we are thinking of achieving. So I think a good starting point is to have a clear definition of your buyer persona, to clearly define the purchasing behavior, to define the media where this person is found because sometimes many of us think “well, let’s make ads” and we start shooting everywhere and that’s not the smartest thing to do.
JG: Correct. Here at La Mediática, for example, what we do from that point of view is not to buy media, what we buy are audiences. If that audience is on Facebook today, we will be on Facebook; if that audience is on Google tomorrow, we will be on Google; if that audience is on El Comercio the day after tomorrow, we will be on El Comercio; if it is on Spotify later, we will be on Spotify. Where to find that audience is what will determine the media mix. We cannot predetermine it in advance and pigeonhole investments through that type of decision: I have to spend so much here and so much here. The smartest way to do it is to put together a pool and have that pool run in the media where it needs to be run, where it will find the people who are ready to buy or who are moving forward in their buying process.
EE: Correct. Many people believe, or many brands believe, that the entire audience is ready to buy at the moment they are in the purchasing process and we fall into making our entire communication strategy with digital advertising thinking that everyone wants to buy from us, and we start making ads only for products. But we don't go two steps back in the journey, where there are people who may be considering solutions or who are even just being presented with a problem but without any commercial intention. How does content help cover those other stages of the journey?
JG: Well, content helps me identify people who are beginning the purchasing process, and from a technical point of view, what we do is target those people. The most powerful tool that the digital world has today is retargeting: being able to recontact people who have shown interest or who have shown in some way, through content consumption, that they are beginning the purchasing process. If I try to put all my digital advertising with the expectation of reaching only people who are ready to make the purchase, that is, I only do sales pushes, a good part of my communication, no matter how well I try to segment it, will go to waste. The best way to do it is to put together the purchasing line that takes advantage of the data I have collected from the people who are consuming that content.
EE: Interesting, so remarketing is a very good way to understand where a person is in order to impact them with content that helps them reach the next stage of the process.
JG: Exactly, that is the job of retargeting, helping the person to evolve in the purchasing process. Going from one stage to another until they reach a point where they are determined to buy.
EE: Now, what I also notice a lot in digital is that a lot of people are ignoring ads. What is the key to making sure an ad is not ignored?
JG: Well, no matter how well you segment, you're always going to have people you reach who aren't going to be interested in that ad at that moment. What increases the probability of attention and interest in the ad? That you start with data that indicates that that person has some probability of being interested in the product. Again, we come back to the fact that we have to have the entire purchasing process, we have to open the purchasing process permanently through content and not necessarily only through advertising. The moment we do that, we start to have more determined people, less waste, and lower rates of people who don't see my ads or who simply avoid them.
EE: Let's talk a little about the different advertising strategies that exist: there are advertising strategies for branding and there are advertising strategies that are more focused on performance, on conversion. What is the difference? What criteria should I have to combine both? Where should I go? 100% performance or combining branding? Combining both? Tell us a little about your experience in that regard.
JG: They are two very different worlds, but they are two complementary worlds. Necessarily complementary. Having the expectation that I put together a good performance campaign, I have the right investment, the right ads to do performance and that I am going to achieve results in that way is an expectation that cannot be achieved, because people need to be familiar with the brand.
EE: Especially if you're talking about new brands, right? For example, no one is going to buy from you just because they saw an ad.
JG: That's correct. It's also relevant for well-known brands, because you necessarily have to be on people's radar. Be part of the set of brands that people make decisions about so that you don't kill yourself later on through price. The work of content and the work of branding is to build values for the person, attributes, so that they know them so that when they are going to make a decision regarding a category, they have some brands on their radar. And secondly, they know that these brands are valuable, not only because they are cheap, so that is the work of branding. You necessarily have to have a combination of branding so that performance is facilitated and you have very good conversion costs.
EE: In my experience, what I see is that there are many models that businesses are using that are only focused on audience purchases, and I believe that this model is not sustainable in the medium and long term. There is more and more competition to capture the user's attention with ads that end up being too invasive, and acquisition costs are also increasing because there is more competition, more bidding, and because it is only about impacting people by believing that they all want to buy.
So I think that model is wearing thin, and if you don't combine it with an inbound model where you work on content, where you distribute that content intelligently using your media investment and you don't work to build your own audience, it's a mistake.
In addition, there are times when the buyer is in a consideration or awareness stage, and then you educate him and take him to the sales process, which will end up not being profitable for the business. What do you think about this?
JG: I'm going to jump a little bit to another topic, which is the topic of data. When we don't do inbound, when we don't have a data strategy of our own and we're only using the data that Facebook gives us, the data that Google gives us, the data that some media can share with us that very few outside of these two share in order to work with them, we are necessarily subject to a lot of overlapping of users. For example, in universities, when I work on segmentations through Facebook tools, a person ends up qualifying for careers as far apart as design, then marketing, then accounting, and then even medicine because, despite the fact that they have a lot of data, behind it it's not necessarily exclusive from one user to another. What inbound allows me to do is to start adding layers of information that do end up being exclusive, so when I combine one thing with another I end up avoiding that overlapping of audiences where the same user can qualify me for very different products and that helps me improve segmentation.
EE: Sure. For example, when we work on these strategies together, we use a lot of the data we capture in the CRM for the most qualified leads. Based on those qualified leads, we go and look for similar audiences and bring in those types of prospects, and we start to exclude the leads that don't qualify.
JG: Of course, that is an opportunity, that I have that additional data filter. Without that, the truth is, it is very difficult to achieve results because everyone has the same tools and the same segmentation possibilities with Facebook. So there is a lot of competition for a user that in many cases ends up being wasted because they do not necessarily qualify for what you are looking for.
EE: What is clear to me is that if you don’t have your buyer persona and the purchasing journey well defined and you don’t collect data to fine-tune that process, if you don’t have all three components and technology that allows you to measure and optimize that comparison process , then you are losing money. Ok, done. Julián, to close a bit, tell us about the new trends that are coming in the media. What is the content format that brands are most looking to advertise and are audiences accepting? Tell us a little about that, about the trends.
JG: Facebook is probably setting the most important trends because it has become a very important advertising machine for advertisers and agencies as well. It is a medium that gives very good results but it has made many recent changes to its algorithm. In the last six months it has given a major shake-up to what things it prioritizes when publishing.
EE: Like which ones?
JG: In the last four months, they are starting to prioritize videos over any other format.
EE: Video.
JG: So it also has its special requirements; they have to be very short videos of 10 maximum 15 seconds , many of them are going to require subtitling because the algorithm is going to understand that it is subtitled and is going to prioritize it, the algorithm is going to prioritize short durations, it is going to prioritize the pieces that do not have text within the video unless they are the subtitles, it is going to prioritize the editions that it manages to understand that are fast, editions with multiple screens, those types of things are being prioritized by the algorithm and where one sees it at the time of purchase. When you win or do not win inventory with the same bid that you were making a week ago. Those types of things are what are evolving.
EE: Excellent, video is what we should be investing in . Alright, that's all for today in this episode, subscribe to Inbound from within, watch the previous episodes. Every week I'm meeting with the protagonists who are doing inbound in their businesses and helping them with their learning procedures so that they can make better decisions. See you in the next episode. Thank you very much Julian!
JG: Thank you very much.
Table of contents
Investing in paid advertising in doctor database package digital media can take your content to another level, amplifying its reach, reaching the right audiences and multiplying your results. We will talk with our friends at La Mediática about how to make digital media advertising work for conversion, in a new chapter of #InboundDesdeAdentro
No time? Listen to the interview here
Read the transcript here
EE: Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of Inbound from within. Today I am in the offices of La Mediática with its CEO Julián Galeano, who has opened the doors to us to tell us, from his experience, how to make an investment strategy in digital media. So, together with him, we are going to talk about how we can plan a media strategy, how to design a conversion funnel using ads and many more topics related to this world of inbound with digital advertising. Julián, welcome to our program, thank you for opening the doors of the office to us.
JG: Well, thank you very much. I am happy to answer any questions or doubts you may have. The world of digital strategy is not simple; it sometimes seems simple but there is a lot of complexity behind it, so questions are welcome.
EE: I'm interested in talking a lot about what you mentioned, about the complexity behind it, and we're here to do this in a practical way. How about we start by talking about how to plan a digital media investment strategy? What's the first thing a client who wants to invest in media needs to know?
JG: I'm going to start with the obvious, but it is often overlooked. It does not end up being the duty of strategies. So you have to necessarily start with the objectives. The objectives will determine the tools.
that you are going to use later in the media, will also determine the data tools and will determine the way in which you are going to buy the media, so having a clear objective is the main thing to be able to start working in digital media.
EE: Now, when planning objectives, you not only have to take into account the number of clients you want to generate through this campaign, but you also have to design a funnel or a kind of funnel to reach those clients, because what I see is that many people think that "ok, if I invest so many thousands of soles and place ads, people will click and buy from me" and that is not necessarily the case.
JG: That is an expectation that cannot be met with digital media. Every person in every category has a decision process, and that process has to be understood from the media point of view at all its points. I have to permanently open the conversion funnel and I have to be feeding it every day with new people who are opening their decision process. Depending on the category, they will solve it that same day or several weeks later. Then I have to understand the people who are already trying to solve questions and develop a decision. And finally, I do have to take care of the people who are already ready to come in and buy.
But it is an expectation that digital media cannot meet: trying to push media presence only to people who are ready to solve.
To start, you need data, to have identified those people. If you have no way of identifying those people, or knowing which ones are ready to buy, a good part of the advertising that is put on the air ends up being wasted. So you necessarily have to attend to the people who start the process, start marking them, which is the main advantage that the digital world has and allows you to follow up until you end up closing the purchase process with that person .
Subscribe to the chapters of Inbound from Within
English: EE: You talk a lot about people and this has to do with the definition of the buyer persona , so if we don’t fully understand who we want to target: what their purchasing behaviors are using data, what their interests are, their needs, their concerns, we can’t design a purchasing journey that allows us to achieve the objectives that we have defined, or that we are thinking of achieving. So I think a good starting point is to have a clear definition of your buyer persona, to clearly define the purchasing behavior, to define the media where this person is found because sometimes many of us think “well, let’s make ads” and we start shooting everywhere and that’s not the smartest thing to do.
JG: Correct. Here at La Mediática, for example, what we do from that point of view is not to buy media, what we buy are audiences. If that audience is on Facebook today, we will be on Facebook; if that audience is on Google tomorrow, we will be on Google; if that audience is on El Comercio the day after tomorrow, we will be on El Comercio; if it is on Spotify later, we will be on Spotify. Where to find that audience is what will determine the media mix. We cannot predetermine it in advance and pigeonhole investments through that type of decision: I have to spend so much here and so much here. The smartest way to do it is to put together a pool and have that pool run in the media where it needs to be run, where it will find the people who are ready to buy or who are moving forward in their buying process.
EE: Correct. Many people believe, or many brands believe, that the entire audience is ready to buy at the moment they are in the purchasing process and we fall into making our entire communication strategy with digital advertising thinking that everyone wants to buy from us, and we start making ads only for products. But we don't go two steps back in the journey, where there are people who may be considering solutions or who are even just being presented with a problem but without any commercial intention. How does content help cover those other stages of the journey?
JG: Well, content helps me identify people who are beginning the purchasing process, and from a technical point of view, what we do is target those people. The most powerful tool that the digital world has today is retargeting: being able to recontact people who have shown interest or who have shown in some way, through content consumption, that they are beginning the purchasing process. If I try to put all my digital advertising with the expectation of reaching only people who are ready to make the purchase, that is, I only do sales pushes, a good part of my communication, no matter how well I try to segment it, will go to waste. The best way to do it is to put together the purchasing line that takes advantage of the data I have collected from the people who are consuming that content.
EE: Interesting, so remarketing is a very good way to understand where a person is in order to impact them with content that helps them reach the next stage of the process.
JG: Exactly, that is the job of retargeting, helping the person to evolve in the purchasing process. Going from one stage to another until they reach a point where they are determined to buy.
EE: Now, what I also notice a lot in digital is that a lot of people are ignoring ads. What is the key to making sure an ad is not ignored?
JG: Well, no matter how well you segment, you're always going to have people you reach who aren't going to be interested in that ad at that moment. What increases the probability of attention and interest in the ad? That you start with data that indicates that that person has some probability of being interested in the product. Again, we come back to the fact that we have to have the entire purchasing process, we have to open the purchasing process permanently through content and not necessarily only through advertising. The moment we do that, we start to have more determined people, less waste, and lower rates of people who don't see my ads or who simply avoid them.
EE: Let's talk a little about the different advertising strategies that exist: there are advertising strategies for branding and there are advertising strategies that are more focused on performance, on conversion. What is the difference? What criteria should I have to combine both? Where should I go? 100% performance or combining branding? Combining both? Tell us a little about your experience in that regard.
JG: They are two very different worlds, but they are two complementary worlds. Necessarily complementary. Having the expectation that I put together a good performance campaign, I have the right investment, the right ads to do performance and that I am going to achieve results in that way is an expectation that cannot be achieved, because people need to be familiar with the brand.
EE: Especially if you're talking about new brands, right? For example, no one is going to buy from you just because they saw an ad.
JG: That's correct. It's also relevant for well-known brands, because you necessarily have to be on people's radar. Be part of the set of brands that people make decisions about so that you don't kill yourself later on through price. The work of content and the work of branding is to build values for the person, attributes, so that they know them so that when they are going to make a decision regarding a category, they have some brands on their radar. And secondly, they know that these brands are valuable, not only because they are cheap, so that is the work of branding. You necessarily have to have a combination of branding so that performance is facilitated and you have very good conversion costs.
EE: In my experience, what I see is that there are many models that businesses are using that are only focused on audience purchases, and I believe that this model is not sustainable in the medium and long term. There is more and more competition to capture the user's attention with ads that end up being too invasive, and acquisition costs are also increasing because there is more competition, more bidding, and because it is only about impacting people by believing that they all want to buy.
So I think that model is wearing thin, and if you don't combine it with an inbound model where you work on content, where you distribute that content intelligently using your media investment and you don't work to build your own audience, it's a mistake.
In addition, there are times when the buyer is in a consideration or awareness stage, and then you educate him and take him to the sales process, which will end up not being profitable for the business. What do you think about this?
JG: I'm going to jump a little bit to another topic, which is the topic of data. When we don't do inbound, when we don't have a data strategy of our own and we're only using the data that Facebook gives us, the data that Google gives us, the data that some media can share with us that very few outside of these two share in order to work with them, we are necessarily subject to a lot of overlapping of users. For example, in universities, when I work on segmentations through Facebook tools, a person ends up qualifying for careers as far apart as design, then marketing, then accounting, and then even medicine because, despite the fact that they have a lot of data, behind it it's not necessarily exclusive from one user to another. What inbound allows me to do is to start adding layers of information that do end up being exclusive, so when I combine one thing with another I end up avoiding that overlapping of audiences where the same user can qualify me for very different products and that helps me improve segmentation.
EE: Sure. For example, when we work on these strategies together, we use a lot of the data we capture in the CRM for the most qualified leads. Based on those qualified leads, we go and look for similar audiences and bring in those types of prospects, and we start to exclude the leads that don't qualify.
JG: Of course, that is an opportunity, that I have that additional data filter. Without that, the truth is, it is very difficult to achieve results because everyone has the same tools and the same segmentation possibilities with Facebook. So there is a lot of competition for a user that in many cases ends up being wasted because they do not necessarily qualify for what you are looking for.
EE: What is clear to me is that if you don’t have your buyer persona and the purchasing journey well defined and you don’t collect data to fine-tune that process, if you don’t have all three components and technology that allows you to measure and optimize that comparison process , then you are losing money. Ok, done. Julián, to close a bit, tell us about the new trends that are coming in the media. What is the content format that brands are most looking to advertise and are audiences accepting? Tell us a little about that, about the trends.
JG: Facebook is probably setting the most important trends because it has become a very important advertising machine for advertisers and agencies as well. It is a medium that gives very good results but it has made many recent changes to its algorithm. In the last six months it has given a major shake-up to what things it prioritizes when publishing.
EE: Like which ones?
JG: In the last four months, they are starting to prioritize videos over any other format.
EE: Video.
JG: So it also has its special requirements; they have to be very short videos of 10 maximum 15 seconds , many of them are going to require subtitling because the algorithm is going to understand that it is subtitled and is going to prioritize it, the algorithm is going to prioritize short durations, it is going to prioritize the pieces that do not have text within the video unless they are the subtitles, it is going to prioritize the editions that it manages to understand that are fast, editions with multiple screens, those types of things are being prioritized by the algorithm and where one sees it at the time of purchase. When you win or do not win inventory with the same bid that you were making a week ago. Those types of things are what are evolving.
EE: Excellent, video is what we should be investing in . Alright, that's all for today in this episode, subscribe to Inbound from within, watch the previous episodes. Every week I'm meeting with the protagonists who are doing inbound in their businesses and helping them with their learning procedures so that they can make better decisions. See you in the next episode. Thank you very much Julian!
JG: Thank you very much.