Your Marketing ROI Playbook:

How to Create a Marketing Plan That

Will Get Results

At TEGNA, we are made up of a vast network of local marketing experts across the country. Working with small to large businesses every day, we understand how critical it is to see real results. We care about our clients and their success, and their results are our foremost concern. That’s why we’ve developed this eBook. Inside, we’ll dive into the key elements to help you leverage marketing for real results that lift your revenue while retaining and growing customers.

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In our experience, we find that some business owners view marketing as an investment that is unpredictable and even confusing or disappointing at times. To them, it seems like only the biggest players gain brand recognition—but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Oftentimes, smaller businesses have the biggest opportunity to experience positive ROI from their marketing investment.

Luckily, businesses of all sizes are beginning to understand that using a variety of channels to build brand awareness and drive sales is critical to a results-driven marketing strategy.

The ABCs of What You Need to Know to Get Marketing Results

Ais for Audience & Accountability

Audience Why This Matters

When advertising, you need to know and understand your target audience. This will help you across a number of critical areas, including selecting which marketing channels to use, developing the right language to use and leveraging the most effective creative to reach your customers and have a lasting impact. It also ensures that you make advertising choices that will help you truly reach the right audience. This in turn improves your marketing ROI for a number of reasons. To start, the more you understand your ideal audience, the better you can shape your messaging and choose platforms that will reach them. You will also be able to eliminate waste to make sure you aren’t spending time, resources and messaging to reach audiences that would never need or purchase your service or product.

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For example, if you have two primary target audience groups—one being men, 50+ and the other being women, 18-34—you’re going to need to have different creative, messaging, offers and media to reach these different groups. A marketing strategy is rarely one-size-fits-all.

Tactical Tips

Core Demographics• Age (Gen Y, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers,

Silent Generation)

• Race (Caucasian, African American, Hawaiian, Hispanic, etc.)

• Gender (male, female, transgender)

• Marital Status (single, never married, married, domestic partnership, separated, divorced)

• Occupation (full time, part time, self employed, unemployed, retired, along with employment industries)

• Household Size (non-family household, family household, number of dependents)

• Income (<$20,000, $20,000 - $34,999, $35,000 - $49,999, $50,000 - $74,999, $75,000 - $99,999, $100,000+)

Psychographics• Religious beliefs • Political opinions

• Personality traits • Lifestyle choices

• Entertainment/hobby choices

Behaviors• Social media activities

• Websites visited

• How they research the need you solve

• Stores shopped • Purchase habits

• Point in path to purchase

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To better understand your target audience, you’ll need to do some research and work. It’s wise to not rely on gut feelings or assume that you already know why or how they make purchasing decisions. To reveal what your customers want or need, especially the pain points you can solve, invest in market research from a third party, and consider conducting your own surveys in order to reveal key information. To the right are examples of some of the kinds of information you’d want to gather in each category.

Remember, even once you’ve identified a qualified audience, that doesn’t mean that the audience is homogenous or that all their interests and needs are the same. Take a deeper look at psychographic and behavior patterns and nuances to create smaller segmented audiences and further improve your effectiveness.

You should also commit to regular audits of your customer base to keep up with how they evolve as well as what types of new consumers become involved with your brand.

For example, if you’re a home improvement retailer, you may realize that a major audience segment is fathers, 45-54 who earn $75,000+ and own their home. However, within this group, you could have an audience who lives in historic homes and an audience who lives in new residential developments. These two sets of customers will be very similar, and may even share pain points. But without the deeper look, you may miss pertinent pain points that your marketing should be addressing.

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Accountability Why This Matters

Believe it or not, many businesses don’t even use tools or technology to track their results or to measure marketing performance. In fact, it’s pretty common for brands to resort to the all too familiar “How did you hear about us?” tactic for defining attribution. It’s a small minority of businesses that cite ROI measurements as a reason they began to grow their digital outreach, instead relying on the fact that their competitors were doing it as the reason for their “strategic” choice. This is a quick way to completely undermine your marketing efforts. At TEGNA, we see this quite often. The goals are clear, the marketing strategy is in place, and once the ads start, a “set it and forget it” mentality too often leaves businesses wondering if anything they did even worked. We recommend using technology and data to ensure you are tracking the right metrics and that systems are in place to help you measure the true effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Starting with a quick look at your historical data is a great way to build a baseline. Here are some questions to explore:

• How were numbers this time last year? How are they different with this campaign running?

• Have you run promotions like this before? If so, how did they perform compared to now?

• What are your average website visits each month? Did you see a boost?

• Is there an uptick in online searches for your brand name or campaign- related keywords?

You can also leverage existing data analytic platforms and tools. We strongly suggest working with your media partners to establish goals and a tracking plan. Every type of media is different, and experienced experts will help you build a plan that will provide you with the best tracking available for that platform. Lastly, if you’re not using some kind of software or service to track your results, do it manually with a spreadsheet. It may be clunky, but the record is important to reference and provide proof of efficacy now and in the future.

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Tactical Tips

Always rely on data, and don’t wait until your campaign is completely finished to see whether or not it worked. Instead, you should identify important metrics that align with your business goals before any marketing begins, and benchmark them as your campaign is running. This will help reveal weak points in your advertising plan and give you the opportunity to redirect them and make them more effective.

Branding Why This Matters

Branding is what helps a potential customer decide whether they’ll buy the (perceived) exact same product from Company A or Company B. People buy from businesses they want to do business with. They buy from brands that align with what matters to them, can communicate a need or problem being solved and that they generally trust. Obviously, how much each of these factors impacts a purchasing decision varies depending on the complexity of the product. Choosing your toilet paper doesn’t carry the same decision-making weight as purchasing a car. Bottom line is that your brand matters and can directly affect the ROI of your marketing. If your business is one that has little or no brand recognition in the marketplace (or with a particular audience), then your marketing should have a very different approach compared to that of a well-established competitor. Your brand is represented in everything from the colors in your logo and the fonts you choose, to the artwork you use, to a jingle, tagline or positioning statement that is consistent across your marketing. These elements can help boost recognition, recall and emotional resonance. Quality branding attracts new customers, lifts brand loyalty and, when your advertising is at optimal frequency, keeps your brand front-of-mind as a top choice.

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Bis for Branding & Budget

Some places to get started with building a consistent brand:

• Similar messaging and/or tagline across all marketing

• Always talking about your company name and products with the same language

• Using consistent design (colors, fonts, logos, etc.) across your website, digital marketing, TV ads and beyond

• Focusing on a feeling you want customers to feel when they think about your brand or business

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It’s important to remember that branding isn’t just something you do; it’s who your brand is. Even if you’re running a short term, high-frequency action campaign, branding is still critical. Be consistent and recognizable in the way you present your brand across channels. Consumers expect to experience your brand seamlessly, no matter where they find you.

Tactical Tips

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Budget Why This Matters

First and foremost, marketing is an investment and not simply a business expense. Every time you advertise you are investing in your company, your brand and both your short- and long-term growth and success.

Having an ongoing marketing budget is key to any successful business plan. Consistent and strategic marketing means you have a plan for how you’ll spend your money throughout the year and allot enough funds to reach your goals. One of the biggest mistakes we see small businesses make is taking a small budget and wanting to do a longer campaign with less frequency that ultimately doesn’t get any results or traction. The intention is right—to have a longer, consistent approach—but without the budget to back that up, businesses rarely meet their goals. This is why we suggest building out your budget so that you aren’t nickle-and-diming yourself at every turn. Keep room in your budget for developing marketing creative and give yourself the ability to choose the best media with the right frequency for your needs. Too often, the cheapest route ends up being much more expensive in the long run because it isn’t able to deliver a return.

Tactical TipsAlways develop your budget before you develop your campaign, rather than try to make a budget that fits the campaign you’ve created. This ensures feasibility. You need to be realistic about matching your expectations, goals and tactics to the budget you have available. You may not be able to start with a comprehensive omni-channel campaign, but you can start by effectively winning customers on the strongest channel to help your business grow. As you grow, you can add channels or frequency in line with your growth. It’s also important to remember that certain advertising tactics (e.g., coupons) can temporarily impinge on your revenue in the service of attracting new customers, so you need to be careful you don’t harm your business in the process. Any campaign that cuts beyond your marketing budget into operational costs isn’t worth it.

Call-to-Action Why This Matters

Your marketing call-to-action (CTA) is one of the most powerful tools in an advertising arsenal. It is literally what drives customer action, and that means it needs to be compelling, straightforward and easy to understand, while clearly defining the steps you want someone to take.

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For example, if you want to sell a certain number of products, your ad needs to tell the audience where to go to find out more about the product and where to buy it. A CTA like “Come into our store today!” won’t work if the audience doesn’t even know where your store is. Same goes for when you are driving people to your website to do something. When they visit that web address, they should be able to immediately find exactly what they’re looking for. The more complicated or frustrating it is for a customer to complete the action, the less likely they are to try.

There are branding campaigns that don’t have a strong call-to-action beyond getting to know a brand and educating them on who you are and what you do. This is fine, as long as it aligns directly with your goals and how you’ll measure ROI. While you might not be measuring sales or revenue for a branding campaign, you could have other measurables like increased foot traffic, Facebook likes or website visits. If those are the metrics you’re interested in tracking, then your CTA needs to point people in that direction.

Cis for Call-to-Action, Choosing Wisely, & Cross Promotion

To get you started, here are some consistent rules to follow:

• Use commanding verbs (e.g., call, sign up, buy) to prompt action, and pair them with phraseology that impress the audience with a sense of urgency or scarcity (e.g., call now, sign up today, buy while supplies last).

• Be clear and concise.

• Don’t have too many. If you mention your Facebook page, your location, your website and your phone number in one ad, it’s far more likely that no action will be taken. It might feel counterintuitive, but we suggest sticking to one or two contact points per ad.

• Make it stand out. In the digital space, using “clickable” buttons can help. While on TV, it’s critical to make sure it’s legible and both shown and spoken throughout your ad.

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Tactical Tips

There are some tried and true practices for choosing the right marketing CTA, and oftentimes that will vary depending on the medium.

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Choose (Your Media) Wisely Why This Matters

We’ve already emphasized the importance of understanding your target audience and relying on data, and this area is one of the reasons why. With a solid foundation of who you are targeting paired with your known marketing budget, you can make the best choices for where you’ll advertise to ensure a solid ROI. If you choose the wrong media channels for your audience and message, you could end up wasting both time and money. This isn’t simply in the broad sense (e.g., TV vs. digital). It also includes which particular stations or websites you’re on. Having the right media type paired with the right audience is key. You can’t have one without the other, no matter how amazing your creative is. Start by ensuring that you truly understand the differences and benefits of each media option like TV, radio, newspaper, yellow pages, direct mail, social media or search. There are pros and cons of each and there’s no standard mix. What matters is the audience you’re seeking, the budget you have to work with and how your marketing goals line up with the media you choose.

Not all media is created equal. Some, like the yellow pages for instance, are best used for very bottom of the funnel tactics—when your customers are already looking for your brand name and want to buy from you. Others, like TV ads, can be great for attracting new customers, developing leads and reaching a new audience for a particular product or promotion. When we talk about choosing a medium with your budget in mind, that’s because all advertising requires a level of frequency in order to see a return on investment. You have to expose your audience to your ad repeatedly if you want them to take action, but just how many times that is will vary from segment to segment and across types of media. Even the general rule of thumb is pretty broad: some say 7 times exactly, while others estimate between 6 and 20 times are required to make your message stick. Reaching someone 6 times during a TV campaign will require a different budget that reaching someone 6 times on an outdoor billboard ad. Keep this in mind when building out your budget and choosing where you’ll be advertising.

As a business, finding the right frequency can require something of a balancing act. You need to determine how often you need to advertise across channels to saturate your audience at the right level to drive action but avoid over-spending or over-saturating. Then, you need to leverage the right budget to manage that. A high-frequency ad that runs over a longer period of time could get pretty expensive, and if you try doing that over multiple channels, you could start to stretch yourself too thin. This is when you can turn to a marketing partner to help you understand what frequency you need that also fits in your budget. Utilize their expertise to get the most bang for your buck.

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Tactical Tips

The best thing you can do to choose the right medium is to find marketing partners you can trust who will give you unbiased recommendations and feedback on a variety of different advertising options. For example, our Account Executives work hard to develop integrated marketing plans that tie a variety of platforms and audiences together for one seamless and effective campaign, and we work with clients and budgets of all sizes.

Tactical Tips

Don’t think of your advertising channels as silos. Each channel impacts the frequency of your message across your campaign, and customers will look for your brand in different places based on their needs and where they are in their consumer journey. They may become aware of their need because of a TV ad, turn to your blog content during research, encounter your social media and online reviews (e.g., via Yelp) while gathering people’s opinions, then receive a coupon from you in a digital retargeting campaign. Each touchpoint is another point of influence, but if you only operate on one or two channels, you could miss out on a lot of opportunities to connect with potential customers.

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Cross Promote Why This Matters

The simple truth is that you can’t always rely on a single media channel to reach everyone you want. A 2016 report revealed that SMBs are utilizing more than 7 media channels on average to advertise. Roughly half of small businesses leverage digital channels including email, websites and social media for marketing (54%, 51% and 48% respectively, according to third-party research) in order to drive sales and build brand awareness. This outreach is important, especially as mobile grows in influence, but sticking just with digital outlets won’t be completely effective either. You may not realize that combining multiple channels into a unified strategy can increase your results in critical performance areas. For instance, it’s very common for businesses to see a boost in one advertising medium’s ROI when others are added. The ads start working together because as a consumer, we don’t care where we’re seeing an ad–what matters is that we see it and remember it. Seeing an ad that is part of a larger campaign on one platform increases the consumer’s memory and recognition of the campaign when seen on the next medium. This is often referred to as the “kicker effect.”

1,2,3

Fitting these ABCs into a strategy may not seem as easy as counting to 3, and that’s okay—marketing is a skill that takes time to hone. The necessary basics for getting the results you want are a marketing plan that:

• Is measurable against your goals • Has the appropriate budget• Is focused on the right audience for specific reasons • Ultimately builds your brand across channels with

powerful frequency You may not be comfortable developing a marketing plan on your own. That’s ok, too! We encourage you to take advantage of the tools at your disposal, and that includes using an experienced media partner to help you develop and execute a successful marketing plan so that you don’t waste time, money or other resources.

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At TEGNA, we’re devoted to providing highly relevant content that matters as we engage more than 90 million Americans each and every week. We have worked with over 20,000 advertisers across all industries and of all sizes. We empower brands to leverage digital and broadcast media boldly to generate success, capture new customers and retain the ones they already have. 1,2,3It’s as easy as

Contact us today to see how TEGNA can help your business lift ROI and take

your advertising to the next level.

www.TEGNAMarketing.cominfo@tegnamarketing.com

1-833-GOTEGNA

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