You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions
are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are
Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media.
Jenny today’s topic, four rules nonprofit attraction should follow when planning their
ad budget.
Oh boy.
Just a few little guidelines.
Oh boy.
This is, you know, I’m going through our notes here. This is like a marketing 3000 college
level class. This is kind of big picture high level, if you will.
Well, I love to teach. So that excites me. But yeah, this is a, we’ll kind of walk you
through a guide that we use when we build our plans out and it’s the guy that you can
use as well, or attractions can use as well too.
Yeah.
This is kind of theoretical versus, I mean, there’s some takeaways in here, but this is,
every plan, I promise you, every media plan will still look different even if you follow
these guidelines.
Okay.
Yeah. It’s not like a fill in.
True.
Right.
It’s not easy.
No, no, no.
All right.
Got it.
Got it.
Yeah.
And then, you know, Jenny did an excellent job of putting together this content in a written
form.
It’s available on Jenny’s website attend.media.
You can just go to the site.
It should be pretty obvious exactly where it is.
Clicking download.
No emails.
It’s free.
Just go grab it.
So if you like this stuff, we’re going to be talking about today.
Attend.media is the site.
All right.
You ready?
Deep breath.
Ready.
Yeah.
I did some push ups.
I’m ready for this one.
I want to talk about today.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, kick us off.
Like, what exactly is this media planning guide for nonprofit attractions that you wrote
and that we’re going to be talking about in this episode?
Yeah.
So, I guess, first of all, this really comes from, you know, we’ve been working with nonprofit
attractions, or I’ve been working with nonprofit attractions over the last ten years
I’ve been in the media space for the last 15.
Some of these rules even come from learning from other industries outside of the nonprofit
attraction space.
But really kind of what I started noticing in a trend of was whenever I started working
with the new client or, you know, providing, you know, maybe it was just in strategy or
their media plan overall was through kind of like doing like an audit on a media plan
because what do you do?
You get it’s someone’s plans from last year.
That’s where you start and you start looking at and saying like, why are you doing this?
Why are you doing that?
Or, you know, you’re kind of learning about what worked and what didn’t for them, but one
of the things that we would always notice is, and this is actually the piece that we noticed
from not just nonprofit attractions, but local advertisers in general is, they’d really
be like spending a very low amount across a lot of channels, across a lot of channels.
So, you know, some of the guidelines that we’ve created here really just from learning through
doing those audits for local advertisers and local nonprofit advertisers and just ways that
we can make their money work harder because at the end of the day, you always have a ton
of money as a nonprofit.
Yeah.
So, you’re performing all these audits and you’ve kind of picked up on this trend.
These are some of the things that most of your clients were doing wrong.
Yeah.
Doing wrong or just could be doing better.
Sure.
You know, just creating more efficiencies, I don’t think it’s like we don’t ever look at
a plan and say like, oh my gosh, I’ll do your U.S.
But every dollar counts.
And, you know, again, especially when your dollars are less, every dollar is more and more
important.
So, how can we kind of help guide you to build the most effective media plan with limited
or unlimited dollars?
We don’t want to waste any.
So, how do we do that?
Yeah.
So, if you’re going into planning in the next few weeks, few months, go get the guide,
follow step by step.
We’ve got four rules that we’re going to go through here.
And, Jenny, I think this is kind of a tool, you know, a sidekick.
Our marketers can use, kind of put together their own plan.
Mm-hmm.
We like to think of it as a way to stay disciplined during your planning.
Awesome.
Okay.
Here we go.
Four rules.
Number one, the bucket rule.
What do we got?
So, the bucket rule is really kind of our way of, kind of defining how channels fit into
your media plan.
And it’s, it’s a, it’s a different way to think about it.
I think a lot of advertisers are familiar with the funnel, right?
Awareness, consideration, conversion.
But what happens from a channel perspective, so TV, radio, social is when you look at a
funnel at the end of the day when it’s all laid out, a lot of these channels are in,
a lot of these different objectives, right?
So, our stages of the funnel.
So, my TV, you know, and, or just all of our traditional media gets lumped into the top
funnel awareness, right?
TV, radio, out of home.
But there’s, the length of the media landscape has changed.
So, as programmatic buying, right, which was really more of a, a tool that we use with digital
ad buying is now becoming possible in the traditional media space.
We can time more data to it.
We can time more attribution to it.
So, really when we’re thinking about awareness, consideration, conversion, like all of our
channels to some extent can support all of these phases.
I mean, think about like direct response advertisers for, for ever they’ve been using TV
as a bottom funnel conversion tactic, right?
They’re running a TV spot with the expectation that the phone is going to ring.
So, for us, this was a way, this, this kind of bucket role was a way to kind of reframe
how we’re thinking about our media channels.
But with, because it’s really more of our creative, that’s going to determine, you know, is it
awareness?
Is it consideration, is it conversion?
When we’re trying to tell the, the consumer to do, but from a channel perspective, we just
felt this bucket role really made, made a little bit more sense.
Yeah, you’re kind of taking the funnel, the typical consumer journey funnel and reshaping
that into a lens from a media planning, media buying perspective, right?
It’s more about the channels, more about what our investment is going to go into versus maybe
where a consumer is laying in that mysterious, whatever, whatever funnel.
Right.
Okay.
So, what are our buckets?
We’ve got two.
Yeah, so we, we’ve got it back into what we call impactful and opportunistic.
So, I guess we’ll jump into impactful first.
Let’s do impactful.
So all of your media channels, TV, radio, fill in the blank, you’re going to put into
either an impactful bucket or an opportunistic bucket.
Correct.
Okay.
All right.
So, talk to us about impactful.
So, when we think about impactful, we really think about media channels that have the ability
to elevate the attractions brand, right?
Create excitement.
And a lot of times, this is the language that we would use when we talk about awareness,
but in this case, we’re going to remove that and just talk about, it’s like, high impact,
high probability my ads going to be seen.
You maybe have a longer message, right?
Our storytelling formats.
We talk about that a lot and they advertising space.
So, I’m thinking this is like TV, you know, a traditional big screen TV, a radio ad, a
billboard, that kind of stuff.
Yep.
So, we think about like large screen, audio, high reach.
So a lot of our traditional media channels do fit into this bucket.
It’s also placement first, right?
Like I run a billboard.
I know where that billboard’s going to be.
You know, even if you’re running a programmatic out of home campaign, you know the, the
space is going to run into, but, but we know the placement, right?
I know I’m buying a TV spot in the morning news.
So I know if I’m watching that channel, I’m likely going to see that spot.
So yeah, it’s, it’s in fact, it’s expected to be in the placement that we bought and yeah,
it has a, again, that ability to create that excitement and stand out and from the audience.
And I’m also going to maybe add this.
It seems like it, these channels, you mentioned placement.
It’s more like it’s contextually aligned with quality content.
Yes, quality for sure.
So, this is where we’re running through and making sure that we don’t just have a TV
buy that’s running all over night, right?
So we’re going in and really just ensuring that the buy is running in the day parts
in the programming on the channels or stations that are going to resonate with our consumer
the most.
Right.
I mean, one of the lines you have here is elevate the brand.
So I don’t want to be running on Jerry Springer, right?
Got it.
Yep.
And then I guess on the flip side, we’ve got our opportunistic.
So the way we think about opportunistic really is more of a reasonable chance that our target
audience can act on some type of purchasing decision or some type of action.
So yes, a lot of our digital does fall into this bucket, but it’s not to say that opportunistic
can’t drive awareness, right?
Like Facebook can absolutely drive awareness, consideration and conversion for any message
that we’re running, right?
But it’s opportunistic because now when I’m running that ad, I have a chance, a good chance
of that person actually engaging with my ad, collecting and going to my website to find
more information or even by purchasing a ticket online.
So this is really when we get a little bit more to like our one to one messaging.
We might have a lot of different audiences that we’re targeting, we’re customizing our
message to that audience versus like one to many where we have a more general message
maybe in our opportunistic, or I’m sorry, in our impactful channels.
We typically have that kind of one to few message in our opportunistic channels, right?
We can serve a lot of different messaging based off of who that that audience is.
Our small screens are absolutely okay here, short video, quick content, you know, again,
probably a lot more flexibility in rotating multiple messages because we need to get in
front of that frequency needs to be much higher in this case to drive that action.
So yeah, I think, you know, and kind of on the surface, we might think of traditional
is impacts and digital is opportunistic, but it’s not always anything.
So we’ll go through some examples of some channels as well too.
Okay.
Let’s, you’ve been talking a lot about influencer marketing or like creator content.
So let’s go through this exercise and this is, you know, your marketing 3000 class here.
Let’s say you’ve hired or you found some great creator content out there about one of your
clients, um, fill in the blank museum.
You’ve engaged with that creator say, Hey, I want to run, you know, promote your ads with
a paid ad budget.
Like walk me through the difference there.
What bucket would you put influencer marketing or creator content in?
So the influence or marketing or creator content, I would put an impact full.
So I’m working with, you know, a big, you know, things to do Orlando influencer and they’re
going to come and create come to my attraction walk through share their experience, share
their tips to how to, you know, beat the crowds or best days to visit or best time to
see the, you know, the, the tigers, right?
Like we, that’s impactful.
Right.
This is like production.
This is great content.
Um, and say we would bucket that under impactful even though most of the time that’s getting
shared on a social channel, that influence or content is impactful.
Now, when we say, Hey, we’re going to now take that content that you created and run ads
out of our channel and social.
Now we’re going to bucket that to opportunistic because now what we’re trying to do that,
that initial content that the influence or has created is going to drive us some reach
and new eyeballs, people who aren’t our current customers, right?
Or who may not be.
But we’re also going to be focusing on things like engagement of the ad, like how many people
are commenting on it and liking it and sharing it.
And then it comes to our ads will engagement is absolutely something we’re measuring.
We’re trying to like now drive an action.
So now we’re trying to run an ad to promote that organic content to get them to go to our
side, buy a ticket, come and visit.
So the ad itself, we’re going to bucket in opportunistic the content that’s initially created
though, we’re going to bucket into impactful.
Okay.
Got it rule number two, the 60 40 rule.
Walk us through that.
So the 60 40 rule is really just a way to ensure some discipline in your media plans.
So, you know, local nonprofits kind of already talked about this, but they are a very broad
audience.
So we want to ensure that we’ve got mass reach channels to be able to reach a lot of
people in our market.
So we really like to stick with about 60% of our budget is impactful and about 40% opportunistic
to ensure that we’ve got high reach in a market.
We think about from a reach perspective, a lot of times our opportunistic channels, especially
for like adding a lot of targeting to them can get very small.
And while that can be great based off of a particular message that you’re running, let’s
say you’re running some, you know, you’re trying to drive in, you know, a younger audience
and maybe you’re running a particular promotion or message that might only resonate with
them.
So it’s okay if I’m in so small, if I’m putting like, oh, my money behind that, like I’m
missing out a huge audience, that’s going to make up the majority of my visitors.
So you’ve got to be careful there.
Like it’s great to be able to create those different audiences and have specific messaging
to them, but we can’t only do that.
We’ve still have a, you know, we’ve got our millennial moms with young kids coming in.
We’ve got younger singles coming in.
We’ve got, are the grandparents bringing their grandchildren in like your audience is typically
pretty broad.
We’re not targeting, you know, 25 to 34 only.
We’re trying to reach 25 to 64 in many cases.
So there’s quite a big mix that needs to go on and we need that variety of channels that
can help us drive impact and opportunity.
Okay.
So 60% of your budget is going to impactful channels like TV, radio, outdoor, influencer.
Influencer.
Thank you.
So 40% of your budget is going to opportunistic channels like paid search, paid social display
by the ticket now convert.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
And you mentioned discipline.
You’re doing this.
You know, I’m thinking like, okay, you know, I’m halfway through my campaign, my annual
campaign and, you know, attendance maybe isn’t exactly where it should be.
We’ve all been there.
Right?
So let’s move all the money to Facebook because that’s what’s creating the lowest cost per
conversion, the lowest cost per ticket sale.
And I’m thinking with this rule, this 6040 rule is you’re setting some, some barriers,
some guidelines with these dollars saying, hey, just because on paper, this particular
tactic or this particular channel is giving us our best, you know, once again, cost per
conversion, we can’t just steal all the TV money and put it into, in my example, Facebook.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that’s a trap.
I think as over the years, especially as we started getting more and more data with
digital, we could attribute more of our conversions to our online channels.
People started putting more money to them just because it was the only thing that they could
prove out is working.
I think there’s a lot of changes going on in the industry now.
A lot of changes in terms of what we’re going to be able to track digitally, which I think
is scaring some people to have them go back to any more traditional because they’re going
to say, well, if I can’t track my display anymore, I might as well run TV, right?
So whether you got a little bit of that going on, but there’s also some interesting things
that we can still do in terms of like tracking exposure to a visit inside of a park or,
you know, doing some other attribution.
But I think the one thing when we think about, you know, to your example about, okay, Facebook’s
working, our search is working, right?
So that’s got my lowest cost to move more money there.
I mean, if you start digging into it or peeling, peeling the layers of these channels, what’s
working in Facebook?
Retargeting.
What’s working in search?
Branded search.
So if we’re putting, if we’re shifting more or budget to some of those channels and we’re
not thinking about how we’re prospecting new audiences and we’re putting all the money
into retargeting and branded for the conversion, then we’re spending a lot of our money on people
who are likely to come anyways.
And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing those things.
I absolutely every plan that I have run is going to have retargeting and branded in it,
but probably at a lower percentage than maybe what a lot of people are spending typically
in the space or really in any space, in industry.
And I think that’s important because we’ve, you know, in order to meet your visitation goals,
in order to maybe meet some of your, you know, diversity initiatives, right?
Like you’ve got to reach new people and bring new people in.
We absolutely want to be the reminder because we don’t want to lose the people who are
familiar with us and are already coming.
But if we keep pushing more and more of our paid budgets to the high converting tactics,
we’re potentially losing owl on reaching the spot audience, bringing in new audiences
and keeping our overall visitation goals.
And I think one thing that happens when we optimize towards a conversion is a lot of times
that conversion.
Unfortunately, for nonprofit attractions, isn’t even a ticket sale.
It might just be a, you know, a first step in a process because it can’t track all the way
through.
So just be very, very careful about putting too much of your budget against those.
They need to be there.
You should be tracking something on your site.
You should be doing some type of attribution, but don’t put all your money there just because
it’s the only thing that you can track right now.
Yeah, Jenny, you were just talking to a marketer who, through agency, recommended moving
away from TV completely.
And I’m not here to scream from the mountain that TV is the absolute must for everyone,
but you get that situation where maybe, you know, once again, maybe you just kind of focus
on what you absolutely can measure.
You get hyper focused on these metrics and you forget the big picture.
And I think this is what that 6040 rule is talking about.
And I love what you said about reaching new audiences, especially for this space where
you know, pretty much any, it’s a local attraction and pretty much anybody in that local area
is a prospect.
That’s who we want to be sharing our mission with.
That’s who we want to be creating excitement with is everybody.
Right.
So we need these high reach vehicles to share that message.
Right.
And listen, every, your channel makes is going to, I mean, I feel like we’ve been saying
TV a lot like your channel makes is going to be dictated by your audience.
And yes, absolutely.
If you’re like, well, our audience is in your market.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But if it’s like, listen, no, my audience is strictly under 35, then yeah, I’m probably going
to argue don’t put linear TV.
Don’t put broadcast on your plan.
But I think for most nonprofit attractions, it’s pretty wide.
Like 2564 is what we’re looking at.
And you might have like one like specific audience within that that you want to prioritize.
But well, yeah, let’s talk about this because you’re saying the 6040 rule, 60%.
Impactful 40% opportunistic.
That’s at an annual basis.
That’s the kind of the 30,000 feet view.
You know, if you’re going after a specific audience for cocktails at the zoo, that younger demographic,
you have a kind of a specific campaign.
This rule can be broken, right?
Yeah.
Or even, you know, we’ve taught some on previous episodes about like a wedding initiative
or play it right at the very, very finite audience.
And I want to reach them in channels where they are looking for wedding content.
I don’t need to run TV spots for that, right?
Like I don’t need high awareness or you know, that type of impact.
But as a nonprofit attraction, if I’m running TV spots for my brand throughout the year,
I’m running radio or out of home or some other impactful form of media, then my attraction
is top of mind for this consumer.
So when they are wedding planning and they do go into search or they do go into Pinterest
and they’re looking for ideas, when my wedding ad pops up, they’re already familiar with who
I am, right?
So it’s like, oh, great.
They do weddings.
Didn’t know that, but not, I don’t know who this attraction is, right?
Because if they have zero brand awareness of who we are as an attraction, what’s going
to make them want to actually, you know, book a wedding there too.
Like our ad is not going to be strong enough in that, you know, in that position to be able
to drive it on its own.
So here you go.
You have to stay disciplined.
6040 is the mix.
And by allocating 60% to impactful channels, you allow yourself on a one-to-one or kind of
one-off campaign, you allow the opportunity to run 80, 90, 100% of that budget in opportunistic
channels.
Yeah, so it’s in those smaller initiatives can completely be supported by an opportunistic
media mix.
You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast.
Conversations on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their
mission through marketing.
Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media.
Attend media is a media planning and buying agency, specializing in zoos, aquariums,
gardens and museums.
For more information, please visit attend.media.
Now back to Ryan and Jenny.
All right, Jenny.
So we’ve gone through two of the four rules so far.
One, the bucket rule.
You’re saying put all media channels into one of two buckets.
That’s either going to be impactful or opportunistic.
And your second rule was the 6040 rule that on an annual level, at an annual view, you’re
going to allocate 60% of your budget to impactful channels and 40% of your budget into opportunistic
channels, right?
Right.
Yeah, okay.
So rule number three, the 5% rule.
So I mentioned this a little bit when we started, but going through audits, one of the things
that we would see with local advertisers, non-profit attractions and other local advertisers over
the years is really just spreading themselves a little too thin.
So they’re putting everything on their media plan.
And this happens because sometimes you do need to diversify that channel next to reach
a lot of the different audiences.
So we usually do recommend and expect to see a pretty robust channel mix on a plan, but
we are seeing everything on a plan.
So a lot of times this could be like, you’re trying to support maybe a local publisher or
someone’s kind of asked you for those media dollars and you’re like, okay, it’s just a small
amount.
I’ll just give it to them.
Like that happens a lot.
And when we think about the 5% rule, there’s no like right or wrong channel necessarily to
put on a media plan, but it’s just, if you’re investing less than 5%, like what is the strategy
behind that?
Like are you even like, what is this actually doing for you?
Well, okay.
Hang on.
I think we’re bearing the lead just to touch here.
What exactly is the 5% rule?
So the 5% rule is that we only invest in a media chain if we can allocate a minimum of
5% of our total budget to the channel.
And this sounds low, but like I’m saying, if you throw in that one publisher for the local
print magazine one time, it’s going to be under 5% of your spend, right?
If we just dabble and tick-tack a little bit, but we really don’t have a very strong initiative
and take time would be a platform, not a channel, but we’re just dabbling at some of these
social channels.
If you 100 on tick-tack, if you 100 on Snapchat, you know, a little bit more on Facebook,
but ultimately together, these are not actually going to exceed 5% of my total budget.
Like, that happens a lot.
And I think we get into or nonprofit attractions to get it, can fall into this trap of like
just constantly testing a lot of different things.
And I’m hearing the marketing directors on the other side going, well, that’s not me,
you know, I wouldn’t do that.
But you’re saying you see that when you audit these, these plans.
Pretty often, yeah.
And sometimes it’s almost like you’re checking the box to say, like, okay, we did that new
thing that everyone said we should do or we played nice with that one person and we just
need to, you know, we need to do that for a particular reason.
But I would really start thinking through, like, what is the strategy behind each of these
channels?
You know, it’s with a smaller budget, you’re going to want that percentage to be higher.
So yeah, if you’ve got a $30,000 budget, 5%, per channel is going to be pretty low.
I want to increase that number.
But but really ultimately this comes down to just not spreading yourself to thin.
And I think with this, like a few things that we can think of, so we talked a little bit
about the local print publisher or the local, you know, print magazine that gets thrown
in on the plan for one ad, I’m not saying that there’s any particular channel that you
should be spending this amount of money in, but come into it with a strategy behind how
that channel is fitting into your plan.
So you may be in a market where those local print magazines, like you’re trying to reach,
you know, maybe, you know, moms with young kids and these happen to be super popular, right?
It could be a combination of local family websites and print publications.
Like you could have a strategy around building some frequency in these running ads on the
digital and print side and it works for you, right?
Like that’s where you hear a lot of people reference, like that’s where they saw an ad
for you to know about an event.
So that’s great.
It’s been more than 5% of your budget on it.
So if you’re not willing to spend more than 5% of your budget on it, it’s probably because
you know it’s not right for your budget.
Ooh, well said.
So I got a half a million dollar annual budget, you know, the mommy blog, mommy magazine,
local magazine comes knocking.
My thought here, or your suggestion is, if I can’t spend 25 grand on this, then…
Remember, it’s the channel, not just the, the, right?
So no, you don’t need to spend $25,000 on it.
You might not even be able to spend $25,000 on that one publication.
But I might have a strategy to go in and run maybe a local publisher is kind of part of
my channel next to where it’s like print and digital and it’s not just mommy magazines,
right?
A few local neighborhood publications that I’m trying to get into, a couple of, you know,
local parenting magazines, maybe also piggybacking on their website.
You know, maybe you’ve got like a creative loafing or something in your market.
So some kind of like activity based, but so those are all going to fall under my print budget
now.
And so yeah, if I’ve got a half a million dollar budget, I want all of these together to
funnel up to $25,000 and maybe not for one campaign that can be throughout the year, but I’m
going to use these to create frequency among this audience.
And if I can’t commit to that, why am I doing it?
That’s the question I would ask.
This is discipline, discipline, right?
These, these guides or this guide, these rules are help, are aimed to help you kind of get
out of the fog of war, right?
As our day goes on, like, can we really make this decision?
Let’s go back to the guide.
Let’s go back to the rules to the break some of these rules.
And I will say for some of these, you could drill down to like a campaign.
So maybe you’ve got a three, four, five month campaign.
And so maybe that’s going to be a little bit less budget, but it’s still going to exceed
five percent, right?
But maybe that campaign is a hundred grand and I’m going to put, you know, $5,000 behind
the print ads because they can be pretty cheap, obviously with some of these local publications.
But you know, some of these can drill down to a campaign specific level, but for the most
part, I would say look at your budget annually, how you’re supporting all of your media channels.
And I know, so just go through and audit your current media plans or last year’s media
plans and just see like how many channels actually came under five percent.
And I’m thinking like one of the takeaways when you audit plans is you’re generally recommending
to cut channel.
Yes.
Again, don’t spread yourself to thin.
You’re looking to consolidate, build a strategy properly invest.
Correct.
And let’s think about some of the pros to doing this.
Not only are you going to create higher reach in some of these channels, right?
So where you’re not just like deluding your message across several, but you’re freeing
up maybe production dollars because if you’re, if you’re doing it right, you’re creating
a message for each one of these channels that you’re in, you’re, you’re adjusting that
creative to fit that channel.
So you’re freeing up some production dollars to be able to do that by not just saying,
okay, hey, creative team, we’ve got 10 channels that you need to do this in.
What happens is you get one video back and you’ve got to run it in every single one of
those channels or you get one type of image back that’s just resized for every single
channel versus thought through how it’s going to fit into that channel.
And if you’re doing creative internally, I mean, like, can you imagine going to a creative
director and being like, okay, I need this video now, you know, converted for three or four
different channels and oh, you were only spending $500 in each of them.
So it’s not really even going to do anything anyways.
They would just be like, just, I mean, their minds would just be blood like because they’re
not even thinking about it when they get the request to produce the creative.
But then it’s like, I got them working like 10 hours a day to try to get out this creative
done in time for this campaign launched and no one’s even going to see this ad because
we’re barely running anything in it.
All right, for all the creative people out there, this is minute 30 and minute 30,
20 seconds, so go ahead and click that and share that over with your media team or your
marketing director.
Yeah.
All right, ready to move on?
Let’s go.
All right, number four, the social rule.
So with the 5% rule, we said we won’t, we don’t dictate what channels you should run
and every channel makes this going to be different.
But the social rule, we do dictate a little bit.
Wait, so you’re at a rule breaking your other rules?
Cool.
Not breaking.
No, it doesn’t break.
It still fits.
So it still fits in the 5% rule.
But we actually recommend more here.
So with the social rule, we think that non-private attractions should be spending about 10%
of their budget on social.
And that’s like at least a minimum.
Correct.
No, I would say yes because smaller budgets, just like with the 5% rule, the smaller the
budget, the higher the percentage.
So you’re spending $300, $400, $500,000.
I’d like to see you more like 15% of your budget.
If you are a non-profit spending $3, $4, $5 million, this percentage could be lower.
But I would also argue that if you are spending that much money, you’re most likely going
outside of your local market in which case your audience is getting bigger so the 10%
rule still works.
I mean, in general, 10% of the media budget paid social.
Again, going back to auditing and spreading yourself to thin.
This is the area where we see people drastically underspend.
And I think one of the other reasons why we say 10% here is because there’s a lot of platforms
out that we can run in.
So it’s not just Facebook and Instagram.
How are you building out a strategy to incorporate TikTok or maybe even some other channels
like Appentrised or Reddit, right?
Like this can all.
We’ve got another episode where we talk about campaign strategies for all of these channels.
But you can’t start getting into some of these other channels if you’re not spending
10% because what’s going to happen is you’re going to start stealing your budget from Facebook
and Instagram, which really need to be kind of your work forces in your social media plan.
And what you should be doing is saying, hey, I’m only really 2% here and 3% here and 1%
here and some other channels and saying, let’s eliminate those, add them to our social
plan.
And now I can add TikTok to the mix.
I can add maybe some Pinterest to the mix.
I can add some other channels, some other support to the mix.
I think another thing is back to like the United initiatives.
Everyone’s in all of Facebook.
So you need to start diversifying the platforms in your social media plan or your social media
channel mix to reach a lot of different audiences.
It’s not all Facebook.
Again, Facebook, back to kind of what we were talking about in the beginning of the episode,
like it’s the channel that typically converts and therefore we put all our money there versus
thinking through, are people really using this channel?
Like, where are they engaging when interacting and commenting more?
Like, where am I standing out more?
Or can I use better content or work with creator content?
Like that’s not Facebook.
Creator content is not really showing up in Facebook, right?
It’s all TikTok and Instagram.
We did an episode a while back kind of talking about social media and you mentioned something
that kind of stuck out with me, like how CPMs have been rising for the last couple of
years.
But the budgets kind of stay the same.
Right.
So that’s another big thing.
If you’re spending less than 10%, and you’re, I see this on the plans a lot, right?
You’ll, they’ll be spending less than 10%, but then the CPMs that they have kind of next
to it for not their actual CPMs, but their planning CPM will be like $2.
Yes.
Like the estimated amount of what they think the CPM is going to come in at for what they
think their total impressions is going to be.
I don’t remember the last campaign that we’ve run on Facebook or Instagram.
They came in at $2.
Like just once you start adding in some, I mean, even just like some basic targeting, creating
a few different audiences.
If you’re running video, if you’re optimizing towards a conversion versus just straight up
reach, I mean, you’re going to be in this $7 plus CPM range.
So you know, I don’t think that’s anyone’s like, and there’s one person like go back and
be like, who put $2 on this plan and project it?
But just copy and paste from the last year, right?
You’ve been doing that for five or six years.
Oh.
So what’s going to happen is you’ve allocated the same amount of budget.
You’ve underestimated how expensive, I say expensive, but how much more expensive this
platform has become due to its popularity.
And when everything comes out in the wash is you did not reach, you know, your add dollars
to not go nearly as far as you expected to in planning stage.
And I think that’s your argument here is we need to increase these budgets.
If we’re going to play in this field, we need to increase those budgets.
So we are reaching, you know, those reaching frequency goals that we expected.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, like I said, if you go through following these guidelines and you
do an internal audit of your media plan, you’re going to find cost savings, right?
Your media plan is a budget.
And you’ve got to go through your personal budget and trim the things that aren’t working
for you that you aren’t using.
And you’ve got to do the same thing with your media plan because it is, you know, we can
be guilty of just being like, well, we had good visitation last year.
So do the same thing.
But you’ve got to constantly be changing.
I mean, these channels are constantly adapting.
You sit, you know, consumer usage among different media channels is constantly changing.
And I’m not saying that your plan has to be a total completely different every single
year.
But you’ve got to be going through and looking at it and thinking through like, okay, what’s
working for me?
What’s not?
You know, where am I able to spread my mission and my message better so that I’m able to
allow some of these channels that are better at driving a conversion, actually work harder
for me.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let’s go through it.
Just a quick recap.
Number one, the bucket rule, all media channels going in either into an opportunistic or
impactful bucket and you can get the full list on the website attend.media.
Number two, the 60 40 rule, 60% of the budget should be spent in impactful channels and 40%
in opportunistic channels.
Number three, and going back to that, the idea here is to stay disciplined.
You need brand support as the year goes through.
You’re doing one off campaigns, a big promotion for a big event.
That’s where you can go heavy into opportunistic, but don’t steal from the impactful budget.
Overall.
Yep.
Exactly.
And then number five, the 5% rule, this is do not spread yourself to thin.
If you’re going to add a new channel to your mix, make sure you’re coming in with proper
waiting or proper investment level, don’t just dip your toe into the water, build out a strategy.
Is this worthy of my plan, worthy of my dollars?
Five percent is kind of like the minimum I need to spend in order to say yes.
And then number four, you’re kind of doubling down on the 5% rule within paid social.
One big trend that you’re seeing is these nonprofit attractions aren’t allocating enough dollars
into paid social.
CPMs have gotten more expensive.
There’s more platforms.
Don’t be stealing away from Facebook to go test other platforms, increase your overall paid
social budget.
How’d I do?
That was pretty good.
A plus.
What do we call this?
Yeah.
Non-profit media planning 3000.
And you know what I like about this is you’re not just saying, hey, 30% to TV, 10% to radio.
This is market by market, but these are the guidelines, the swim lanes that you have to
stay in.
Right.
We’re definitely not telling you which channels to run every because you’re all local market
advertisers, right?
Maybe every local market is going to vary based off of the properties and channels available
to you in that market, your audience, the diversity mix in your audience, right?
So everyone can follow these guides and have a completely different media plans.
So we’re, don’t, this isn’t the cookie cutter approach that gives everyone the same thing,
but just gives you some guides to look at when you’re going through an auditing your own
plan.
This is great.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast.
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