SPECIAL FEATURE MEDIA STRATEGY
Media campaigns: how to get the best value Marcus Lewis focuses on four factors that will assist you in fundraising successfully through the media.
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F&P Magazine | October November 2016
fpmagazine.com.au
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verything changes… and within the fundraising sector, this is especially true. There is more pressure to deliver more donors with less budget and there is more competition than ever before. Face-to-face, legacy and tactical appeals are still delivering but where else should a fundraising team look to cost effectively sustain and grow its supporter base? What media can be used to deliver a consistent and strong ROI? These factors will help you to fundraise successfully through the media.
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A unified approach Every donor you will ever acquire is extremely likely to have been influenced by or interacted with media placements in at least two media channels, if not many more. It doesn’t make sense to bucket different pieces of activity or budgets into silos. One message equals one donor is a very rare event. The key to driving the best results for your marketing budget is to have a unified
create a situation where the next dollar isn’t decided by budget but by measured efficiency. However, the rewards are there and this is where effective data collection and use is required.
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A data collection and attribution strategy When using the right analytical tools and processes, it’s extremely easy to see not only how individual channels are working in their own right, but also how the different channels contribute and work together to deliver your messages. The key to this is tagging and coding to collect the data that allows us to understand the path each donation has taken to ensure that a responder’s progress can be viewed to completion. Too much focus is put into digital data around the date and time stamp of the conversion. It’s important to be able to view when a donor first interacted with you and with what they interacted. After all, you may have a fantastic response,
“The key to driving the best results for your marketing budget is to have a unified approach to donor recruitment through all channels.” approach to donor recruitment through all channels. You also have to understand the contribution traditional and digital media channels have on each other. This is important. I’ve been lucky enough to work on acquisition media campaigns in several different markets, and when it comes to response, Australia, in my experience, has one of the highest offline to online response ratios in the world (in some instances we’ve seen over a 90% online to 10% call ratio). Therefore, you need to have some measurement system in place to understand the mutual influence between traditional and digital channels. Something other than search budget will be driving search activity. Whether it’s TV, direct mail or news, you need to understand this to properly evaluate and budget for your acquisition activity, otherwise you could be under investing or even cutting what is a profitable acquisition channel – just one that doesn’t appear to be that way without proper online attribution. It definitely requires more effort to
however a poor conversion journey could be undermining your success. Last click analysis will not show you this. If you can determine the most common paths to conversion as well as the timings around that and the first points of contact, you can then start to build a digital model that combines with traditional media to give a fuller picture of what’s working and what isn’t. That in turn allows any organisation to optimise its media budget accordingly and deliver a better ROI and stronger overall cost per donor.
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A consistent creative approach Because it’s very rare that an individual will only interact with you on one media channel, it’s important that all channels have a consistent
message in order to get the best collective result, particularly with TV. More than any other media, TV has the most demonstrable influence on paid and natural search.
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A clear communication goal Having a clear goal of what you want to achieve overall, and designing the donor journey in an integrated way, is easily as important as these points: without sharing TV data, how does the in-house search team know when to maximise its share of voice? Without being able to tag up the website effectively, how can the data we need to drive performance be collected? Without agreeing on a collective attribution methodology, how can we determine success?
In summary
We have to remember that when donors are recruited through the media, it is a ‘pull’ scenario. We need to give them a damn good reason to respond. Good creative and media will do that. But we need to remind ourselves that we need to pull – and pull together – at every stage of the donor journey. And tag, track and measure without bias across all channels to keep getting the best results. The rewards of that are loyal, long-term donors. In my experience it’s worth taking that journey.
Digital checklist Here’s how to get the best digital response from your campaign: • keyword copy on search should reflect the creative seen on mobile devices, display, out of home and, most importantly, TV • landing pages should reflect digital display or EDM copy that has driven potential donors to the site • home pages should have a clear link to donations and the message that has driven donors there.
Marcus Lewis Marcus is Managing Director of DTV Group company Sanctuary Media Group, a specialist direct response agency based in Sydney. He has over 20 years’ experience in analysing media with a specialty in DRTV and digital performance. Nonprofits have been the focus of his work for a number of years.
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