How does a brand determine the channels that will really leverage awareness marketing?
In a previous blog: Awareness Advertising: Adding Some Broccoli To The Sugar Highs Of Performance Marketing, I discussed some concepts about how to think about your awareness advertising and how you can measure it. This piece is really looking at the channels that are readily available to broadcast your brand messaging, specifically in Australia.
There are a whole number of digital channels at your disposal. There are the Meta channels of Facebook & Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s snappy short content on TikTok, the more modest Pinterest and Snapchat.
So how do you choose these channels? Where to start? Do you choose the largest one? Something more niche? Or every single one all at once? (don’t do that).
There are 4 ways to evaluate a channel.
- Reach potential
- Demographic Fit
- Psychographic fit
- Practical fit
Start with the overall strength of the channel. How many people will you reach?
The chart above is taken from the ad platforms (which are maybe accurate?) and the data should be taken with a grain of salt. The base numbers say that Meta and Google have the best ability to reach people.
The next filter to look through is the actual demographic fit. You want to align your channel with your marketing – it makes no sense to try and sell puffer jackets in tropical Queensland.
Digging deeper into key demographic metrics like age and gender will help narrow things down further. Age and gender won’t necessarily apply to all advertisers, but it will help you understand some of your competitive metrics.
Meta
You’ve got a fantastic reach in Australia across the ages and it skews slightly female. More effectively you’re likely to be considering the 25 plus demographic with Instagram and Facebook. The older the demographic the more engaged they are on this platform.
TikTok is kind of interesting. The reach for TikTok is definitely younger. And the younger demographic skews female. But as you get into the 35 plus these audiences are getting very, very, very small and they skew heavily male. That’s probably going to change over time as more and more people adopt the platform. Keep in mind this is the snapshot at the moment.
One of the underappreciated platforms is Pinterest. There’s definitely a large female population on Pinterest. There’s 4 million Australians on Pinterest. I would estimate at least 80% of them are female. The very valuable demo of 25 to 35 year old females make this an attractive fit for beauty, fashion and interior design led products.
YouTube’s a little bit trickier to measure and compare as the platform doesn’t talk about reach however YouTube states that they hit 87% of Australian adults in November of 2022. Right at peak shopping time, there’s a lot of Australian adults on YouTube.
And Snapchat.. Just isn’t a channel that WebSavvy has worked with – but if you’re after a younger audience – it’s worth a shot.
The next factor is your psychographic fit. The channel, your brand and your customer have to have some overlap. Your brand values have to align with the customer’s lifestyle, and the customer needs to use that channel in order for it to make sense. It would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Government to advertise on TikTok after banning it in March of 2023. The channel brand and the advertiser don’t have a positive overlap.
Conversely if you have an audience of Planners and organisers – then something like Pinterest would fit like a glove.
The final element of choosing a channel is simply a practical one. Ask yourself, ‘where has the brand got traction already’. Often this is overlooked and a channel that has media attention gets the brand attention. It’s much easier to build on a strength than try and create a new one. Only look to new channels if you’re already saturating your strong performing ones!
