Going Long and Short
Is your brand lacking a comprehensive planning strategy? Read on to find out what goes into our industry-leading planning and buying services, and how the two work together.
What is ‘Paid Social Planning’?
At Born Social, we view planning as a way to take a step back from the execution of successful campaigns, and build on business successes, developing them into long-term growth strategies.
Our planning service allows us to take the media expertise that is used to deliver the best possible immediate results for businesses, and extend these wins through best in class media strategy. We believe that time spent planning ultimately means swifter and more effective returns. This includes everything from building actionable plans with clear measurement and allocating budgets to relevant platforms, all the way to audience creation and content journey planning.
“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”
What defines our approach to paid planning?
Born’s Media planning is defined by three principles, which help us produce relevant, effective, and measurable campaigns.
1. Social as the lead channel.
We’ve talked extensively about the growing divergence and diversification of the media landscape (see our The Social First Brand Whitepaper for context on this). As the below highlights, the online media mix has been in a considerable state of flux in recent years.
What you may also notice from the above is the growing prominence of Paid Social’s share of advertising budget within the digital media landscape, with more recent data showing it takes a majority share of online marketing budgets.
Another example of the vital role social is playing is highlighted in the IPA’s recent edition of touchpoints (our summary of this here for reference), which also highlights social media’s key role in the growth of video-based media, stating ”4/5 of the top media forms for 16 - 34s by reach are Social or video-sharing platforms”.
Social is beginning to sit at the center of commercial media trends, and at Born our planning team is uniquely equipped to navigate this growing prominence of paid social in the digital media mix, enabling brands to generate results by putting paid social first on their media plan.
2. Social’s role in the media mix.
We believe in building social-first brands, but not social-only ones. Our planning team has a deep understanding of the wider media landscape, and how trends in media behaviors are impacting consumption.
The above graphs from IPA Touchpoints 2022 highlight daily patterns in media consumption. Data like this helps our planning team build leading social plans that work seamlessly with our client's broader marketing mix.
3. Going long, and short.
Planners make up 50% of Born Social’s media team. The other half is made up of Performance Managers whose role is to ensure day-to-day account performance is delivering against our chosen KPI’s. The relationship between the two areas of the team allows us to implement media strategies that help businesses achieve their long-term goals, without having to sacrifice short-term metrics and results.
The below shows why this is so important:
If we think of planning as feeding the long-term process of “demand” creation highlighted above in pink, then buying is the delivery strategy that ensures the sustainable level of demand to keep performance, "sales" or the blue line in the graph. In having a team of specialists in both areas, Born’s Media Team is able to drive sustained business growth for brands and deliver more immediate results.
Planning in action.
Great plans deliver results, and our work with one of our recent performance clients is a great example of how our media planning principles translate into highly successful campaigns.
This client onboarded in June 2021 after a difficult few months recovering from IOS14’s impact on attribution in January (more on this here).
Two months after onboarding with us, they began to see incremental ROI recovery of between 5%-20%. However, in August when our client took on a planner to work alongside the buying team on the account and set it up for long-term growth, you can see how MoM ROI began to grow up by 30%+ at points.
This was the result of planning and buying specialists collaborating to achieve short and long-term wins by implementing a full funnel strategy, which you can read more about in the “Full Funnel” section of our recent whitepaper The Social First Brand.
So, if you feel like your brand is lacking:
A long term plan for scaling Paid Social
A social approach that compliments the rest of your marketing plan
Brand growth without sacrificing your short term goals
Or, if you’re just interested to know more about our approach to planning, get in touch with us at [email protected]