What Startups Can Learn From The Media Mix

Probably one of the least pressing issues for newly founded startups is the consideration of mass marketing. I’m talking about buying media on the level of a multi-national fortune 1000 organization.

Most startups, especially during their formative stages are all about finding a niche. Founders are concerned with developing a specific product around a core group of customers. Expanding operations, whether fast or slow, happens at a rate that the product and organization is able to scale in-line with.

This is all very understandable; It’s a necessity to think about the thousands of little things it takes to just survive in those early days, however, assuming that the problem your startup is solving is one that actually needs solving, broader mass marketing concepts have a lot to teach organizations that are ready to start rapidly scaling.

Diversify Your Marketing As You Scale

When we talk about a “Media Mix” we’re referring to the combination of channels (search, social media, print, tv, etc.) that are available for us to broadcast our message. Whether that message is received by our intended audience depends upon a few things:

• The size of the audience represented on each channel,
• The ability of each channel to efficiently target those audiences,
• The efficacy of our message (quality of the creative materials)

Each channel has it’s own advantages and disadvantages; if we rely too heavily on a single channel we begin to encounter bottlenecks. The trick to effective utilization comes about through diversification and understanding how best to allocate media budget to this mix of channels.

During the early stages of growth many startups rely on “free” advertising; word of mouth, both physical and on social media is an effective way to spread a message, up to a point. We soon reach saturation on these channels: your extended network is only so large and many social media platforms algorithmically limit the reach of organic content. It’s usually at this stage that many startups take their first foray in to “paid” media, be that with print, tv, digital, or other channels, paid media can reach a larger audience, more consistently, and with richer creative options.

The key to effectively expanding your media mix comes from really knowing your audience and your brand. If you know what channels your audience is most likely to be on, as well as how to best express your brand values on those channels, we can begin to get an idea of how our media mix might look. Maybe the majority of your audience are avid TV watchers who don’t know about your brand. You might also realize that many of your competitors, who have traditionally utilized print media, aren’t doing much, if any TV advertising. It then makes more sense to save the budget that was set aside for those 20 print ad insertions and shift them to a single TV spot during a primetime event. It would effectively cut through the noise, reaching a relevant audience without competing for space with other advertisers in your category. In fact, one Toronto startup did just that.

Wealthsimple bought a 30 second TV ad during the Canadian programming of the Super Bowl. They mention in their blog that at $170,000 Canadian dollars they saw the placement as being undervalued in comparison to US Super Bowl ads which come in at a mind-boggling $5,000,000 US dollars. With a projected audience of 9,200,000 in Canada, this worked out to a CPM of $18.48, (the cost of reaching a thousand people) which is relatively efficient for a network television placement. Wealthsimple used the TV ad as a stepping stone to launch a mass awareness campaign which included a diversified portfolio of high-reach media tactics. This type of savvy media thinking is essential in effectively cutting through the noise and reaching your target audience at all levels of investment. Traditionally the media mix has been thought of as a concept that concerns larger organizations, but thinking about it as a fledgling startup not only helps you to make pragmatic marketing decisions but can also act as a guideline for future expansion and growth.

Everyone knows about the concepts of diversifying when it comes to risk, that old adage “don’t put all your eggs in the same basket” speaks to the idea that we need a spread of options in order to maximize efficiency and mitigate risk. Because risk is highest in the early days of a startup, understanding which media channels make sense both now and as you scale causes you to ask broader questions about the brand, the customers, and the product itself. The media mix prepares a startup for a world where even niché markets are a fight for share-of-voice, and it constantly asks the question, who are my customers and how can I effectively reach them?