Our Approach to Media Planning and Buying for Nonprofit Attractions
The 4 Pillars of Our Approach to Media Planning
1. Paid Media is for New Visitors
We think paid media investment should emphasize marketing to first-time and infrequent visitors.
New visitation is crucial for nonprofit attractions to sustain and expand their mission, conservancy, and education work.
We develop media plans with a portion of the ad budget dedicated to reaching ‘growth audiences’.
2. Be Disciplined
In our experience, nonprofit attractions often benefit from a focused approach to media planning.
Rather than expanding media channels, we often recommend concentrating efforts on fewer channels to ensure each one has enough investment to impact visitation positively.
We dive deeper into this concept in our Media Planning Guide for Nonprofit Attractions.
3. Match Location to Media Habits
People often live near others with similar interests.
By using tools like Placer.ai and TruTrade, we analyze visitor location data to identify those who currently visit and those who don’t.
We then combine this location data with media habit data from sources like MRI-Simmons and Resonate.
This approach allows us to compare the media habits of visitors and non-visitors.
4. Measure
Paid media is an investment for your institution.
Investments are intended to have a return.
Our goal is to uncover which of your media investments are increasing visitation.
To do this, we’ve developed an innovative Marketing Mix Model specifically designed for local attractions.
This statistical model holistically measures the effectiveness of both traditional and digital media investments.
Plus, we add factors like emails, events, and weather so we can better understand the incremental lift in visitation attributed to paid media investment.
Fundamental Data Needed for Media Planning
Using the approach mentioned above, we provide complete media plans on an annual basis and/or for events.
Plans are designed to be either executed by in-house teams or by us.
To develop a media plan, we need:
1. Location Data
2. Media Habit Data
Once we have the location data, we can overlay media consumption data provided by MRI-Simmons or Resonate. Typically, we provide this data.
3. Audience Personas
Attitudinal data can comprise guest surveys, focus groups, and visitor analysis.
We typically work from reports by The Morey Group and similar consulting groups.
4. Your Institutional Knowledge
The first step in engaging with us to develop a media plan is a Structured Kick Off Call.
Based on our experience with nonprofit attractions, we’ve developed a questionnaire design to speed up the common agency/client discovery process.
Table of Contents
The 4 Pillars of Our Approach to Media Buying
1. Don’t Fall for the Low-Hanging Fruit
Let’s not run all of our ads to people who are going to come anyways just because it looks better on a marketing report.
Just as we need to be disciplined in our media planning, we too need to be disciplined in our media buying.
2. Buy Quality Placements
You are a mission-based organization. Where your ads run matters.
Oftentimes we see advertisers chase the lowest CPM. This strategy can lead to your messaging surrounded by questionable content – both in digital and traditional mediums.
We believe brand safety is of top importance.
3. Work with Local Reps
We often start engagements where the client has local media relationships in place. We want to carry those relationships forward.
Local TV and radio stations can offer tremendous value in trade, unique media placement opportunities, and ad production.
4. 100% Committed to Transparent Media Buying Fees
We believe our clients should ‘own’ their digital ad buying platforms.
Ideally, our team would manage and optimize digital campaigns in your organization’s Google Ad, Meta, TikTok, and other accounts.
This setup allows for a near seamless transition if you ever wanted to change who is managing the campaigns.
Plus, we propose fee-based pricing rather than a commission. Our pricing is based on the complexity of the media buys and not the size of the ad budget.
Pricing and Deliverable
Deliverable
We deliver media strategy and media plan(s) based on the rules laid out in our Media Planning Guide for Nonprofit Attractions.
This is delivered through a presentation and leave-behind deck.
Our detailed media plans comprise of:
- Media flowchart
- Planning rates
- Channel mix
- Budget allocations
- Daypart mix
- Detailed buying guidelines
Plans are designed to be executed by your team or us.
Pricing
Our standard fee for media strategy and planning is $15,000.
The fee varies depending on the amount of data the client already has and on the proposed number of plans to be developed.
Leverage our expertise in helping nonprofit attractions increase visitation with their growth audiences.
Click here to schedule a 30-minute call to explore hiring us.
