Overcoming the challenges of media planning with GWI

Struggling to ace your media planning? You’re not alone. The challenges can seem endless and the days can seem long – especially when you aren’t seeing results. But don’t feel down.

You’re not doing it wrong. You’re just not doing it with GWI. 

If the media planning process was easy, every brand would be a household name. But it’s not; it’s hard. Despite all the tips and tricks you can find online the fact is there’s no magic solution. Instead it’s all about method. 

That’s why GWI is here to help you with a step-by-step guide to navigating a super competitive global media landscape so you can come out on top – even when consumers’ budgets are tight. 

This blog is your blueprint for not only understanding the benefits of media planning using GWI, but how our reliable insights can help you build a bulletproof marketing strategy, save time, and boost ROI.

1. Challenges of media planning
2. Example of media planning with GWI
3. Using GWI during your media planning process 
4. GWI in action: Media planning with Tequila Avión

Let’s talk about the challenges of media planning

How you choose to present media content to your target audience is a big deal. From television, outdoor, and print media to paid ads and digital channels, data-led media placement is the key to driving engagement, building brand awareness, and turning browsers into buyers. 

What are the benefits of media planning with GWI? Simply that we’ve got a wealth of valuable insights and deep data designed to help you showcase your brand in the right place, at the right time, so it’s seen by the right people. 

Let’s get into it. 

Your GWI media planning game plan

1. Conquer the attention economy
2. Keep up with quick changes in trends
3. Get answers that help you make decisions – fast
4. Understand what content drives real results 

1. Conquer the attention economy  

Einstein may have said that time is an illusion but the attention economy is very real. Every day consumers are choosing where to put their focus and as a media planner, it’s up to you to understand how to reach them.  

If you want to connect with your target audience, you need deep consumer data that shows you exactly where to find them – whether that’s watching TV on their phones/tablets (something that’s grown 54% year-on-year), or playing their favorite video game. You’ll be able to sharpen your media strategy and boost results with insights that go beneath the surface to show you consumers’ motivations, purchase habits, and more. 

2. Keep up with quick changes in trends

Trends move fast – really fast. If you blink, you may miss the next big thing like a new social media platform that appears out of nowhere (we’re looking at you, Threads), or waste your time on fading fads. 

GWI is your secret weapon for spotting, tracking, and staying on top of the latest trends. 

With new questions added, you’ll be able to stand out from the crowd thanks to instant access to fresh insights representing 2.8bn consumers worldwide. 

3. Get answers that help you make decisions – fast 

What’s something you can waste but can never earn? Time. It’s precious, it’s fleeting, and it can be expensive if your media plan doesn’t hit the mark. While you may not be able to stop the clock on trends or evolving consumer attitudes and perceptions, you can definitely stay ahead of the competition if you’ve the right audience insights to take your media plan to the next level. 

At GWI we’re all about fast, reliable data. With our intuitive platform, you can unlock valuable insights, build charts in a flash with our instant charts feature powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and understand your audience in seconds with instant audience insights. And that’s just the beginning. 

4. Understand what content drives real results

Tight budgets and looming deadlines can put a damper on the creative process but you still need to make sure your content will land with your customers. When dollars are involved, every message needs to make instant sense. Can you say “pressure”?

To make data-led decisions you need insights that go beyond basic demographics. GWI’s market research platform is designed to help you discover and understand your audience’s values, brand expectations (for example, being reliable), and the issues that matter most to them so you can smash the media planning process. 

Here’s an example of media planning with GWI

Let’s say you’re a beauty brand looking for the perfect platform to launch an exciting new advertising campaign. Your campaign objective as a media planner is to boost audience interaction, gain followers, and increase views – but this time you want to think outside of the box. Since you’re already on every platform, you need fresh insights to give you a new perspective.

You know that to really unlock new opportunities, you’ll need digital media plans that resonate with your target audience, but first you need to know where to find them. 

From your market research with GWI, you discover a slightly surprising statistic: beauty buyers are 35% more likely than average to prefer parenting and family podcasts. To connect with this audience you could pull off the perfect social media collaboration with a parenting podcast – but which one? 

Using our data, you’re able to find the details likely to make the biggest difference to your media plan.

You discover beauty buyers are 33% more likely than average to want brands to be cool and trendy – so you reach out to the hottest parenting/family podcast with the most listeners. 

To put a cherry on top – and supercharge your media planning strategy – you can even add in custom research to fine-tune your targeting and reach even the most niche consumers. 

How to use GWI during your media planning process

1. Build your audience

First, you’ll start by building your audience. Pick from over 250k attributes covering things like who they are, where they live, what they do today (and plan to do tomorrow), and even personal attitudes, values, and behaviors like how often they drink coffee.

The result is a picture of your consumers, as broad or as detailed as you need it to be.

In this example, we’ve used Gen Z but you can customize your own audience or choose a prebuilt audience.  

2. Add segmentation

Now that you have your audience, it’s about applying a media lens to understand their consumption habits.

You can uncover details like how much time they spend streaming music, scrolling social media, or listening to podcasts. With insights like these you’ll be able to dig deeper into the audience to see what type of content should be in your media plan.

3. Apply filters

After that you can apply filters like location.

These help you put your data into context and narrow the scope of what you’re analyzing so you don’t get stuck in the muck. 

4. Spot patterns and opportunities

Now you can see what’s hot – and what’s not – for your audience. For example, you can easily gauge the likelihood of Gen Z consuming various media types compared to other generations just by looking at the index figure for each media type. An index figure above 100 means they’re more likely to consume that media type (known as “over-indexing”), while an index figure below 100 means they’re less likely to consume (known as – you guessed it – “under indexing”). 

This simple but powerful view of audience attitudes is the key to unlocking campaign-defining insights, showing you where and how to reach consumers.

5. Zero in

Once you know what to focus on, you can zero in with laser-like precision on exactly the consumers you want to connect with.  

GWI in action: Media planning with Tequila Avión 

When award-winning spirits brand Tequila Avión wanted to drive awareness using traditional media, their agency – Fullsix – turned to GWI. With our help, they were able to shine in an oversaturated market despite budget constraints, audience complexity, and cutthroat competition. 

Here’s how they did it: 

Step 1. Fullsix analyzed a mix of online and offline data to understand exactly who was buying and engaging with the brand

Step 2. Next they combined the different profiling points to build robust audience segments

Step 3. They conducted a thorough target analysis to understand consumers’  lifestyles, interests, behaviors, and touchpoint affinities

Step 4. Finally they clustered the audience by key interests and behaviors   

The result? Not only did online clustering and optimization deliver 8% more efficient reach, but the offline results were 30% more efficient than traditional campaigns. Thanks to a data-driven campaign enabled by GWI, Tequila Avión’s digital marketing efforts achieved incredible brand lift across all their benchmarks.  

Overcoming the challenges of media planning with GWI

Our platform is designed to streamline your media planning process by offering consumer insights that help you understand your audience like never before. You’ll be able to expertly navigate the unpredictable world of changing trends, uncertain budgets, and waning consumer attention, using reliable data and insights to make faster, better decisions.  

Media planning is never simple, but GWI makes it easier. 

To see our platform in action and understand exactly how it can help you, just reach out to our team to schedule time to chat.