Almost every day, we see another article about how difficult it has become for businesses to reach potential customers with traditional media. Today’s customers are highly mobile, and TV, newspapers, and other traditional vehicles are less effective than they once were, particularly with younger generations. But now, a new methodology called Life Pattern Marketing can help you reach your audience in a compelling and effective way.
Life Pattern Marketing maps the unique work, play, and social patterns of your target audience’s daily routines. It then complements your media plan by including digital out-of-home media placement in the locations that match the life pattern of an audience where traditional media cannot reach them. This is an approach to marketing that builds awareness and retention by intercepting your audience with your message as they go about their busy lives.
Digital Out-of-Home Media—It’s Everywhere
Applying Life Pattern Marketing means placing media and a brand’s message on digital signage that is located where busy people really are: out and about, living their daily lives. Using this approach, advertisers and media planners can reach their target audience with a dynamic and interactive media at locations like:
…among many other types of locations.
Digital out-of-home media is popping up in places where advertising reaches people with short, punchy brand messages. The media exists everywhere people work, play and socialize. As they pump gas in the morning, shop for groceries in the afternoon, stop by to withdraw money from the ATM, and meet friends for an after-work drink at a bar or restaurant, people see your media on digital signs that are placed where they can’t be missed. The key is context: when a customer sees your media in many different contextual settings, your message rises above the “noise” and builds awareness and retention. If you apply the Life Pattern Marketing methodology to select digital out-of-home media venues that will intercept your audience, you deliver high frequency exposure to your brand.
Applying the Life Pattern Marketing Methodology
To implement Life Pattern Marketing, you map the work, play, and social patterns of a particular target audience’s daily routines. You then weave a media strategy through these patterns. The steps to follow in applying the Life Pattern Marketing methodology are:
- Identify the target segment of the population that you want to reach.
Segmentation is different for Life Pattern Marketing. Instead of slicing audiences just across common dimensions such as demographics, psychographics, and lifestage, now think deeply about their behavior. This provides a perspective that we exploit in the next step.
- Map their life patterns.
Where do they go? What do they do when they get there? This requires reviewing their typical daily habits. Where do they work, play, and socialize?
- Find the venues along their life patterns where you can place digital out-of-home media.
These digital signs are the ones that will create the perception of ubiquity in ways that other media cannot. That’s due to digital media’s richness and effectiveness. Busy people will see them while out and about, in places where they engage with the screen rather than tune it out.
- Create a campaign “flighting strategy”.
The flighting strategy is a schedule that designates how much advertising per week is appropriate. For example, for four weeks, reach university students in their dorm rooms, coffee shops and gas stations, and then, for the next four weeks reach them in restaurants, pubs, bookstores, dorm rooms, and student recreation centers. Flighting allows advertisers to avoid overwhelming the target segment with an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach. Flighting is subtler that that, and is the key to creating the powerful perception of ubiquity.
- Develop your campaign assets.
Create an advertising campaign where the same creative and copy can be used across flights and venues. Repurposing web assets is one way to be cost effective. Simple graphics and punchy copy or a simple Flash animation can be an effective way to deliver a message. On the other hand, advertisers can also leverage full motion video from television treatments for an effective 15 or 30 second spot.
- Customize the creative.
Your message can be even more effective by slightly tweaking the creative across venues in a single flight and by adjusting the creative across flights. For example, imagine a “treasure hunt” much like beverage bottlecap contests that have been successful for years. But for this medium, people text a “secret message” that they spotted on a digital screen advertisement in a venue, to a short code. When they get all ten messages, they win the prize. This is just one of many ways you can leverage creative across venues and get your audience to proactively seek advertising.
Get Started with SeeSaw’s Life Patterns
SeeSaw has identified several hard to reach audience segments and applied Life Pattern analysis to create life pattern packages for these segments. The following life patterns give advertisers and media planners a starting point for reaching elusive audiences with digital out-of-home media:
- College Students
18 to 24 year-olds whose activities center around college campuses; on campus at places like student unions, recreation centers and dorm rooms and off campus in bookstores, health clubs, bars and restaurants, among others.
- Mobile Millennials
Elusive 18 to 34 year-olds have disrupted traditional media channels with their adoption of technologies like Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), text messaging on cell phones, and digital music players. Their active lifestyle makes maps to multiple types of digital out-of-home venues.
- Alpha Moms
College-educated, tech-aware moms whose on-the-go lifestyle and extensive use of the Internet for information gathering make it difficult for traditional media such as newspapers, radio or TV to reach them. These moms can be reached in grocery stores, medical offices, beauty salons, health clubs and retail environments.
- Business Professionals
25 to 54 year-olds who are always on the move due to busy work, play and social schedules, Digital out-of-home venues intercept them in places like coffee shops, office buildings, bars and restaurants and transit centers like airports.
Multiple consumer segments can be mapped to specific life patterns using the Life Pattern Marketing method. At SeeSaw Networks, as we continue to grow our extensive network, we will announce additional life patterns. In the meantime, you can get more information by visiting our website.
Learn more: Schedule a Life Pattern Marketing Workshop
If you’re wondering how you can use Life Pattern Marketing to reach your target audience, schedule a Life Pattern Marketing workshop with SeeSaw. In an interactive session, consultants from SeeSaw Networks will collaborate with you as you learn how to use Life Pattern Marketing to intercept people in their daily work, play, and social routines.
Learn more about the workshop at our website or request a workshop today.
