How to Use Emerging Media to Build Your Brand

Newer media options like influencer marketing, podcasts, and social media have become a mainstay for consumers, marketers, and advertisers alike.

It goes without saying, wherever consumers go, that’s where advertisers eventually end up, too.

Here’s a look at the numbers:

• Marketers are continuing to increase their ad spend on these and other digital channels.
• In 2022, marketers spent approximately $5 billion on influencer marketing, with projections for 2024 at $7 billion.
• Podcast advertising spend is projected to exceed $4 million by 2024.

It’s widely known that these new media options provide increased reach.

For instance, studies have shown that podcast advertising can improve brand awareness by 13 points, while sponsored ad content improves it by 10 percentage points.

But Neilsen wondered about their ability to impact brand lift.

In a new study conducted by the reputable company, researchers identified five key elements that empower companies to increase brand lift from their investment in ad strategies like podcast, influencer marketing, and branded content.

Brand Lift Attributes

Here are the five attributes:

• Brand Recall. This factor influences almost 40% of brand lift in various media. It makes sense even anecdotally: if consumers don’t recall the ad, they won’t remember the brand, and the ad won’t have an impact.
• Enjoyability. The second most-important element is enjoyability, or the entertainment factor. Your brand achieves lift when the ad is enjoyable to watch and experience.
• Captivating. This element, along with relatability and non-negative, rank about the same in terms of effectiveness in driving brand lift.
• Relatability. Audiences want to relate to the person delivering the message, whether that is a podcast host or influencer.
• Non-Negative. Negativity in ads typically reflects poorly on the brand, as this causes audiences to think poorly about the brand.

KPIs to Know

The study also dives into key performance indicators (KPIs) teams can look at in order to understand which attributes are driving individual metrics, like purchase intent and familiarity.

You can see from the chart below that brand recall has the biggest impact on the audience’s purchase intent (while that is also based on having higher awareness in general)

A few other interesting KPI takeaways to note:

Enjoyability drives higher brand familiarity and recommendation intent.

Brand recall seems to have the least impact on familiarity

Not negative also has a low impact on purchase intent.

Bottom Line

Marketers will do well to measure key metrics to understand how ads are driving brand lift.

Studies show that only 3% of marketers measure this on a regular basis. So there’s lots of room for growth and opportunity to learn from tactics.

As the landscape is ever evolving, you can expect to see new platforms and services on the scene that will draw audiences with new content.

It’s important that you develop a framework for measuring brand equity so you can know what’s working and what you need to improve on.