Ask a business owner, brand founder or in-house marketing team what they mean by ‘digital marketing’ and the answers will usually sound familiar. Paid search, paid social, SEO, email marketing… all useful, all recognisable and all very much part of the picture. But they absolutely are not the whole picture.
At MEERKATworks, we help brands look beyond the ‘default’ digital channels, because digital marketing does not stop at the search results page, the social feed or the latest email campaign. It can mean digital audio reaching people while they are driving, cooking or walking the dog. It can mean connected TV putting your brand on the biggest screen in the house. It can mean digital out-of-home advertising, triggered by data points such as a change in weather. Put it this way: if we had a penny for every business that confidently told us they ‘do digital marketing’ but has never properly considered digital audio, digital TV or out-of-home, we’d have a very full piggy bank indeed!
The common version of digital marketing became dominant for good reasons – these channels are accessible, measurable and relatively easy to manage in-house or with a small agency. For businesses starting out with digital advertising, they make sense as a starting point. The problem is that for many brands, the starting point has become the whole picture. Digital media planning encompasses far more than click-through rates on a Facebook ad or a position-one ranking on Google. It involves understanding where audiences spend their time and making deliberate decisions about which of those moments are worth buying. When digital marketing is reduced to a handful of familiar platforms, a significant portion of that opportunity simply evaporates.
The digital channels you’ve been ignoring
Digital audio is one of the most consistently overlooked formats in brand media plans. Streaming services, podcasts, music platforms and digital radio all fall under its umbrella, and the scale of the audience is considerable. In the UK, millions of people listen via connected devices every week, through headphones on their commute, through smart speakers at home, through apps in the car. As digital audio is delivered over connected devices, it allows advertisers to use data to target a more precisely defined audience and even vary the content of the ad the listener hears. It’s not a niche capability; it’s a meaningful advantage that most brands simply overlook and fail to leverage.
Connected TV and digital TV are similarly underexploited. As more households stream content through services such as ITVX, Channel 4, Sky AdSmart, Prime Video, YouTube and a growing list of platforms, the ability to serve targeted video advertising to specific audiences, based on geography, household type, viewing behaviour and more, has expanded considerably. This is not broadcast TV requiring a national budget and a long lead time. Connected TV advertising can be bought programmatically, targeted with precision and measured in ways that bring it much closer to digital display than to traditional broadcast in terms of campaign control.
Then there is digital out-of-home advertising (DOOH), which has transformed what used to be a largely static medium into something genuinely responsive. Digital screens across high streets, transport networks, shopping centres and roadside locations can now serve dynamic creative based on time of day, weather, footfall data or audience profiling.
Where your audience actually spends their time
An important question in any media plan is not “which channels do we know how to use?” It is “where is our audience and what are they doing?”
Consider a working adult in their thirties. They may spend twenty minutes on social media in the morning. They may listen to audio for forty minutes – a podcast, a music service, a digital radio station – during a commute or a lunchtime walk. They may stream TV content in the evening on a connected device rather than through a traditional broadcast schedule. They will likely pass digital out-of-home screens throughout their day. A media strategy that only accounts for the social media portion of the day is missing most of it. This is not an argument for spreading budget thinly across every available channel; it is a call for deciding on a channel mix based on evidence about where an audience actually is, rather than habit or familiarity with particular platforms.
Channels work better together
Digital advertising channels reinforce each other when planned as a system rather than a collection of separate activities. Audio advertising works particularly well alongside outdoor advertising; both reach people when they are away from a screen and in an active state of mind. A well-timed audio ad can reinforce a message someone has already encountered on a digital billboard, compounding awareness without requiring additional visual attention. Similarly, connected TV and programmatic display share audience data in ways that allow a brand to deliver sequential messaging – introducing a product through a video ad on a streaming platform and then reinforcing it with display activity as the viewer moves to other digital environments. This is where digital media planning expertise earns its value – the difference between channels that happen to run at the same time and channels that are expertly planned to work together is often the difference between a campaign that builds momentum and one that simply generates impressions.
Media planning builds the right media mix
A media planning and buying agency brings several things to the table that are difficult to replicate from inside a marketing team focused primarily on owned and paid social channels. The first is channel knowledge – understanding the full range of digitally enabled environments where audiences can be found and reached. The second is buying relationships, whether it’s negotiating rates with digital audio networks, securing premium programmatic inventory or planning a digital OOH campaign across a specific geographic area. The commercial side of media buying requires experience, an understanding of true value, and established relationships that translate directly into better value for the brand.
The third is audience intelligence. Effective digital advertising is not about finding the cheapest impressions; it is about finding the right ones. Media planning agencies work with audience data, planning tools and market research to understand not just where a target audience is, but when they are most receptive and what kind of message is likely to land. This thinking informs channel selection, creative approach, timing and budget allocation. And finally, campaign measurement – understanding what is working across a multi-channel media plan (and being honest about what is not). A good agency will help a brand understand the full contribution that each channel is making, including the channels whose impact is harder to measure directly.
Time to think differently about digital marketing
Digital marketing has always been bigger than the platforms that happen to be most visible at any given moment. The brands that perform best over time are rarely the ones that have mastered a single channel – they are the ones who have developed a clear understanding of their audience and built a media strategy that follows that audience wherever it goes.
If your current definition of digital marketing stops at search and social, it might be worth asking what you are not seeing. Digital audio, connected TV, programmatic display and digital OOH advertising are established and increasingly central to how audiences experience media. The expertise to plan across them, buy them effectively and measure their contribution is the purpose and benefit of a specialist media planning and buying agency like MEERKATworks.
Digital marketing examples
The MEERKAT team has worked with a wide variety of clients across the full digital landscape.
Digital postcards from Minnesota
We created, planned and bought the ‘Postcards from Minnesota’ digital audio campaign for Explore Minnesota. The campaign featured creative written and produced by our MEERKAT audio expert, Dan. The audio postcards brought to life some of the awe-inspiring places to explore in Minnesota such as the legendary Mississippi and the Northern Lights and Dark Sky Sanctuary at Voyageurs National Park.
Digital audio targeting allowed us to precisely pinpoint listeners in Greater London, within the Travel audience segments of both DAX and Bauer DA.
Listen to 'Postcards from Minnesota' Audio
CTV campaign for Willen Lake
The MEERKATs delivered a strategically targeted connected TV campaign for Willen Lake – the popular outdoor destination in Milton Keynes. The campaign was geo-targeted to households in the surrounding catchment area using a range of viewing platforms and ensured the creative reached those most likely to visit. Whether parents were enjoying family films in the living room or children were streaming shows on personal devices, the campaign made sure the Willen Lake message was front and centre.
By combining connected TV with Video on Demand (VoD) and traditional Sky TV, the campaign provided consistent messaging across a variety of formats and devices. This cross-platform strategy maximised reach while maintaining relevance, tapping into the real viewing behaviours of modern families.
Digital OOH in student accommodation
The MEERKATs secured digital OOH campaigns targeting students in over 200 university halls across the UK. The various campaigns were planned for MPB, Idahoan Mash, The Protein Ball Co. and ArtUK.
Digital OOH formats in student accommodation allowed the brands to strategically tap into an open-minded and receptive audience where they actually live. The campaigns accessed living spaces such as cinema rooms, gyms and study halls ensuring the brand messaging reached the right audience, at the right time, in just the right place.
If you’d like to talk through what a more effective digital media plan could look like for your brand, get in touch with the MEERKATworks team today. We’re friendly and don’t bite, unless you’re a scorpion.