If we are going to invest money, we want to be sure it´s the best investment and we want to see a fast and very concrete return of the investment.

In all of the cases, we invest in order to communicate and promote our proposal, our product in the best possible way.

Investments can go from a LinkedIn premium account to a massive media, in the middle we can find different areas of digital, expos and trade shows (No matter if this is called BTL, it´s a way to communicate and sales), POS actions and layout and of course social marketing or cause marketing.

The media selection must consider at least 3 key factors:

• The audience: as specific and concrete as possible in order to really reach the people we need to do something or decide something about shopping our product/service. Once we have the audience we will have a variety of ways to reach them and we can select among them, even for hard audiences there is more than one option.

• Our distribution: it sounds obvious but sometimes is forgotten or considered in a wrong way when selecting the media. If we have only 2 shops in a 10 million people city it doesn’t make sense to have massive. The same apply for digital, not much time ago I had a talk with the General Manager of a Gym with 2 sites. They decided to advertise on social targeting only their city….98% of the people who received the ad and answered were completely out of the geographical area of both of the sites!!!

• Our message/product: There are messages very sensitive to the believability of the people who say it. Therefore, it´s better someone else, with authority and/or believability, talk about our product, not us. PR and social strategies get a big role on this cases.

Sometimes we have very geographically limited distribution and we need to “demonstrate” physically the product. Activations in the right place and well executed are an option for this case.

On the other hand, there has been a big change on the way we manage media and that makes a big difference for marketing. Before digital age, you had only the chance to have one only message repeated everywhere and you were not able to change in the way.

Now, digital era gives you 2 great chances: 1) The chance to change once and another time the ads and channels, therefore the optimization is the name of the game; 2) The need to have several versions of the Ad for different channels/moments, SEM is a great example for this: if someone is looking for a cell phone with good camera, better we talk about the camera in our line of text, this same consumer can look later for a cell phone with big memory, we should have a different text this time.