For some marketing teams, FY27 is already underway, while for others, we’re just getting started. But wherever a brand is on the fiscal calendar, this time of year is a useful period to review future campaign plans and where they’ll land in the year ahead.
This means considering when and where decision-makers engage with content and how long their buying cycles are. Equally important is ensuring you’re reaching the right targets – all of them. Not just the executive who signs the purchase order, but the entire committee shaping and contributing to buying decisions. The ideal channel can connect you with all of them.
The audience matters
SmartBrief’s latest Marketing, Advertising & Media Kit puts the SmartBrief audience at 716K engaged professionals and executives, including 32% C-suite, 20% VP, and 17% Director-level professionals.
More than half of this audience, 51%, say they are the primary decision-maker for purchases involving marketing tools, platforms or services. That makes the quality of the audience an important part of the equation.
Reach, of course, still matters, but as the fiscal year gets underway, perhaps the more useful question is what the reach represents: Are you appearing in front of those who are shaping the conversations, those influencing the decisions, and the stakeholders evaluating the options? A strong strategy needs to consider the full committee, not just one person making the final call.
Content during the buying journey
There’s also a considerable difference between having your content seen and having it create an opportunity to engage.
Among SmartBrief's Marketing, Advertising & Media audience, 47% say they have contacted a vendor in the last six months after engaging with industry content, while 31% are actively evaluating new vendors.
This doesn’t mean every piece of content produced has to have a lead-gen angle, but it does suggest that where professionals are consuming information can play a significant role before conversations happen.
This is particularly relevant for newsletters, which continue to play a core role in the research process, with one in three SmartBrief readers using them specifically to research solutions.
Make the media plan work harder
If your annual strategies are already in motion, you don’t necessarily need to add more to the plan. It’s more about making the work already underway work harder across the buying journey.
This could mean extending a strong piece of content beyond its original campaign and maintaining visibility with an audience between campaigns, or using signals to determine when decision-makers are leaning into a particular topic.
The key is to stop treating good content as a one-off campaign but keep it working across different points in the buying journey.
An even closer look at the audience
The SmartBrief Marketing, Advertising & Media Solutions Kit brings together the latest audience data, publication reach, engagement insights, and targeting opportunities across SmartBrief's marketing, advertising, and media portfolio.
It shares a view of where campaigns can connect with the people shaping marketing and media decisions. If you have plans underway, contact your SmartBrief Sales Rep to discuss how you can get your existing content to work harder.
