Today’s marketing media mix looks something like a giant spider web: a complex weave of tangential offline and online media channels all connected at the center by the brand.
Navigating this web of digital marketing opportunities isn’t easy. Your company’s customers likely aren’t making it any easier. According to the Harvard Business Review, the average American consumer uses six different media channels throughout the buying process.
Clearly, relying on one or two proven media channels is no longer a sure path to success for a brand. Today’s successful digital marketing campaigns require a unique mix of multichannel advertising that appeals to a consumer’s interests along all paths of the purchase process.
Here are four strategies that will help you develop the right multichannel mix for your brand.
Know Your Audience
When developing messaging for any audience, you have one shot to capture a consumer’s attention. Knowing what your audience is looking for, and which devices they use during their search, will help determine whether you need to use a hard-sell approach in your digital marketing or if a soft-sell, engagement approach is more appropriate.
In order to achieve this effect, it’s important to understand your most-desired response. This is the critical action you wish a potential customer to take based on having received your brand’s marketing message or offer.
Play Off of Multiple Media Channels
Spending heavily in one media channel can achieve your sales and revenue goals but it can also leave your business open to potential long-term shortfalls. Diversity of media channels is critical to ensuring success beyond the initial jolt of leads or sales that your digital marketing procures.
Spending evenly across multiple media channels, preferably in a manner that ties the different media channels together to ensure you reach consumers across multiple devices and at multiple points in their purchase path, will increase the performance of your campaign.
During the initial push of any marketing campaign, a combination of branding and promotion will help build awareness of your campaign. Despite solid promotion, consumers may not take immediate action based solely on your ads. Develop quality SEO practices that ensure consumers will see your TV or Web branding campaign down the road when promotion decreases. Cover yourself when it comes to search so that when a consumer searches for your brand, the campaign continues to show up in search results.
When playing off different media channels, always think branding. How are you going to reach a new audience or geographical demographic? Be smart about how you get the brand’s name out but ultimately make sure you get it out. People won’t search for a brand that they don’t know about. Beauty brand Nivea is a great example of a brand that successfully reached its target market, women age 18-35, by playing off of multiple media channels.
Retargeting
No matter how much research you do on your audience or how creative your campaign is, it’s unlikely you will be able capture the leads or sales of each visitor to your site. There is a solution to this problem: retargeting.
By placing a retargeting pixel on your site or banner ad, you can effectively re-message your audience as they continue to browse the Web.
Make sure the creative is as unique and tailored to the consumer’s prior session as possible. The consumer might have initially visited you through search, but is redirected back to your website via original content that you’ve placed where you can show them a display ad, or on Facebook where you can reach them through a variety of advertising options.
Develop audience-oriented and unique retargeting creative that will capture the consumer’s attention the second time around and bring them back to your site or offer.
The Take-Away
Customer acquisition marketing need not be a tedious process. It’s a proven method for building awareness and affinity among current customers and potential prospects based on your brand’s reputation and word-of-mouth. There is no certainty in targeting any customer audience, but there is plenty your brand can do to ensure there is great potential in your ROI once your campaign goes live.
Daryl Colwell is senior vice president of business development at Matomy Media Group.
Network
