With the economic recession in full swing and continued market contraction across most sectors, how do you effectively implement a robust marketing, advertising and communications strategy using fewer of your marketing dollars?
This is becoming the million dollar question amongst marketers this year and I will lay out five brief but effective basic marketing approaches for you to implement into your marketing mix that will lower your costs, expand your consumer base and strengthen your department’s effective rate of return.
1. If you are currently running print advertising campaigns than this may be something that is old news to some of you. For the most part though, this is an area that has received fairly little mention in trade articles so let’s briefly cover this now. Print medians have been hit hard with the boom in technological use amongst consumers across all industries as well as the general population. Recent data from a wide variety of sources have proven that consumers are utilizing the Internet to read articles, get their news and for general entertainment. Newspapers and magazines are feeling the hit and are willing to drastically reduce costs across the board for ads and will provide even deeper discounts if you are running a campaign. Furthermore, reevaluate the need for full page ads. Do you really need that full page, four color ad in Sunday’s newspaper? Dig down into the readership demographics and more than likely you can save money by placing an equally efficient half page ad with a few supplemental topper ads for half the cost. Additionally, don’t hesitate to request that you get gratis coverage for the on-line version in the form of a static banner or skyscraper. You’ll find that not only have the costs come down significantly once you begin to negotiate but they will be willing to provide an assortment of free placements for you. In a nutshell, rate cards should be viewed at with a grain of salt as everything is up for serious negotiation saving you thousands right off the bat.
2. TV viewers have become increasingly accustomed to going on-line to see their favorite shows as well as recording those shows on DVR’s. This translates into a smaller, but still significant, reduction in the overall impressions of your commercial spots. This means that the impression rates you’re given are less accurate than you expected. Most TV commercials are not shown in the on-line content for TV shows and I think it’s safe to say no one watches commercials viewing a recorded TV show. So how do you regain that audience you have lost? Bundle your spend for airtime into a package for on-line exposure and make certain you gain that exposure on the right section of the website that targets those viewers you aim to reach for the shows within that block of airtime. Your advertising campaign should entail a 365 degree approach ensuring that highest amount of impressions is reached by your target audience across all medians within the scope of delivery vehicles you are using. If you are going to pay for spots during the time slots of a TV show make certain you have sufficient coverage with the network on-line for that same time slot.
3. Radio stations offer a range of advertising products and a hybrid of those products should be implemented for your campaign. If you are going to run a flight of 30 second spots during weekday drive time then you should also purchase plugs from the on-air talent as well as tie in on-line exposure through banner ads and distribution during your radio campaign for their newsletter blasts. If you are in the CPG business or consumer based service business than an additional outlet should be considered – radio station promotions. Most stations conduct remote broadcasts on-site at events as well as run promotions with their street teams featuring on-air talent. Radio stations spend very little of their own money to hand out prizes so this offers your brand or service a perfect opportunity to increase exposure through one on one impressions. Since it’s tax time let’s use a local tax service as an example. Not only should the tax service utilize radio spots, on-air plugs, on-line banner ads and inclusion in the eblast but also tie into a few remote broadcasts where the listener base can obtain free tax counseling services. Your brand has covered every avenue of communication within that network as well as built in one to one marketing. Your sales rep will work with you when negotiating these deals so make the most of it to ensure that you are spending wisely as well as gaining the largest percent of coverage.
4. Media Partnerships – something the big players are doing more often and savings millions of dollars. Why not your brand? Have you noticed more and more recent commercials are tying in multiple brands within their ads? Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Target, Motion Picture Companies and the like are all producing commercials that advertise multiple brands. They share a portion of these costs enabling more coverage for less money with the same impact. The take away from this is that every business is feeling the impact of the economy and complimentary brands with similar consumer bases are leveraging their buying power. Dig deep into your client portfolio as well as your vendor portfolio and more likely than not you will find a few that would compliment a joint advertising campaign. Some perfect avenues to do this in, even within the most conservative industries, are trade shows, sponsorships, promotions and print buys.
5. Leverage the on-line component more than you have in the past. The marketing spend per customer is much lower utilizing on-line advertising so spend some time reevaluating your current on-line marketing campaigns. Seek to expand their reach, the amount of publishers you are using as well as the impression thresholds you have them set at. Reinvigorate your email marketing campaigns, refine your landing pages and develop your drip campaigns. These methods can lower the cost of consumer targeted communications while providing detailed tracking analysis for you and your sales team to review. If you haven’t already, make sure you have these campaigns integrated into your CRM or Salesforce.com tool sets and then analyze your global lead scoring on a weekly basis. This will help to make your sales force more efficient as well as proving real time analysis for your communications approach. If you are finding that your website or landing page bounce rates are increasing or that you are noticing a trend in drop offs at point “X” in your sales process then you now have found an area that needs refinement (this goes with the assumption that as you increase your traffic by “x”% you should see the equivalent in bounce rates which should be pulled from the equation).
That’s it for now. I hope these five brief points offer you some assistance in empowering your marketing campaign for 2009.