Editor’s note: This is the second part in a seven-part series on managing your marketing portfolio. Part 3 will publish next Friday. Click to read Part 1.
A marketing strategy, like a diversified investment portfolio, must have a 360-degree approach.
If you want to carve out any kind of substantial market share, share of mind, or share of wallet in today’s competitive landscape, you cannot afford to limit your marketing initiatives to one media channel.
Like a professional financial adviser who looks to produce the best yield/risk ratios for its clients by recommending a diversified mix of investments that will create long term growth and/or produce income (and protect principal), a marketing adviser must take a 360-degree approach that will build brand equity in the long term while driving sales in the short term by leveraging the power of diversified asset classes (media channels), proven to outperform single channel strategies.
Just as a financial adviser uses a mix of corporate and tax free bonds, equities including individual stocks, mutual funds, ETFs and Index Funds —from small cap to large cap, value to growth—plus foreign investments and money market instruments, a marketing adviser must help his/her client select from a wide range of established and new channel platforms, SEM options, web marketing, social media, direct, television, radio, print, out-of-home, event marketing, point of sale, public relations, and more than a dozen other choices to create the right “balance” of assets that will build the brand in the long term, and drive sales in the short term. The marketer’s brand experience is the direct and indirect result of a consortium of these assets.
“Single voice” integration in marketing is like earning compounded interest with a Certificate of Deposit.
Having “single voice” messaging across all your media channels paints a clear and consistent image of your brand in the minds of your audience. You also benefit from the “CD effect,” where all of your media channels, digital and traditional, begin helping each other, compounding interest in your brand like a Certificate of Deposit.
In short, turn your marketing budget into an interest bearing account where your brand interest compounds daily.
If one person hears a radio ad in the morning and sees a TV spot with a similar message during the late news, it is proven that this exposure in dual channels increases awareness of your brand, boosts recall, and helps motivate the consumer to take action. This “CD effect” compounds with the more media you run—paid, earned and owned. From social channels, community events and public relations, to radio, print, television and the like, the compounded effect of single voice messaging in multiple touch points (assets) can do amazing things for your marketing investment, both short-term and long-term.
Conversely, speaking to your target audience differently in one channel versus another erodes your brand equity.
In fact, in a recent survey by Yes Lifecycle Marketing, over half of marketers polled use six or more outbound channels to interact and connect with their customers. 21% percent said they use more than 10. And 21% said they spend 15 hours or more every week doing traffic control around communications, technology, and various other marketing services with vendors. With “more and more niche marketing vendors providing channel-specific solutions, it is imperative for marketers to be selective about which vendor, or possibly vendors, they work with, otherwise, customers don’t get a seamless cohesive brand and message experience through each marketing channel, across all facets of the lifecycle stage,” the report said.
Check back next Friday for more insights on this topic.
Stuart Dornfield is an award-winning freelance creative director and copywriter with 40 years experience in marketing, strategy, advertising and production. A former senior vice president and creative director of Zimmerman Advertising (Omnicom), the 13th largest agency in the U.S., and the co-founder of Gold Coast Advertising, the third largest agency in South Florida, Stuart now offers his creative services and marketing insights as a freelancer with offices in New York and Miami.