Are you using the right marketing channels?

09/01/2012

It’s the 64,000 dollar question. And it gets harder than ever to answer with so many new marketing possibilities and opportunities competing for your marketing spend.

What works these days? Do you stick with good old tried and tested offline or ignore it completely? Do you concentrate solely on online? How much time should you spend on social media? What about mobile marketing – research from Barclays Corporate suggests that by 2021, UK consumers will be spending a whopping £19.3 billion every year via their mobiles and tablet devices.

So which channels should you be using and in what mix?

Depends really on what your objectives are in each of your marketing campaigns: acquisition, retention or engagement. A recent Marketing Gap survey from research company Fastmap, suggested that by and large, social media doesn’t work for new business acquisition. It might do if you’re a massive, iconic brand with an equally massive budget. But not so much for smaller, less well-known brands.

Here’s our summary of the different channels and their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, this is only a rough guide and a brilliant campaign should stand out and be successful in any channel.

Direct marketing – DM certainly has the most flexibility, the most creative freedom, and is the best for a long copy story. It’s also the only medium you can touch, feel, play with and smell. In an increasingly virtual world, it makes a change to experience a little reality. If you can get the creative right to the right audience with the right offer, you can get both impact and response - extremely cost-effectively. So DM is good for acquisition and retention, but may not be cost-effective for low level engagement.

Social media – according to a study carried out by IBM, 82% of marketers plan to use more social media. However, the problem they face is that social media requires constant monitoring and is very time intensive. It’s also virtually impossible to measure ROI. The upside is that marketers can engage and build relationships in a way that suits their customers and prospects. This makes social media very good for retention and loyalty building, but impractical for acquisition.

Email – an effective, low cost way to get customers and prospects to engage with you. But this is essentially retention and not acquisition. Bear in mind too, that email isn’t working as well these days. A recent US survey for instance, discovered that over half of all emails are deleted within two seconds without ever being opened.

Mobile – more obtrusive than email and also starting to become less effective. Use carefully.

Search, SEO, pay-per-click, Adwords, web banners – all useful tools for acquisition. Again, the only problem can be the time required to monitor these to see what’s working and make the necessary tweaks to improve effectiveness. For most businesses, it will be a case of trying to achieve a decent level of response and then maintaining it without spending vast amounts of time or money in the process.

Blogs – free of charge and a brilliant way to engage with customers and prospects if done regularly. Fresh content on your website will also help to boost your search engine ranking. 

Broadcast media – great for impact and brand awareness, but can be prohibitively expensive. Localised channels such as radio can work extremely well for acquisition and tactical marketing activities - promoting local news, events and special offers.

Whichever channels you use, your communications have to be well targeted and grab and hold the reader’s attention. They have to be relevant, engaging and reflect your brand values. Above all, they need to dramatise your benefits and link these to the basic human needs and desires of your target audience. A strong, enticing offer also wouldn’t go amiss.

So which channels are right for you? It’s all a question of testing.