What is the most effective way to reach your customers? Is it a phone call? A postcard with a special offer? A tradeshow or event?
With so many ways to market to customers, it is critical to select a combination of pieces and delivery methods that ensures that qualified, interested customers hear your marketing message. The combination of marketing materials that you select to implement will become your ‘media mix’.
Defining Your Marketing Media Mix
GATHER YOUR RESOURCES
Before you begin defining your media mix, be sure you have prepared a Campaign Plan and a value proposition.
STEP-BY-STEP TO SUCCESS
- Understand where your target audience lives
Consider the buying behaviors of your target customers and gain insight into where they collect information (from magazines, press, peers, reports, word of mouth) along with how and where they make their purchasing decisions. Be particularly sensitive to understanding where your customers are when they are feeling their pain the most.
For example, if you are offering mobility solutions look into billboard or radio drive time media to reach clients when they are in peak hour traffic.
- Assess your current available delivery mechanisms
Your company may have some channels already developed to reach customers, such as salespeople who visit customer accounts, or quarterly customer events. If so, then you’ve already got delivery mechanisms in place through which you can communicate your campaign message. Be sure to take these into account when defining your media mix.
Some mediums have special considerations or limitations in certain regions (such as email marketing in Europe). Careful considerations should be made toward how to build opt-in/opt-out capabilities throughout your campaign and be sure to adhere to the guidelines for marketing in your region.
- Plan a presence at all times
Unless you are scaling back your business, your company should have a presence in at least one media at all times. Whether you purchase a telephone directory ad or attach promotional material to the sides of your vehicles, new customers should always have a way to learn about you. See the media mix chart in section 3.
Tip!
To best engage your target audience, carefully consider your media mix:
Product
Design and package your offerings so they appeal to timely market needs.
Place
Carefully choose channels, partnerships, and alternative distribution mechanisms to maximize sales.
Price
Determine if your pricing should be based on competitor offerings, cost-plus margin, or value.
Promotion
Advertising and public relations can be more successful with the magic words: “Free, You, Now, Today, Only, Exclusive, Promotion, Discount.”
- Select additional delivery mechanisms
The list below includes a variety of media options that you may choose to deliver your marketing message. You will likely want to select several free options to pursue as well as premium options as your marketing budget allows. Choose the delivery mechanisms that will most effectively and efficiently deliver your company’s value offering to your target audience. Remember to evaluate your company’s privacy policy before defining media—your company might have a no-call list.
Free or Inexpensive:
- Press Relations
- Word-of-mouth
- Community bulletin boards
- e-mail newsletter
- e-mail solicitation
- Local community, sports and/or event sponsorship
- Newsletters
- Traded advertising with local merchants.
Moderate cost:
- Local newspapers
- Local business publications
- Yellow-page ads
- Business letter
- Postcard
- Business reply cards
- Poster/banner
- Fax-down
- Web directories (often free)
- Local pack mailings
- TV (local cable)
- Placed Web banners
- Web sites
- Trade shows (booth, sponsor)
- Customer seminars
Premium:
- Airport signage
- Telephone solicitation
- Surveys
- Radio ads
- National print publications
- TV (national)
- Other in-person interactions
- Leverage your message across all selected media
Once you have identified your media mix, it is time to select a marketing message or theme and consistently communicate that message via your selected media. Successful marketing campaigns rely on a strong theme. That theme will become stronger and more compelling when it is leveraged across a variety of media. Make sure the common elements of your theme—tagline, offer, iconography, spokesperson, symbol, etc.—are woven throughout your campaign. If your customer can immediately recognize your offering by its language and imagery, you will gain momentum and create a more lasting impression.
- Build your timeling
Create a calendar that maps out when every piece of your campaign will reach customers. Modify your plan to make sure your media placements relate to each other in an effective manner. Add key company milestones to your calendar such as the launch of a new product or service to ensure that you are marketing to customers at a time when you are best prepared to service them, or have a new product or service to promote. See “The Result”, below, for an example of a campaign timeline.
- Take advantage of media services
Many print publications, as well as radio and television outlets, offer marketing services when you place an ad with them. Take advantage of those services when possible, and utilize the resulting marketing materials in other media. For example, a newspaper may offer to employ their internal designers to lay out your ad. If you like the design or content of the ad, use the layout or copy for other printed media, such as flyers and banners.
- Stay focused on your campaign plan
Every campaign takes time to mature and start to show results in the market. Be patient, stay the course, and remember that it typically takes 5 – 7 impressions over a period of time for prospective customers to begin to pay attention, so that they eventually take action and respond to your offerings.
THE RESULT
Once you have defined your media mix and created your campaign timeline, the final result will be a comprehensive view of your annual marketing plan at a glance.
MEASURE YOUR SUCCESS
Record customer responses to your media campaigns to gauge their effectiveness. Business reply cards and online Web forms are easy ways to track responses to your campaigns, while web site metrics and unique codes assigned to direct mail pieces can help you identify how customers came to you. And always have your staff ask new customers “How did you hear about us?” Use this “response rate” data to determine how to alter your media mix in the future.
Here is an example of a simple response rate report, which tracks three types of media.
| Average Response | Highest Response rates | |
| Direct Mail | 2.54% | 5.36 (Packaged goods) |
| 1.88% | 3.83% – Wholesale Trade 2.65% – Communications |
|
| Telephone | 7.44% | Those calling to existing client base as list source |
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