Category: Traditional Marketing

Channel Planning

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Effective marketing considers both channels and communication techniques needed to enable customer acquisition for particular service or product categories. Each channel has its weaknesses and strengths, costs and benefits, limits and freedoms, and must be scrutinized carefully to understand how it will or won’t improve the campaign strategy. Therefore, let’s discuss how to determine which digital and traditional channels to use for your campaign.

Target audience measurement

First, measure where the potential audience is spending their time. Determine who you want to target; for instance, are you targeting an older demographic that primarily uses TV, email, Facebook, and radio – or are you targeting Gen Z, who are heavy users of TikTok, CTV and new digital media platforms. Use top content creators and brands in your vertical and analyze their audience engagement across several channels. Meaningful metrics to use include content engagement, audience size, video views, and mobile app usage.

Allocate marketing budget across multiple channels

Establish an overall budget for the campaign and then divide the budget amongst targeted channels. Understand that doubling the campaign budget of a high-performing channel may not proportionally increase performance. Therefore, never rapidly invest a massive amount of money in campaigns. Instead, consider running more ads, targeting new markets, or more keywords to determine which channels are getting more results in terms of reach, impressions, views, and conversions.

Determine how to schedule the campaigns across multiple channels

A campaign schedule will help keep you organized; however, there’s no one-size-fits-all perfect schedule. The ideal timing and frequency of the campaign across multiple channels will depend on your targeted industry and audience, among other things. Moreover, some channels can be active during the campaign’s life, while others will provide a better lift by overlapping during specific moments in the campaign. For longer campaigns, this is more difficult as you must adequately plan the budget for the campaign’s duration. For example, a campaign that will be active for 3 months may not necessarily have all paid channels running during the entire duration to be cost-effective. Therefore, campaign scheduling is essential to enhance your chances of achieving goals. 

Track campaign channel utilization

If you’re not using a campaign management platform, create a spreadsheet to document which channels have been utilized for campaigns. Use spreadsheets for items like content and financials. For example, you can track ad spend, budgets and ROAS (return on ad spend). Spreadsheets can also be used to manage campaigns, ad effectiveness, social media posts, blog calendars, web traffic, SEO, and many other metrics.

Gather learnings for creating your next channel plan

Do some in-depth market research to find which platforms your audience is using more in that timespan and mold your campaigns and content to their expectations. Then, you need to constantly track the results to determine how well the campaigns and channels are performing and what tweaks should be done. Essentially, channel planning is all about delivering what the customers need and where and when they need it – vital knowledge that’s driven by data.

Conclusion

By integrating digital and traditional marketing channels, you can attract a potential audience in their preferred way; furnish and motivate sales and marketing teams, and maximize your chances of achieving your desired business goals. 

Rolanda Gregory ©2022
All Rights Reserved.

Performance Marketing: Optimizing ad spend to achieve campaign goals

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A digital marketing strategy that is driven by results is termed performance marketing. It is ideal for businesses looking to reach audiences at scale since results are based on how end-users interact with campaigns and content.

Moreover, performance marketing works when advertisers pay either publishers or agencies to design and place advertisements for the organization on several performance marketing channels — search engines, social media, embedded web content, CTV, videos, and more. Rather than paying for an ad in a conventional way, advertisers pay based on how well the ad performs by measuring the number of impressions, clicks, shares, or sales.

An important factor of performance marketing is determining how to optimize ad spend to achieve campaign goals. Let’s take a deep dive into some tried-and-tested tips I have discovered to do this the right way.

  • Determine your KPIs (key performance indicators) and ROAS (return on ad spend) goal

A KPI is an effective metric used to measure performance. There’re 3 main groups of KPIs.

Social engagement – Defines how content performs on social media.

On-site metrics – Defines how content influences website visitor’s behavior, for instance, bounce rate and time spent on site.

Conversion metrics – Defines how content turns potential leads and campaigns to sales.

First, determine what you need to measure and ask yourself these questions.

  1. What timespan will you measure the metrics across?
  2. What’s a realistic growth rate?
  3. How will you achieve the desired results?


After setting your KPIs goals, set a realistic goal for the average ROAS you would like to achieve. It’s essential to determine ROAS goals to evaluate the ad campaign’s performance quantitatively. Then, a mix of insights, a dash of data crunching, and research will put you on the right track.

  • Set a realistic budget

Setting a realistic budget, whether it’s based on the percentage of revenue or fixed income, makes it simpler to allocate resources effectively and measure the campaign’s results. Ask yourself these questions:

  1. What percent of the budget can be spent on marketing?
  2. What’s your CLV or LTV (customer lifetime value)?
  3. What’s your funnel/conversion process?
  4. What’s the conversion rate?


To set a realistic budget, you should know what a lead or a visitor is worth and what the customer lifetime value for the business is.

  • Target your campaign to the optimal audiences

Successful advertising is the ability to reach an audience who’ll be most interested in the offered service or product. If you need to get the right eyes on your ad campaign, you must target the optimal audiences. To do this, gather information about who your potential audience is.  What are their demographics? Consider things like hobbies/interests, age, gender, location, salary, discretionary income, and education. The more information you have about the ideal audience, the better you can target them. Knowing your audience also enables finding look-alikes of your highest performing audience segments.

  • Monitor campaign progress for effectiveness, paying close attention to burn rate of budget, CTR (click-through rate), conversions, and revenue

Monitoring campaign progress for effectiveness allows determining if the campaign is working correctly and how the marketing tactics are performing. Therefore, use elements that can be assessed and quantified easily, such as clicks, actual sales, and profit. 

Furthermore, the burn rate describes how fast a campaign is spending its allocated budget. Keep a watchful eye on the levels of spend to ensure there’s a direct correlation in conversions. Burning through your campaign budget too swiftly without results leads to an underperforming scenario in which you may not be able to recoup. Besides that, it’s also vital to monitor impressions, CTR, conversions, and revenue to determine how many users are visiting the website and performing the desired actions such as filling out a contact form, making a purchase, downloading a spec sheet, etc.

  • Gather learnings and optimize elements such as creative, copy, CTA (call-to-action)

The content builds excitement and interest, and the promo, CTA, and creative encourage the visitor to dig deeper and become a paying customer. An appealing ad with a persuasive call to action is the fastest way to generate leads and double the conversion rates. However, since every business is different, continually analyzing and testing helps determine what works best for your potential customers, resulting in a campaign that converts to leads and purchases.

Wrapping Up

Performance marketing is an effective and creative way to diversify your audience and expand reach, all while obtaining valuable data and insights. Find out the approaches that optimize your ad spend and work best for your brand and customers. It doesn’t matter where you stand in the performance marketing space; there is always room to grow!

Rolanda Gregory ©2022
All Rights Reserved.

Omni-Channel Campaigns…Connecting the Dots

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Intersecting circles

When launching a new service, product or startup, it’s important to do so from an integrated and connected perspective. Marketing campaigns should be planned strategically across all available marketing channels. If a particular channel isn’t utilized it’s important to understand and notate why.

Creating awareness and buzz is best done in concerted partnership across multiple marketing channels, leveraging the audience and strengths available in each channel.  Omni-channel marketing ensures that you’ve covered all the bases.

Once the purpose, theme, budget and schedule are determined, drilling down to analyze each marketing channel is necessary.  Campaigns aren’t one size fits all, so a strategic play on how to utilize digital, traditional and out-of-home, as well how as how key tools such as targeting and segmentation impacts your messaging are important. How you communicate on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, can be decidedly different from Email Marketing, Radio, Banner Ads, Direct Mail, PPC or DRTV so it’s necessary to create customized copy for each channel that ladders up to your overall campaign theme and message.

Measurement is crucial in understanding what roles marketing channels play in the performance of your campaign.  Implementing multi-channel attribution tools can assist in this area.  While you may not see a direct conversion from some channels, knowing which channels are introducers and influencers are just as critical as knowing which ones are closers.

When launching marketing campaigns, do not do so in separation.  Leveraging at least multi if not omni channels will yield better performance.  I have witnessed organizations that launch campaigns in isolation – with different teams being responsible.  The email team is launching a totally different campaign and message than the social team, etc. with no integration or coordination from the top.  Creating an editorial and acquisition marketing calendar will help coordinate the efforts of multiple teams, and ensure everyone is on-message.

On your next campaign, utilize omni-channel marketing to engage consumers on their turf and to see a lift in performance.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.

Role of the Business Card in the Digital Age

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image

I’ve often wondered about the seldom used box of business cards that sit in one of my desk drawers, as well as the stack that occupies a small place atop my desk.  While they contain useful information, they’re often left behind.

I’ve forgotten to carry them when attending important vendor meetings, or when interviewing a potential new hire.  I realize at those moments that I’ve just made a business faux pas. Although one that’s glanced over by almost everyone as I’m also seldom alone in forgetting to carry them.

Once upon a time, business cards were critical in making first impressions, establishing methods of communication, and demonstrating that you are a professional.

Today, they have been somewhat displaced by smartphones that allow us to enter our contact information directly, and sites such as LinkedIn.

In today’s world, I do believe that business cards can continue to be an effective marketing tool for entrepreneurs and executives as it’s a piece of yourself and your brand that can be left behind as a reminder.  This is amplified when time is of the essence, phone batteries are low, or you want to be sure your email address doesn’t get misspelled.

For me, this serves as a reminder to keep them at the ready.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.

Is Display Advertising Dead?

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Dunkin-Autism 300x250

I’ve often heard Marketers mention that they’re unable to optimize their display campaigns to perform as well as their Paid Search campaigns.  This has led some of those Marketers to believe that their banner ads are ineffective.  While this could be true, they may be jumping to conclusions without having all of the pertinent data.

When it comes to effective demand and lead generation, it’s not necessarily a good idea to think of it simply as last-click, first-click or distributed.  There are other important factors such as view-throughs.  View-throughs are important because they assist in actual conversions by providing intangibles such as brand recognition.  Without the view-throughs and awareness of the promotion and brand, the conversion may not happen.  However, many organizations are not equipped to realize this potential.  It can be solved for by implementing multi-channel and multi-touch data attribution tools which track all campaigns (digital and traditional) and utilizes formulas and proprietary algorithms to accurately weigh the value of views, clicks and ultimately the conversion itself across all marketing channels and devices.

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We should also consider how consumers feel about banner ads.  They are often identified as being synonymous with malware – and not to mention annoying.  And more often than not are totally irrelevant to the consumer.  To make display impactful, it should be carefully targeted to the appropriate audience and not cast as a blanket online.

On your next digital campaign, try combining a content article with a relevant banner ad to see an incremental lift in clickthroughs.  Be sure to ad contextual text ads in the mix as well.

So as far as display advertising being dead, no it isn’t.  It should simply be looked at through a different lens, as it’s further up the marketing funnel than PPC.  Create your display advertising strategy to achieve upper to mid-level funnel brand recognition.  Couple on the use of bidding and targeting tools to create bottom of the funnel lead generation conversions.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.