In today’s marketplace with millions of companies vying for a customer’s attention, using only one or two forms of marketing will not effectively reach your audience. If a business utilizes several different marketing channels, it creates a better chance of engaging and eventually converting potential customers into sales.
However, before jumping into every marketing avenue you can think of, you should start with creating a strategy that complements your budget. To get the most out of your marketing dollars, focus on consistency and frequency in the marketing efforts that you decide to pursue.
It’s good to start small with whatever budget you have and benchmarks within your marketing strategy. As goals are met and you dominate one market (like running a consistent commercial on a particular radio station), your business can think about other ways to increase its reach.
The strategy you create should be flexible and easily adjusted depending on your campaign’s performance. However, you also want to give a campaign a reasonable amount of time to prove its worth, depending on the nature of your business and offer(s).
How to Track Your Marketing
Your website and social media networks are great resources to pull insights and analytics that can come in handy for setting benchmarks and tracking campaign performance. And luckily, radio integrates well with these two efforts.
Consumers are exposed to variety of different types of marketing every day. How can your marketing stand out from the clutter? A business must consider several different touch points for reaching a customer and getting them to remember your brand and take action. This is the exact reason why all marketing efforts must be integrated and consistent across all platforms.
For instance, your automotive dealership maybe be looking to create a summer promotion. Your marketing strategy consists of running radio spots about it, but also backing it up with social media updates and announcements on your website. These are all of the different consumer touchpoints for them to find out about your brand.
Integrating Your Efforts
Since you are spending money and time on all of these different campaigns, you should have a way of tracking what’s working. Analytics reports should take into account all of the different touchpoints that the consumer is exposed to that could’ve caused them to take action. However, how do you truly know what channel triggered someone to buy your product or service?
For example, a potential customer may have been exposed to your brand by hearing a commercial on the radio, seeing a billboard, noticing an ad as they were browsing the internet, and saw an advertisement in your favorite newspaper. Which of these impressions caused them to take action? Was it a TV commercial or a combination of all of these things? The consistency and frequency of the advertising messages was probably just too hard to ignore. Check out this blog post on why consistency is your marketing plan’s secret weapon.
Think about how the marketing plan’s tracking and benchmarking data reflects all of these different touchpoints. Effectively tracking your different marketing campaigns simultaneously is possible as long as you have set very clear goals for each channel. Then it’s all about organizing the process in a way that shows clearly if — and how — you are meeting your goals.
Consistency Is Key
When using multiple forms of advertising, make sure that everything is stable across the board and that you can clearly measure growth rates. If you see an increase in engagement and sales within the marketing channels that are being utilized, you know it’s working.
For businesses that use radio advertising, Zimmer Radio & Marketing Group will work with advertisers to set goals and determine what your business is wanting to achieve (e.g. overall sales growth, sales in a particular product or service, etc.) We also advise scheduling regular meetings to revisit the marketing plan and be sure we are on track for optimal results. Contact Zimmer today for more information about how we can help businesses just like yours.
