Big city marketing on a suburban budget: Part 3

Part 3 of 3: An integrated approach to optimizing your advertising and Brand Capital

If you were to visually draw out a good Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) plan, it would look like a spider web; all initiatives linked by common threads and the closer to the center you get, the more sticky and dense the strands get.

The initiatives along the outer edges of the spider web would be traditional advertising media: radio, newspaper, magazines, outdoor and television. These vehicles are low-involvement and are best used for getting your brand exposure and gaining awareness. They are also the most wasteful from an ROI perspective as it is difficult to track their effectiveness in a meaningful way.

The next level in would include some higher-involvement tools with better ROI. These would include online advertising, direct mail, sponsorships, trade shows and cause marketing.

Go in another level and you would see PR, e-mail marketing and consumer events. These are high-involvement, high-ROI tools that give you more intimate access to your customers.

The next layer includes your most interactive and highest-involvement tools as a marketer: your web site and the point-of-purchase (wherever that may be: online, in your own store or restaurant, in a mass retailer, etc.)

The very center of the web is your desired result. That could be a sale, acquiring consumer information, gaining web traffic, etc.

A potential customer that first hears about you through one of your low-involvement initiatives can slip away fairly easily. The trick is to walk them down to the more sticky tangly levels where you are closer to getting your desired result. Using a TV commercial or billboard to plug your web site or a retailtainment event is a great example of how to do this. Use your online advertising to promote a new product and have users click-through to your web site for a free demo which tells you where and how to purchase.

Obviously many companies don’t employ all of the tactics on my spider-web drawing in their IMC approach. The ones on the chart are just examples of the types of things that you can keep in your arsenal as a marketer or business owner. The important thing to remember is that you need a mix so you have several ways you can reach a customer and several tools that you can use to drive towards your goal. “If you build it, they will come” does not work as a marketing strategy. Focusing all your resources on a great web site or a great POP strategy is not enough. You need other initiatives to drive traffic to those places where you can make your best pitch.

There are also many places where you can build Brand Capital in the IMC web. And you could really use any of the tactics to drive brand capital. But don’t try to do it everywhere… Building capital for your brand is a goal for the campaign as a whole, not for each particular initiative. It will be easiest to track your success if you choose one place on your IMC web to be the primary driver for Brand Capital. And it will work best if that place is very close to the center like on your web site or at the point of purchase. You should always focus on the places where you have the chance to make the most meaningful impact on a consumer. The places that you’re most likely to earn a sale are also the places that you’re most likely to optimize Brand Capital and begin a long-term relationship with a prospect.

A great case study right now is Panasonic, who is pitching their new flat screen TV’s. All the communications (TV, magazine, Internet) revolve around a teaser about a mysterious woman wearing a red dress to a funeral. Although they’re selling TV’s, they want to do that through a more interactive medium than TV or magazines, so the call to action in all advertising is to visit Panasonic.com to find out more about the woman in red.

When you get to Panasonic.com, you can play an interactive game to discover why the woman wears red and enter a sweepstakes (using your email address). And if I solve the mystery, I get an online coupon for 10% off anything in the Panasonic online store. The clues for solving the mystery, by the way, are seen through the “eyes” of Panasonic products like TV’s, digital cameras and DVD recorders. I won’t spoil the ending for you though… Check it out at Panasonic.com, it’s pretty cool.

And make no mistake, that Panasonic campaign cost MILLIONS. And no, not every business can do exactly what they did. But the idea is simple and repeatable at almost any scale.

It costs virtually nothing to run a sweepstakes. All you need is a means for collecting information and a prize. And it’s probably cheapest to do over the web just like Panasonic did. And then you need other means to drive traffic to the site. Panasonic used mass media, but you can use a sign, flyers, inexpensive internet advertising or an ad in your local newspaper. If you have a good prize and you get the word out to a good starter set of people, maybe even your existing customer base, you’ll also get a good number of people to enter based on word of mouth.

And even that small-scale effort, which would cost between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars depending on how you approach it, qualifies as an Integrated Marketing Communications strategy. Outline your objectives, create a message, spread the word using a mix of low-involvement and high-involvement media and you’re there.

In conclusion…

When you’re selling a particular product or service, you’re always going to be tempted to go after the low-hanging fruit when it comes to marketing and advertising. The message is simple, “buy my product.” And there’s nothing wrong with that approach.

But you can do a better job of marketing if you look beyond just “buy my product” and start seeing your goal as “buy my product regularly.” In order to that without the cash to throw behind regular mass media advertising campaigns, you need to look at more efficient means of communicating. Better ROI and less waste.

That’s why a strategy designed to build Brand Capital is such a good approach for so many small and medium-sized firms. You can build your brand on a small budget and stay top-of mind with your customers and your prospects by using their response to your last campaign to fuel your next campaign with little incremental cost.