A cross-media advertising plan involves using different mediums to convey one’s message. It’s easy to allot a budget, determine the kind of media to be used, and execute the plan but not all cross-media advertising plans succeed. So what’s the secret ingredient?
Know What You Want
When it comes to advertising your business, you have to have specific goals in mind. For small and medium scale businesses, it’s tempting to just put your brand out there and wait for the numbers to come up. But when it comes to successfully launching a cross-media advertising plan, you have to have specific targets. Do you want to have more walk-in customers, a 10% increase in sales, or more online exposure? Know what you want and go from there.
Understand Your Niche
The next step is to understand your niche. A cross-media advertising plan can be implemented regardless of your target market’s age group, race, or gender. Remember that you have to completely understand your chosen niche or target market before settling on media platforms to advertise on. Some businesses opt for radio or print and combine it with online ads only to be disappointed at the end. Not all combinations work. AB testing is not the most cost effective method of determing the right advertising mediums so a thorough research on your niche would be a wiser step.
Make It Coherent
Although it’s important for cross-media advertising campaigns to have similar features/style/trains of thought, it is important that you make the ads coherent and specific to the medium used. For example: although Facebook ads can have as much as 60 words in a post, a car wrap or a billboard will have to heavily rely on the brand image or logo in order to make an impact.
Outdoor Advertising + Online Marketing
For some advertisers, the magic formula is outdoor advertising plus online marketing. Although outdoor advertising can be much more expensive, outdoor advertising still reigns supreme as evidenced by big companies such as Amazon, Ebay, Google, and Facebook – all of which employ outdoor advertising to promote their online brands. This is especially important information for businesses or companies that exist solely on the web – although it’s very important to rank high in Google searches and build an active community on Facebook, don’t make the rookie mistake of overlooking outdoor or offline advertising. At the end of the day, outdoor advertising reigns supreme and a billboard cannot be clicked on or blocked in one’s browser.
Know How to Monitor
Lastly, know how to monitor. This could be harder for those who choose outdoor advertising methods. So this is what you can do: add a call to action that is easy to monitor. Do you add your Facebook page or Twitter handle and encourage likes/follows for discounts and freebies? It’s completely up to you.