Is Your Media Fully Integrated?
It Should Be
By Rebecca Barr, Vice President, U.S. Media
You know you are a direct response fanatic when, with great confidence, you can shout out authoritative statements like “put your money where your metrics are!” or boldly stand on your platform of ROI and trump any theories that GRP’s and CPP guarantee orders and sales. Yes, when it comes to bottom-line results, DR enthusiasts are proud of their results.
It’s true – the allure of DR is compelling. The concept of knowing how every dollar is performing is what we strive for, but are we missing something by managing each media vehicle individually?
There is something to be said for customers ordering your product because they “have seen that ad on TV for years”, the lift in online sales with the latest radio campaign, the boost in a retail product launch as a result of that concentrated market TV buy, or even the search marketing terms that are optimized to mimic the key messaging in the latest two-minute TV spot. None of these leads and sales can be accurately attributed back to the exact media source that generated them, but they are the intrinsic branding benefits of an integrated marketing campaign.
The fundamental purpose of any integrated marketing campaign should be to evaluate the overall bottom line and less on the specific channel. Are you DR devotees squirming in your seats yet?
Too often, different mediums and channels of response are placed in silos. In fact, too often, many marketing departments themselves operate in silos.
A well-planned, integrated marketing campaign will eliminate the silos and deliver three key benefits to your overall campaign:
- You will get more bang for your buck
- Achieve greater reach, frequency and awareness
- Conversion rates will soar
Let the channels complement each other
The tactics here are to let the mediums complement each other. Specifically, let’s look at how radio and online can complement a DRTV campaign.
Radio, in some instances, has proven to be a great driver of leads, but as a stand-alone medium, radio will not typically produce an ROI as efficiently as TV; however, as a complement to your television program, radio can be a very effective tool.
Radio allows you to increase your frequency by targeting a niche demo at different times of the day that DRTV may not allow. Additionally, while TV is the most effective tool in reaching the masses nationally and providing blanket coverage, radio allows you to penetrate key target markets.
TV allows you to verbalize a call to action (toll-free number and URL) and also display it throughout the spot, granting more visibility to the viewer. This is why DRTV should be considered the anchor to your campaign. Radio, as a complement, is going to be used to drive home that call to action and increase retention.
This is where online weaves its way into the integrated mix. The URL in the TV and radio spots should always be unique to the campaign, not driving to your corporate homepage. Additionally, to boost conversions, your microsite or landing page should be thematically linked and designed as a continuation of the sales cycle. Think of your landing page as the call center on the web.
Taking the notion of integration one step further, even with a unique URL, we know there will be a percentage of customers that will traffic directly to your homepage. To help bridge that gap between offline and online, invest some of your marketing dollars into paid search terms derived from the messaging in your TV and radio ads. If your ad repeats a unique offer, don’t just bid on synonyms of your company’s service or product, include key phrases from your ads as part of your bidding matrix to help close that gap.
Summary
We have all been trained to be myopic campaign managers, but the key to a successful integrated campaign is considering the big picture. If you consider TV, radio and online as three individual campaigns, you may see a success, a failure and results that you can’t quite quantify. By taking a step back and looking at TV, radio and online as one campaign, you will recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.