It’s time for marketing to grow up and embrace cross-channel campaigns
Guest post by Andy West, Chief Development Officer, Hotwire
It’s 2015 – yet marketers are still approaching campaign planning like it’s 1995.
That’s the stark conclusion of our research into how marketing decision makers approach multi-channel marketing.
Nearly half of those surveyed admitted that they were still running campaigns in isolation. 30% said the campaigns they run are not designed to work across multiple channels.
As an industry our instinct is still to focus time and money on the areas we have personal experience of. That’s most apparent when you consider SEO. It’s acknowledged by the industry as a whole as a vital area, but just 20% of marketers are allocating budget here.
When you consider how prevalent Google is in everyday life this is even more surprising. If you’ve bought a product or service in the last 6 months on anything other than a whim and didn’t Google it first, then you’re in a tiny minority.
It doesn’t get any better when you look at social media. Just 27% allocate budget here, in contrast to the 52% who spend money on online advertising. We’d bet our last penny that most of this spend is going on various forms of PPC advertising– effective in their own right, but are at their best when they form part of a wider campaign.
We now live in a world where it’s normal to engage with multiple channels, so it’s time to accept that this has to be the norm for marketing campaigns. We continue to make our decisions on a channel by channel basis rather than deciding on a single central campaign which can be implemented across channels.
What’s causing this? If it’s the stress of getting all your agencies to agree on a single idea, then find better agencies. Or if it’s because you can’t find an idea which works across all your channels, that’s probably a good sign that you’ve not found the right idea.
How do we address this issue? The starting point is, as always in good comms, our audience. Figure out who the targets of a particular campaign are going to be, then explore the channels they use. Once you’ve done this, you’re in a great place to create an integrated campaign.
Taking this audience led approach will help you create truly joined up campaigns. It will also get you thinking about the kinds of content you need nice and early. Visual and audio assets are often bolted on to a primarily written campaign. But, if you know from the start you’ll be using Instagram or anything else which requires more than just words, you can plan these in from the start.
You can download our whitepaper exploring these challenges in more detail here. Or if you disagree with everything we’ve just said let us know on Twitter (@hotwirepr) – we’re always up for a debate.
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