Developing a winning marketing campaign can be a daunting task.
It takes a lot of time and energy to plan, create, and execute a marketing campaign – and even more, if you want guaranteed results!
The good news is, that the more time you spend on the front end, the better your results will be after your campaign is launched.
It’s really about setting yourself up for success. If you skip ahead or fail to properly complete each process, you’ll notice that critical elements of your marketing campaign are missing – or worse, not generating results.
That’s why I wanted to take some time and put together a few steps that, if you follow them properly, will result in a truly successful marketing campaign.
It’s a waste of time to do all of the work that goes into developing a marketing campaign if it doesn’t deliver the results you need!
Last week, I walked through some key initial first steps to any winning marketing strategy. I explained the importance of setting goals, establishing ideal customers, understanding what motivates these customers, discovering and communicating your “why”, creating a target audience, and (last, but not least) crafting an irresistible offer.
This week, I want to focus on one specific step – and the critical choices that you have to make within that step.
Once you’ve made your way through each of the steps laid out in my previous blog, it’s time to move onto another critical part of the “planning” process…
Choosing the Channels You Need for the Ultimate Marketing Campaign
If you’re in sales or marketing, then you might already be aware of this critical step.
Choosing which channels to utilize for a marketing campaign can be incredibly stressful. In fact, this step can make or break your entire strategy!
This is because no marketing channel is created equal – each one has its own unique strengths, whether they reach a specific audience or they create a higher level of awareness.
Before you get to this point of the process, you’ll want to know exactly who you’re trying to reach and what action or reaction you want that audience to have from your marketing.
This is why the steps laid out in my previous blog – How to Plan & Execute a Winning Marketing Campaign the Easy Way – are so important to follow before you come to this point in your campaign creation.
The channels you choose to carry your carefully crafted offer, the channels you decide will best achieve your desired outcome or goal, the channels you believe will reach your target audience and ideal customers, are the channels that you will shape the remaining aspects of your campaign around.
Moving forward, the channels you choose for your campaign will determine your budget, your headlines, your design, and more.
So, how do you choose which channels are best? Should you use multiple channels? What about all the different digital marketing channels?
There’s a reason I’ve dedicated an entire blog to this topic!
Let’s get started…
1. Digital Marketing
I’ll just go ahead and knock out the obvious choice.
Digital marketing in 2019 isn’t an option – it’s critical to the success of your campaigns. Oh, and don’t just optimize your messaging and design for mobile – start with it.
That said, digital marketing comes in many forms. Paid search, display, and remarketing are just a few options. In addition, digital marketing has its own channels to choose from – like Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
So how do you choose which channels to incorporate or prioritize as you plan your marketing strategy?
You have to understand the benefits of each one. The good news is, that each one has pretty clear benefits, which makes it easier to prioritize the ones that will best serve you as you seek to achieve your goal(s).
While there is no end to the possible combinations you can choose from, I’ve gone ahead and highlighted a few that you definitely don’t want to overlook during this stage of your process.
Paid Search
Paid search is essentially paid advertising within search engines.
This means when someone goes onto a search engine and types a query (like Google Search), your ad can be the answer to their search.
Digital influences nearly 60% of vehicle purchases at the dealership and paid search is where most shoppers will begin their journey, which is why it’s crucial for dealers to utilize this invaluable tool
The top channels for paid search are Google and Google Search Partners, Bing, and Yahoo. There are other search engines, but these are the ones that I recommend you focus on.
If you’re a dealer and someone searches “Cars For Sales Near Me”, then you want your dealership to be the answer to that search.
For this reason, paid search and, more specifically, Google, is one of the channels you’ll want to prioritize for any winning marketing campaign. For example, there are over 68,000 Google searches per second… aka, Google gets a lot of traffic.
Remarketing
Have you ever visited Amazon and looked at a product, or maybe even added it to your cart, but left the website? And then as you are browsing on Facebook, see an ad for the exact product you were just looking at?
This is known as dynamic product remarketing and it is extremely powerful. Not only is the message more relevant to the audience, but it is also more cost-effective to advertisers as these ads typically convert at 2-3x the rate compared to traditional retargeting ads.
There is little doubt that throughout the next several years, competition will only grow both in size and in capabilities. The only way for you to stand out from your competitors is to personalize your ad messaging with your target audience. By utilizing your dealership inventory feed, along with dynamic website targeting, you can ensure that you are always serving the relevant vehicle to the relevant audience.
Social Media
The key to getting the most out of your social media is understanding what channels provide the best value for your dealership.
The most important thing for you to remember is this: if Facebook was a country, it would be the largest in the world.
And, it provides the largest reach and broadest range of audiences of all the social media outlets and the highest ROI of any channel.
Facebook also allows you to target specific people and promote any type of content you choose.
The only downside is that everyone knows this and the world of Facebook advertising is extremely competitive. But, as a dealer, you’re used to competition.
Don’t forget: Channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and more can be overshadowed by the results found on Facebook, but each of these outlets provides different strengths.
Consider how many active users are on each, how many you can target, what type of user is on each, and what they might use each channel for.
Video
There is no doubt that video advertising (and video marketing in general) is on the rise. It was comforting to hear from one of the top digital marketers in the world, that video is definitely something to focus on.
Another reason to focus on digital video is the overall effectiveness. Nielsen performed a study where that measured the impact and effectiveness of television advertising compared to digital video and the results were almost hard to believe.
They showed that when viewers were shown ads across both mediums, only 45% of viewers paid attention to television commercials, versus 83% of viewers that paid attention to digital video ads.
Additionally, it was discovered that nearly 55% of television ads were not paid attention to, due to viewers’ multi-tasking during the ads being shown, whether it was from being distracted by another device or switching channels. Also, the study’s “impact of attention” research uncovered that 2.4x more attention was paid when ads were shown with full sight and sound compared to platforms with audio muted and using subtitles.
So, not only are digital video ads more effective than television ads, but video ad consumption has grown drastically over the last several years. Ultimately, more advertisers are simply taking advantage of the more impactful medium of video, compared with static images or text.
Dealers have a huge advantage in this space, as many are already producing television ads and promoting them. Why not re-purpose your television ads, upload them via YouTube and Facebook, and reach your advertisers across the web?
Furthermore, you can utilize retargeting and customer-match audiences to ensure you are reaching only the most relevant audiences.
2. Direct Mail\
Digital advertising and digital direct marketing (email) allows for increased interaction with a specific audience, it’s cost-effective, it’s data-driven, and it produces real-time results!
It’s no wonder the world of advertising is quickly turning digital.
But, according to one study, digital marketing is actually harder to process than the direct mail we’re so quick to avoid.
The study compared the effects of direct mail with digital media (email and display ads) by recording electroencephalography (a brain imaging method that records the brain’s electrical activity at the surface of the scalp using sensors) and eye tracking (tests that measure the gaze and movement of the eyes using a small, specialized camera).
The study proved that direct mail actually requires 21% less cognitive effort than digital marketing.
In fact, when asked to cite the brand name of an advertisement they had just seen, recall was 70% higher among participants who were exposed to a direct mail piece (75%) than a digital display ad (44%).
This allows direct mail to compliment today’s latest marketing strategies in a way that on one could have foreseen!
Additionally, according to The Household Diary Study by the United States Postal Service, the average household receives 15 pieces of mail per week – less than three pieces of mail each day.
With less competition in the mailbox than the inbox, direct mail has more value and finds itself receiving more attention and responses than ever. USPS reports that 93% of households take time to sort their mail each day and 83% enjoy receiving mail.
More importantly – studies show that millennials are all about direct mail! A recent Forbes article stated that, “…the biggest surprise may be that millennials’ affinity for mail, in general, surpasses that of other generations. They are more likely to scan their mail and more likely to take time to read it and to show it to others.”
3. Email
Studies have shown that email delivers the best marketing return on investment – outperforming other forms of marketing by over 10 percent.
The problem is, that the number of emails sent per day simply means that inboxes are flooded with messaging that may or may not pertain to the recipient. This kind of messaging is quickly filtered out.
Sometimes the email is opened, but the content isn’t relevant to the reader and is sent to the trash. And, if the subject line doesn’t catch their eye or the sender isn’t familiar, the email goes into the trash without even being opened. What’s worse is when these emails are filtered out before the reader even sees them!
If you want to take advantage of the quick, easy, and affordable marketing tool that is email, you have to make sure these emails are relevant, catchy, and response-worthy. If they don’t meet certain criteria, they won’t be read, opened, or even seen!
While I highly recommend utilizing email in any successful marketing campaign, it will be your job is to figure out exactly what messaging your target audience needs to see in order to increase your open and clickthrough rates – but I’ll give you some more specific tips on this in my next blog!
By following best practices and narrowing in on the type of messaging that best resonates with your target audience, you’ll see your ROI rise and, ultimately, gain more qualified leads than ever before.
Put it All Together for the Strongest Results
By combining the success of the classic direct mail marketing campaign with strategic use of digital and email marketing, you can achieve the highest return on investment and will gain the best results.
This type of marketing strategy allows marketers to create a campaign that’s unique and stands out in a world that’s oversaturated with normal marketing methods. It compels consumers to respond because the marketing is different from the methods they’ve learned to ignore.
Digital marketing has widespread capabilities and highly targetable information that’s incredibly relevant to your audiences.
Direct mail marketing is able to do something digital marketing is incapable of – it can be placed in your target audience’s physical mailbox where they must see it, touch it, and respond to it (their response can be yes or no, but they must interact with the piece directly).
By putting together a marketing campaign that combines these channels, you’ll be offsetting the weaknesses of digital marketing with the strengths of direct mail and vice versa.
This type of omnichannel approach will lead your target audience through each step of the buyer’s journey with marketing that responds to his or her actions whether they’re sorting their mail, checking their email, or browsing the web.
That’s how you put together a winning marketing campaign in 2019!
Of course, there are still a few more steps to the process – but I’ll get to that next week.
If you want us to show you how to effectively increase your brand awareness and sales, you can reach out to us at learn@jandlmarketing.com or just schedule a meeting.
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