Diversification: The Key to Sustained Ad Success
Engage your audiences everywhere.
by Tate Morgan
- Diversifying your advertising strategy means adopting an omni-channel approach to marketing.
- Advertising across multiple platforms provides a fail-safe environment for your campaign’s success, and improves your customers’ overall brand experience.
- A wider range of advertising channels allows you to more accurately test creative and determine a winning advertising strategy.
“A wise man doesn’t trust all his eggs to one basket,” – Miguel De Cervantes
Even though business owners have heard the old adage time and time again, there is a tendency to go “all in” on one advertising channel or strategy at a time.
With advertising strategies becoming more and more sophisticated, consumers are expecting higher levels of attention. Focusing strictly on one channel, ignoring consumer preferences, and failing to personalize ad efforts to your audience could have a negative effect on the marketing campaign ROI.
Diversifying you advertising strategy ensure customers are engaged at every level, giving an encouraging sense of awareness and care.
Take Advantage of Omni-Channel Marketing
Focusing your advertising efforts entirely on one channel restricts your likelihood of actually reaching your target market. Ignoring channels altogether can mean missing out on significant portions of your potential audience. Your current customers miss out, too. When you fail to reengage your customer base in the places they exist naturally, your brand becomes less top-of-mind and more of an afterthought.
You also give up leverage and control.
With looming lawsuits, tech and data hacks, and technical glitches, focusing on a single advertising platform could mean trouble if something happens to a particular channel. An omni-channel approach diversifies your advertising efforts and creates fail-safes should any one platform go down.
Omni-channel marketing also focuses on opportunities for customer interactions. Increased engagement requires a cross-platform user experience. Integrating your web and social experience with your email, text, TV/OTT, and traditional ads offers a cohesive, memorable brand experience.
If you have brick-and-mortar locations, bring them into the loop by utilizing Google My Business posts and publicly displaying signups to your text and email campaigns.
More than 70% of consumers want omni-channel experience, but only 29% say that they get it. By streamlining your omni-channel marketing strategy, you can improve customer satisfaction rates and gain a competitive edge.
Pro tip: Don’t confuse omni-channel and multi-channel marketing. Multi-channel means using numerous marketing channels to reach customers. Meanwhile, omni-channel involves connecting multiple channels with each other so all touchpoints a customer has with your brand are unified.
Find Valuable Opportunities for A/B Testing
A/b testing plays a significant role in the success of any marketing strategy, from paid search ads to email marketing. Even a small change in the ad copy or creative design can make a difference between substantial conversions and high bounce rates.
When you diversify your marketing efforts, you get the opportunity to see which creative strategy works the best for your audience. Your ROI depends on your having an understanding of your consumer behavior in relation to your brand.
While creating an omni-channel strategy sounds labor intensive, you can reuse your most effective creative across all of your campaigns once testing proves a significant winner.
Optimize Your Paid Search Marketing Budget
While it may seem that marketing diversification may take a serious toll on your budget, in reality, it can reduce your expenses.
With diversification, you don’t need to depend on the prices set by your chosen marketing channel. When one of the channels increases costs, it won’t affect your budget substantially. However, by putting all eggs in one basket, a price increase could break the budget or force you to look for alternatives.
A prime example is LinkedIn’s advertising floor. Unlike Google or Facebook Ads, LinkedIn sets a minimum cost per click to run ads on the platform. Should LinkedIn ever choose to raise this minimum, your entire ad strategy is only marginally affected if you are diversified among ad platforms.
Discover Opportunities for Using High-Quality Content
High-quality content is a multifaceted tool for achieving high rankings, retaining clients, establishing authority, increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and much more.
By utilizing different marketing tactics and channels, you get multiple opportunities for content publishing.
From well-optimized landing pages to authoritative blog posts, diversification lets you share as much content as possible, thus affecting your company’s bottom line and increasing marketing ROI.
Capitalize on Email Marketing
Some companies fail to capitalize on email marketing since they believe that other channels are more efficient. In reality, email marketing can become the strongest part of your campaign, generating a whopping 3800% ROI.
Email is a trustworthy and highly personalized channel. By allocating at least some of your budget for email marketing, you can increase conversions, boost customer retention rates, generate leads, and provide more value to your target audience.
Even the most efficient social media marketing campaign can’t always achieve the same ROI as email marketing.
Generate Organic Traffic
By focusing on one marketing channel or tactic, you lose the opportunity for generating organic traffic. Even if you have a large marketing budget and spend it all on paid search advertising, you may not see the desired effect on your company’s profitability.
While paid search ads are great for lead generation, you need to implement other marketing strategies to secure conversions and retention. Using several channels allows you to attract organic traffic to your website and boost conversion rates substantially.
Companies with low marketing budgets can achieve excellent results by focusing on organic traffic and optimizing their paid search advertising expenses.
Gain Access to Valuable Data
An omni-channel marketing strategy gives you valuable insights into consumer behavior on and off your website. With the introduction of Google Analytics GA4 (formerly Analytics 360) and data visualization tools like our Advantage Reporting™ dashboard, you can see exactly what actions lead your audiences to become customers. With AI-powered analytics on the rise, you can use the gathered information to streamline your marketing strategy.
The data you collect while interacting with customers through one channel can help you adjust tactics across all other channels and aid with message personalization.
Preparing for Market Changes
The COVID-19 pandemic showed the world that stability is a myth. Markets tend to change rapidly and without warning. If you are using a limited set of marketing tools and channels, even a small market change could affect your entire strategy.
By diversifying your effort, it’s possible to stay afloat if one of your tools or channels suddenly becomes useless.
Diversification is the key to advertising success since it allows you to reach the entire target audience, improve customer satisfaction, cut costs, and prepare for market changes.
Without diversifying your marketing efforts, you could miss valuable growth and development opportunities while losing market share.
In-house and external teams can work together seamlessly to further diversify your advertising efforts. Reach out to Advantage Strategies today to book a free 30-minute strategy session, and see how your business can grow with a diversified advertising strategy.
Copyright 2020 Advantage Strategies, LLC