With the economy turning, marketing budgets are increasing and companies are putting more dollars into their digital budgets than ever before. Entering without planning is a high risk and it is best to plan your efforts accordingly.
“Simply put, converged media is similar to diversifying your financial portfolio,” says Steve Latronica, Director of Interactive Development, The Pita Group. “Rather than putting all your eggs in one basket or spending resources – time and money – on one form of media such as paid, owned or earned efforts, developing a strategy around set objectives and determining how you are going to measure these efforts can pay off nicely.”
These days, paid media has moved beyond traditional with fast-growing digital advertising surging ahead allowing marketers to choose from banner ads that are less expensive but carry placement risks, to more expensive, share-of-voice ads that are displayed on the premium real estate of a page. If you want to aim high, you can opt for pre-roll video ads that grab your audience making page placement irrelevant and giving users a way to engage with the ad.
Owned media is organic content including search-friendly blog posts and content. These efforts add value as they reflect knowledge of the voice of one’s customers, knowing what they really want and taking into consideration and delivering products and services that fit the target audience. Driving your visitors from paid ads to well performing organic content that has been tested creates a successful experience for the user. The key is making sure the content is relevant to the ad that the user has clicked.
Finally, earned media are the fruits of public relations’ labors – press releases and pitches that get picked up and covered by media outlets producing shareable news clips. This provides for opportunities to share the media links on social media platforms and encourages sharing, which will hopefully lead to organic growth.
If you’ve taken inventory and are monitoring user trends while noting what your audience is reacting to, you may find they have grown bored with the buzz worthy and not giving you the bite you were hoping for. Social media is a great way to test content to see how your audience reacts.
Ready to exercise your marketing muscle this year and leverage your spend? Enter converged media. “By opting to deploy all three media tactics, you can accelerate your results because now you’ll be firing on all cylinders,” says Latronica. “You can take baby steps and monitor within a two-week window of executing, which will allow you to make immediate changes based on your audience’s reactions.”
By using multi-faceted strategies, you’ll be able to support your marketing goals and make the most of your marketing budget. Gone are the “spray and pray” days as well as burning out the single media source. The key to defining your marketing campaign goals – driving web traffic, increasing brand awareness or lead generation – is to be concise. Latronica cautions against blurring the goals, “You have to be clear on what you are trying to accomplish before implementing any of these media tactics because you need to be able to measure results and tie them back. If you are focusing on driving traffic to your website, you can’t be disappointed if your social media following doesn’t increase.”
To learn more about integrating convergence media into your marketing campaigns, please give us a call! We’d value an opportunity to work with you!
