In one of my previous blogs, “The madness in online advertising”, I wrote about how people burn their money in online ads even when it brings nothing much in return.
This made me think about it a little deeper.
The most likely reason why people spend madly in online advertising is, they tend to have a superficial approach that just creating Google/Fb ads and taking the campaign live should do the work. But things don’t work that way. It is not that straightforward.
Your marketing campaigns should be like a ‘Carrier strike group’ – a formation of fleet with many types of ships & boats with different purposes and abilities.
Let me rephrase the same thing, your marketing campaign should be targeting your target audience and their peer groups, TA’s influencers with different creatives and messages on different platforms, ideally, wherever they spend time. The more cohesive your campaign is, the better your results.
Now, this statement highlights one basic thing – “marketing campaigns should never be done in isolation”
Successful marketing campaigns require a full understanding of your target audience and their decision-making process. The campaign should be designed with respect to the industry, ticket size, nature of product/service, the life cycle of the product, the emotion it serves, and the complete psychographics.
When one launches an isolated campaign, it is bound to fail. In some cases, it brings a negative brand value. Kick starting a digital campaign without an attempt to know the buying decision is not going to work.
Even when P&G reduced some $200 million in digital spendings, it didn’t make any repercussions on their sale because the deducted amount was disproportionate ad spendings. It was only a part of their digital budget.
Why did I say Carrier strike group(CSG)?
CSG means, an operational formation composed of usually an aircraft carrier, at least one cruiser, a destroyer squadron of at least two destroyers or frigates, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft. A carrier strike group also, on occasion, includes submarines, attached logistics ships and a supply ship.
Source: Wikipedia
If your campaigns are targeted, cohesive and thoughtful to address all the decision-makers, it is surely going to bring results, especially when the ticket size is higher.
Once you find what works, you can try to dismantle how it happened in the real world, only then you can improvise further. Talking to your customers is the key here, analytics & metrics will be helpful only to some extent.
What if your budget doesn’t allow you to go with CSG campaigns? Now, you know your carrier alone campaigns are not going to work, you better wait and plan it thoughtfully with a few campaigns which connect well and launch it to reap the benefits. Something similar to this picture at the least.
The more isolated your campaigns are, the lesser the benefits.
How to make cohesive campaigns?
Deep diving into market segmentation, and how well you connect the segmentation information within your campaigns is the key.
Even the biggest carrier cannot go to war alone – they need support and has to handle other activities which are not the carrier’s strength. Campaigns that are linked together and have common goals perform better, link campaigns and bring results collectively.
- Digital can have group campaigns
- Digital and OOH can have group campaigns
- Videos and OOH have group campaigns
- Digital and CTV can have group campaigns
and much more combinations.
Not only that, connecting online campaigns with offline(if you have initiated OOH campaigns) works much better.
The important thing to note is the more the campaigns that are connected with each other, the better the performance of each campaign because the world we live in is getting complex and intertwined in many ways.
