Marketing is the core of any successful business. If you have the right marketing machine, you create a continuous dialogue with your prospects and leads.
There could be various objectives for the different marketing campaigns:
- Creating awareness
- Maintaining top of mind awareness
- Encouraging brand trial
- Helping customers to buy more products
- Increasing the purchase cycle
- Rewarding loyal customers
- Improving brand perception
- Other
The objectives that we aim to achieve dictate the channels we need to use for that specific task. Moreover, the success of campaign depends not only on the right channels that we use but also on the message that we relay to our potential customers.
“The medium is the message” is a phrase that Marshall McLuhan coined in his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”.
Imagine you are holding dinner at the best restaurant in town; a Michelin Star Chef prepares the food. The message might be the same, but the use of different channels would maximise the turnout to that dinner. The opposite applies as we cannot use the same message on the various channels that we are using for our campaign.
In 1994, I had the pleasure of working with one of the leading communication planning frameworks in the world, MCA or Market Contact Audit, introduced by Integration and its founder Oscar Jamhouri. Over the years, many companies have tried to copy that concept, but have not reached to the essence of MCA, not its black box, is used by leading companies around the world. The actual result of this product is that it assigns a power index to every channel a brand want to apply for the different marketing task.
Finally, the key to a successful marketing campaign measures the return on investment for every communication channel used, rather the collective ROI.
Testing and measuring are key to get the best value for each pound spent, as this will provide us with longevity for our budget, big or small.
