Effective marketing communications

Here’s a quick tip for increasing the return on investment (RoI) from your marketing expenditure – add another ‘channel’.

A study by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) suggests that multi-channel campaigns give better results for the same budget.

A campaign that runs on social media and in printed magazines, for example, gives better returns than one which uses just one of those channels.

The ARF found that you can increase RoI by 19 per cent on average simply by going from one channel to two.

Each additional channel beyond that further improves Rol.

Advertising is more likely to be “encoded in long-term memory” if people encounter it in multiple media, says the ARF.

The research was mostly conducted with consumerfacing brands which use TV advertising.

But if the underlying principles are sound then there are lessons for smaller campaigns – not just those selling to consumers but those selling to businesses as well. Ofcourse, picking the right channels and managing them effectively is also important. Recent research from Royal Mail says that 69 per cent of UK small businesses prefer to develop and manage all their marketing in-house – and 16 per cent outsource it all. That leaves 15 per cent which use a mixture of external agencies and an in-house team to manage their market-ing. I think that this group has the right idea.

Marketing is so fundamental to a business that it cannot be entirely outsourced.

By all means bring in some external expertise, but senior management involvement is essential to set the strategy.

An obvious analogy is an overseas journey.

You need to decide on the destination and the departure date but you can out source the provision of the aircraft and the piloting.

If you had to rely on your own skills and resources you might be restricted to walking! Similarly with your marketing. A small business may not have the skills to undertake multi-channel marketing.

If all you know how to do is place adverts in newspapers, that is what will define your strategy if you aim to do it all yourself.

Following the crowd (the 69 per cent who do all their marketing themselves) may mean getting lost in the crowd. The ‘stand-out’ businesses are going to be those that combine the best of in-house and external resources across multiple channels.