The Heinrich Report Blog

Anatomy of an Integrated Multichannel Campaign
 
         

You’ve got them surrounded. Mailbox, inbox, Facebook wall, Twitter stream, mobile device, search results, TV, radio, print ads …You can target customers from every direction at once. Yet as marketing channels have multiplied, one truth hasn’t changed: More isn’t necessarily better.

“Integrating, not just duplicating, your message across channels is one of the most important ways to optimize your marketing quickly,” says Heinrich President and Owner George Eddy. “You can reach a bigger or broader audience and convey your message via multiple touchpoints. The key is in knowing which channels work best in what combination for your campaign, so you don’t confuse customers — or your ability to measure response.”

Start with this guide to the anatomy of a smart integrated marketing campaign.

In this article:

Part 1: The Brains: Leverage the strengths of each channel.

Part 2. The Heart: Keep branding consistent across channels.

Part 3. The Core: Use interactive direct marketing to help you track response.

Anatomy of an Integrated Multichannel Campaign

Part 1. The Brains: Leverage the strengths of each channel.

You’re unlikely to see incremental lift from adding new channels if all you do is clone your copy and creative and deal it out as though all channels are created equal. And you can’t go too far in the other direction, either; few companies have the resources to become short-order marketers, cooking up unique campaigns to suit each medium individually.

The key is to focus on the unique characteristics of each marketing channel and leverage them to work with a single message. For example, you can use the dynamic, interactive capabilities of the Web to make phone orders easier to track.

Use online channels to track response from offline channels.

“Consumers go online for everything today,” says Heinrich Account Director Jay Rael. “They use the Web to read the paper, find stuff they need … The other channels don’t go away; I still watch TV, still drive by outdoor boards, still open mail. But today the interactive side is the hub. You can track campaigns a lot more easily by integrating interactive direct marketing channels into your campaign.”

Ivy Hastings, Interactive Marketing Strategist with Heinrich partner Fusionbox, agrees and offers an example.

“We just did a campaign for a client offering a free personal training session,,” she says. “First, we used search engine marketing to ensure that the client site appeared at the top of search engines for strategic keywords. Once users click through, the offer is so compelling that users don’t think twice about giving up their contact information. We know that if we can get the customer in the studio, they will convert. So, we use several mediums to drive that trial including drip email campaigns, phone calls and print.” Some people would want to make an appointment online and some would want to call and give their credit card number over the phone. To respond by phone they had to call the franchised location in their area — and that’s traditionally hard to track properly.”

The solution: Drive response to a lead-generation Web landing page — and make the phone number that pops up on the landing page a variable fed by a database.

“For another client, we use pay-per-click to phone tracking to track our ROI for pay-per-click advertising. In many cases, a potential customer will find a company online through paid search advertising, but pick up the phone to make contact instead of buying online or filling out a form. So, how do we track which keywords are converting? We dynamically serve up a different phone number for each keyword campaign. When the number is dialed the data gets tracked and we know which keywords and even which messaging is converting best. The customer had to go to the landing page and enter their contact information; their geographic area determined the phone number displayed for making an appointment by phone, if the customer chose to. So for each phone response, our client got information on the keywords that lead to the call through data tracking the call. (More on using landing pages and keyword tracking in section 3 of this article.)

Don’t include a channel just because you can.

The tracking powers of the Web aside, Rael points out that leveraging the strengths of each channel is also about making sure the channel is right for your objective.

“Using the right tools is the heart of an integrative campaign,” he acknowledges. “But it goes deeper, ‘What is the role of every one of those tactics?’ It’s not just, ‘I want to make sure I get print in there, or social media in there.’ It’s about, ‘Can this channel accomplish what we need to do?’ To use multichannel to its potential, you have to break down the objective and evaluate the validity of each channel for achieving that objective — and attracting the right audience.”

Rael shares a tale of one client that wanted to drive leads into their phone bank system. “Then they said, ‘Oh, and we want to create brand awareness, too.’ Those are two very different things” says Rael. We came back and said that while this promo would drive phone calls like crazy, we would be focusing on that versus trying to create brand awareness as a core objective.”

Keep reading the article with the links below.

Part 2: The Heart: Keep Branding Consistent across channels.

Part 3: The Core: Use Interactive Direct Marketing to Help You Track Response.

Click here to go back to the Heinrich Report.