Instead, we would likely target all households with an income between $100,000 and $250,000 within 30 miles of the store with an emphasis on registered owners driving our brand.  An even better solution would be to analyse our previous sales to pinpoint the top producing zip codes and determine how far out from the store we needed to travel to reach 80% of our previous sales.  Next, we could suppress our existing customers from the list to ensure conquest sales and tailor a message to that audience.  Meanwhile, a parallel campaign could be run to identify opportunities from within the store’s customer database who had purchased more than 24 months ago and may be re-entering the market.  Although the general campaign to both segments would be some form of “Buy Now”, the delivery of this message should be drastically different given the context of each relationship.

Next week we’ll discuss Reach vs Frequency – The inverse curves

The goal of course is to reach the ideal frequency for your message to influence a decision, however the ideal frequency for a message can vary based on both medium and the consumer’s place in the purchase cycle.  However, no matter where someone is in the sales cycle or the medium, the campaign message must be seen more than one time.  Historical evidence aside, I’m fairly certain that the Egyptians created more than one papyrus flyer, and that the ruins in Pompeii had the same message on more than one wall.

The lesson here is to develop a plan focused on delivering a consistent message over time across multiple mediums and most importantly, to stick with it for more than a single month.  There is no magic campaign in any medium that influences a purchase after a single view.

Next week, we’ll continue by exploring the individual elements of the basic formula for success in advertising and discuss “Reach” in greater detail.

Considering that people are awake an average of 16 to 18 hours per day, the total consumption of 12 hours of media may seem virtually impossible, but to be fair, you have to consider that a lot of that time is spent while doing other things. In fact, if it weren’t for multitasking we probably wouldn’t get anything done at all. The reality, however, is that in a “media day” we are not limited to the traditional 24 linear hours we use to measure time. For example, everyone reading this has at one point or another picked up their phone, tablet, or laptop during a commercial on television. This creates a phenomenon known as “multiple stream media traffic”. As the number of simultaneous media streams increases, and our multi-tasking increases, a lot of content falls into the background; and as we continue to increase our multi-tasking, the total hours will grow despite the fact that the total number of physical hours remain constant. This increasing level of multi-tasking creates competition between media streams which reinforces the necessity for us to adhere to the golden rule of advertising:

“Reach x Frequency + Compelling Message = Success”

In a multi-tasking, multiple media stream world the question of where and how to put your advertising dollars can become a daunting task with multiple vendors parading pages of statistics regarding consumer behavior and the reach of their platform. Today, we are going to boil this down to the absolute simplest formula possible. Ready?

There are only 4 ways to sell a product:

• Print
• Digital
• Radio
• Television

Everything falls into one of those four simple categories. There are of course subsets within each, and I would never try to convince anyone that a newspaper ad is the same as a direct mail piece, or that video pre-roll is the same as an SEM campaign, but those are print and digital campaigns

How to allocate your advertising spend

This is where the rubber meets the road, and budget is going to determine everything! In the automotive world, we know from previous studies by NADA that the average shopper visits between 1 and 2 dealerships before purchasing. JD Power also recently released a report indicating that 96% of Americans began their vehicle purchase path online. So throw most of your budget at your digital spend, right? NO! Digital MUST be a component of every advertising plan, but digital marketing is not intrusive media. In fact, most digital marketing is more like a taxi. The customer will go nowhere until he or she decides on a destination, and this is where the advertising mediums that exist farther up the marketing funnel come in to play. To see a complete picture of the marketing funnel and where different media campaigns apply, click here.

The proper use of intrusive media to help strengthen your brand is critical. This gives you the advantage of having an in-market shopper tell the taxi go directly to your store to start their search. Choosing the right blend of intrusive media is influenced mostly by budget. Basically, if you can’t afford to be there with both a high reach and frequency, then stay away from it altogether. If you can only afford to do 3 weeks on a medium versus 4 to reach your goal, then do so, but I would never recommend compromising beyond that. For example, if your budget forces you to choose between 2 weeks of cable, or 4 weeks of radio at a higher frequency, then choose radio every time.

Plan by Quarter or pay more

Too many times, I see clients budgeting month by month rather than setting up a marketing plan for an entire quarter at a time. It requires exactly the same amount of work to layout an entire quarter at once rather than in monthly increments and in most cases, it also gives you additional buying power when dealing with radio or cable representatives. Your monthly incentives may change, but your themes and best-selling models will not. Don’t sell yourself short and consume more of your time than necessary with the trappings of launching monthly marketing campaigns.

Audit Yourself

As we approach the second quarter, force yourself to go through the exercise of auditing your expenses across all your marketing efforts. That means listing out EVERY spend you have in your budget. Include your direct mail, television, radio, website provider, SEM, SEO, newspaper, and don’t forget to list your 3rd party lead providers such as Autotrader.com, Cars.com. If you’d like a worksheet to help you lay everything out, give me a call at 813-334-5291 or let me know on Linkedin and I’ll get something over to you.

Every organization should have a funnel of some sort, and the most popular one that I can recall is likely the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) featured in that famous scene with Alec Baldwin in the movie Glenn Gary Glenn Ross. Odds are that you are already using some variation, but are you focusing your advertising dollars in the correct part of the funnel? Much like the sales funnel, the #marketing funnel has multiple stages from the broadest to the most narrow. At the top, consumers become aware of your product or service, contemplate a purchase, and eventually come to a stage where they must choose between you and a competitor.

Operating farther up the funnel in the awareness and #branding segments allows a broader dialogue to take place which organically creates the opportunities to discuss benefits over competitors which are more important earlier in the cycle. Examples of branding and awareness messages can include advantages of working with you, or special promotions and events.

Advertising and marketing is responsible for the generating traffic and interest in a product or service at the top or middle of the funnel and as these consumers begin to engage with the marketing or advertising programs, they convert into opportunities and are handed off to the sales team to complete the deal.

Although many buyers conduct their own research comparing features and benefits of competitive products to guide themselves through the marketing funnel, they are influenced prior to the research stage “if” they have been presented with compelling branding and awareness campaigns. The mere fact that they are already “aware” of your offering eliminates the need for them to discover you this far into the decision making process.

As you begin to map out your 2016 marketing plan, you can use a very simple test to ensure that you are not relying too heavily on any one part of the funnel. Using the image, identify how much of your marketing dollars are allocated to intrusive mediums, and then compare that amount to the direct mail, email marketing, digital, and search. If you find that the budget is skewed heavily in one segment, you may want to re-evaluate your spend to get the most for your money.