Multi-touch campaigns reach out to your target audience using a variety of formats. With a consistent voice and brand, this type of marketing strategy revolves around the use of “effective frequency”—the number of times a potential customer needs to see your message and brand before acting.
The Magic Number
While marketing experts vary on the magic number, most believe that a message needs to be seen or heard anywhere from three to seven times before it makes its mark. According to John Philip Jones, author of several books on marketing and advertising, “…the phrase was really coined to communicate the idea that there must be enough concentration of media weight to cross a certain threshold—that there has to be enough of it before the consumer buys a product…”
Times have changed since the traditional marketing technique of creating leads from a single channel and assigning a sales rep to go after the lead. Today you need to choose the channels that will create maximum ROI. Options are: Email, Direct Mail, Social Media, Press, Website, Phone calls, Tradeshows, and Landing Pages. Once you know which channels your target audience uses, you’ll know which ones to use to promote your business.
ROI and Multi-touch Campaigns
If you’re among the 83 percent of marketers that are using single-touch campaigns because it’s easy to implement, think again. A study by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) in the USA suggests that multi-channel campaigns give better results for the same budget.
The “How Advertising Works Today” project spanned 5,000 campaigns for 1,000 brands in 41 countries accounting for a total of $375 billion in global advertising spending. It found that brands can on average increase ROI by 19 per cent by expanding a campaign from one media platform to two. Each additional platform further improves ROI with a five-channel campaign outperforming a single-channel campaign by 35 percent.
Increasing the number of channels paid off whereas just increasing the level within one channel did not.
Here’s an example: Think of the phrase “Just Do It” and what do you see? Unless you’ve been living as a recluse in the mountains of Siberia, the Nike slash immediately flashes across your field of vision. Why? Because we’ve seen it in magazines, on billboards, in direct mail, in social media and plastered across our television screens. That is the art of branding and multi-touch campaigns.
