Creating a Cross Media Marketing Campaign to Boost Your Sales Potential

Today’s technology gives the modern marketer the option to take their most effective sales and marketing messages into different media. This type of cross media marketing lets you start a campaign in electronic or print media, for example, then after a suitable time for response has passed, move the campaign into the opposite media.

Here are some factors to keep in mind when you’re preparing your first cross media marketing effort.

• Know what you want to achieve: Before committing resources or sending out the first email or printed piece, know what you want the campaign to achieve. Do you want to acquire a certain number of new leads? Increase revenue by a specific amount? Get more subscribers for your newsletter? Quantified goals give you specific benchmarks you can measure progress against.
• Segment your database: Prepare your database for an effective cross media marketing campaign. Clean up any duplicate entries and remove data for inactive leads or customers. Create market segments that allow you to narrow down your mailings to specific niches, demographics or customer profiles that are most likely to respond to your marketing message.
• Focus your content: Create email messages and direct mail content that’s targeted to the market segment you want to reach. Strive for professional, compelling design and copy that will resonate with recipients and prompt them to take the action you want them to take as soon as they receive your message.
• Include PURLs: Creating Personalized Uniform Resource Locators to include on your media is a creative way to provide a special online landing page for each recipient, giving your target audience another avenue to interact and respond to your campaign.
• Know your procedures: Establish a process and schedule to follow until the end of the campaign. Adhere to these procedures and diverge from the plan only in urgent circumstances. When the campaign is over, analyze results in terms of the process you used, then take steps to change, add to or delete parts of that process.
• Track results: Use industry-accepted techniques and tools to track the results of your campaigns. For example, track e-mail open, click and conversion rates, include tracking codes on postage-paid return envelopes, and monitor what actions respondents took and when they occurred.

How could a cross media marketing program help your company achieve more sales? Are there particular media that could be more effective for you than others?