Why combining channels works
As the saying goes, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.
It's tempting to stick with what's familiar, like Facebook and Google ads, especially when budgets are tight. But as we've seen time and again, relying solely on these channels can be risky.
Think about it: how many times have you heard from fellow advertisers who were blindsided when their once-successful campaigns suddenly flopped? It happens more often than we'd like to admit, and it's a stark reminder that diversification is key.
Making ourselves available
When it comes to online ads, there are numerous factors that can throw things off course. Some are within our control, like pricing and customer service, while others, such as economic shifts or supply chain issues, are beyond our influence. However, we can control how we approach media buying for brand growth.
Research from the Ehrenburg Bass Institute and Byron Sharp's groundbreaking work How Brands Grow highlights the importance of mental and physical availability for marketing success. Essentially, it's about ensuring that people remember us and can easily access our products or services.
It should be no surprise, then, that effectively limiting digital ‘physical’ availability to just two channels—albeit ones with big reach—is not only limiting our growth opportunities but also a risk when conditions change.
Combining for effectiveness
That's where combining different channels comes into play. According to Analytics Partners' research, campaigns that integrate multiple channels tend to deliver a higher return on investment. While Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz, and Andrew Stephen's study No Silver Bullet showed there’s no single right way to do it, their research looking at over a thousand advertising campaigns showed that combining ‘traditional’ channels with digital platforms in a single effort more often than not performed better than digital-only drives.
They recommend channel combinations supporting “complementarities where one channel fills a role that a group of others cannot”. In other words, trying as best we can to maximise the mental and physical availability of our brand and products / services for the audiences we’re trying to target.
The magic of TV
TV emerges as a standout medium for boosting overall campaign performance. Research from Mediacom, Wavemarket, and Gain Theory underscores the power of television, including linear and VOD viewing, to enhance the effectiveness of other channels. What’s more, television is the least risky medium in terms of the variance in investment returns.
This is great news not just for big-spending advertisers. With the advent of addressable options such as Sky’s AdSmart offering for media buyers with modest budgets, just about any marketer should aim to make TV part of their channel mix.
Perception to performance
The perception that TV advertising is expensive can actually work in our favour, as Les Binet & Sarah Carter note in How Not To Plan. It can create a positive image of our brand's popularity and credibility, enticing customers to engage with, and buy, from us when they come to making a purchasing decision.
In essence, diversifying our channels mitigates risks and opens up new avenues for growth and audience engagement. Let's aim to strike the right balance and make the most of what each channel, especially TV, has to offer.
