Less haste, less waste (1/2)

November 2008

It’s a sobering thought that UK enterprise alone spends tens of billions on marketing every year. Even if we make a conservative estimate and say that just 10% to 25% of this is spent ineffectively, we’re looking at a huge waste of money. With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that cost-effective marketing has become a priority for many marketers.

Knee-jerk tactics

There isn’t usually a very good reason for squandering a marketing budget. Often it’s just a case of an organisation basing its promotional tactics on what’s it has “always” done in the past. Typically, this also involves putting the cart before the horse: companies are all too eager to decide what media to use (e.g. a press release, a seminar, a newsletter) without thinking hard enough about what they want to achieve with those media in the first place.

Another problem can occur in larger organisations when marketers are more concerned about securing the biggest possible budget for their own division than they are about what’s best for the company as a whole.

Media-neutral planning

The best way to avoid wasting a marketing budget is to use media-neutral planning (MNP). On a simple level, this means that you take a closer look at your target audience and its needs before deciding how to implement a campaign.

This should inform a more balanced and appropriate choice of promotional tools and media. An organisation can save thousands if it determines that, say, a cheap email marketing campaign is better at reaching the audience it had hoped to reach with expensive print advertising.

MNP often results in using a variety of media working together, an approach that is more effective in reinforcing your messages than using media in isolation.

Beware of agency bias

If you are engaging an external agency to facilitate your communications, MNP can be a double-edged sword. If the agency specialises in just one area – advertising, PR, or direct marketing, for example – it may influence your choice of media in a way that benefits them, rather than you or your customers. If an agency is free from these constraints, it is more likely to welcome an open approach to the briefing process and the opportunity to impress you with an effective campaign.

How to do it

In part two of this article, we look at how to do MNP in such a way that the campaign actually achieves what you want, and how to get past the ‘media-neutral’ stage and choose the right media for the job.

Read part two

 

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