When it comes to investing, there is a saying that goes “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” While the intention of the saying was to highlight the importance of diversification in relation to an investment portfolio, the wisdom of the statement applies to the assembly of a well-balanced digital marketing mix as well. On-page search engine optimisation (SEO), link building, pay per click (PPC), outdoor digital advertising, and social media all have their own values when it comes to assembling a well-designed digital marketing campaign, and failing to account for any one of these may hamper your campaign’s, and brand’s, success. If you want to be really granular about your campaign (and you should), each social media channel does different things and reaches different audiences, so distributing your budget appropriately among these will require some study as well.
If the task of balancing the value of all these digital marketing channels does not seem worth the time and effort needed to study each one, you’ve come to the right article on the internet. Here are the best reasons for you to diversify your online ad spending today, along with some tips on how to do it.
Each Channel Does Different Things
This was mentioned in passing early, but its importance bears repeating: each digital marketing channel is designed to do different things and fills a different gap in the overall campaign mix. For example, investing heavily in PPC ads, as long as they are correctly targeted and land with the correct target audience, will yield relatively quick results, whether your campaign objective is increased engagement, sales conversions, brand awareness, or all three. However, depending solely on paid ads for your campaign’s entire lifespan could quickly bloat your marketing budget. On the other hand, investing in extensive content marketing efforts like on-site SEO and link building will take a while to be effective, but after a certain amount of time, the improved performance of your website on search engines will result in campaign success as well. These tactics are also some of the most cost-effective ways to market a brand online.
Smart digital account managers know the different advantages and disadvantages of each channel and should be able to tune the campaign to its objectives and budget accordingly. The best ones can even change up the timing of a campaign component to make it more appropriate for the status of the campaign; for example, a veteran campaign manager might recommend buying PPC ads early in a campaign’s lifecycle, then eventually transition to a content marketing campaign once some initial buzz has been created around the brand.
Your Target Market’s Presence Is Spread Across the Internet
While your target audience may share a number of similar demographic characteristics like age, average income, and location, the probability of them using the internet in the same way is relatively low. In order to capture as much of them as possible, your brand will need to spread out its marketing spending across the channels that your target audience is most likely to frequent.
For example, if your company is a family restaurant, you probably won’t need to spend on paid ads within B2B channels like LinkedIn. Instead, you may want to focus on hyperlocal ad placements targeting people in your general vicinity, along with some boosted posts on Instagram or Twitter for easy brand engagement. This strategy widens the mouth of the sales funnel that you’re creating, while also preventing your campaign from bloating too much on advertising you may not need in the first place.
Costs Are Managed Better This Way
By keeping your advertising budget distributed among different digital channels, you effectively apply the investment principle of “averaging down”; that is, keeping a lid on your average cost per impression. For example, say you direct your ad budget to a single PPC ad that charges you $2 per click, and say it gets 2000 clicks in a month, for a monthly ad spend of $4000. This makes your average cost per impression $2.
If instead of doing this, you were to cap your PPC spending at $2000 and reroute the other $2000 of your budget to an aggressively boosted social media campaign, you could wind up with 1500 likes and comments. This results in 2500 total impressions between your PPC and social media campaigns, with an average cost per impression of $1.60, or savings of about 20% on your campaign.
Finally, spreading your campaign budget around in this way insulates your brand from sudden price hikes and fluctuations in the various channels you engage with. This makes programming your campaign much easier overall.
It actually makes perfect sense that some of the language of investment makes an appearance in ad campaign design as well. Advertising spending, after all, is a form of investment, and without it, brands would have a difficult time establishing themselves and building a customer base.
