If you were honest you probably checked No to having a marketing plan, No to having a budget, and Yes to using the least expensive online platforms. Those answers point to the very reasons you are not as successful as you desire for being in front of your customers, clients, and prospects. In many companies marketing is an afterthought. Kind of a ‘When we have the money, we’ll do some’ or ‘Sales are weak, let’s run and ad somewhere.’ Even companies with more marketing focus look for the cheapest way to be in front of the market, not necessarily the most effective.

All of the listed outlets should be in your regular arsenal. Each has a different reach, addressable execution, tracking and analysis capabilities. Each is important to be harnessed and coordinated to each other. The more appropriate the layers of outlets the more successful every campaign will be. Here is where budgets come into play. No company has unlimited funds to market or advertise. Cost benefit analysis allows an educated deployment of dollars to where the effect, in a coordinated effort, will be the most productive.

Each of the avenues listed above have facets that the others do not. Social media has a reach of thousands and more when targeted to specific demographics and lifestyles but can be difficult to track. Print publications, unless very specific audiences, can be expensive and require a trackable mechanism such as a landing page that readers are driven to or a unique telephone or email address to inquire or order. Print ads can be very lucrative especially if there is the ability to narrow the audience to your best prospects.

Direct mail is a workhorse in marketing if deployed scientifically. Because of the cost per unit you need to data mine the lists you will utilize. Mailing lists are built based upon very deep data, lifestyle, buying, social conditions, ethnicity, religion, and many, many, more data points. The idea is to narrow the field to the most likely recipient that would have interest in your offer.

In today’s world of cable stations and OTT (Over the Top Television), targetability of households, and even the day and time of ad placement is affordable to most marketers. That doesn’t even touch the online opportunities for retargeting content online. It is the wild west for attention and eyeballs, but it is now pocketbook friendly to more companies than ever before.

My point overall is not just one of the mediums listed above are the be all end all for any marketing effort. The reason the industry is known as integrated marketing is because it is the correct mix of multiples that brings success. The days of let’s place an ad, a post, or radio spot are over, or a least they should be if companies don’t want to be throwing money away.