Anyone who follows the MGR Blog or works with our MGR Consulting Group marketing agency knows that we always advocate a well-diversified marketing strategy, no matter which industry or sector you’re in. I personally use the Multichannel Marketing graphic below all the time while discussing marketing options and plans with our clients.
Imagine if you were riding a bicycle with wheels that have only 3 or 4 spokes. Obviously, your ride wouldn’t be very smooth and you would be just one small bump on the road away from seeing one of your wheels completely collapse resulting in you taking a nasty tumble. For the same reason, if your marketing is just based on 3 or 4 channels, you could do well for a while, but you would also be taking a huge risk of losing quite a bit of business when one of your channels makes an unexpected change to their policy or algorithm, or they cancel your account for no apparent reason, or the company simply disappears. We’ve seen all of those scenarios many time and the outcome hasn’t been pretty.
Need more proof? As I write this article, Google has now confirmed what we already announced in a previous article, making what could be its clearest statement to date about this topic. The latest Penguin update it launched back in October is going to continue indefinitely. It was originally promoted as a slow roll-out, but now we know that it’s basically an ongoing process that is not going to stop. This is also confirmed by Search Engine Land and other major SEO sources around the Internet.
Google’s Statement:
That last big update is still rolling out — though really there won’t be a particularly distinct end-point to the activity, since Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates. The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now.
And that’s just Google. How’s Penguin affecting you? Have your rankings suffered as a result of this roll-out? Or maybe your marketing is primarily focused on Social Media. Unfortunately, Social Media channels are not much different. If you’re putting most of your marketing efforts into social media promotions, all you have to do is look into Facebook’s latest updates to realize that the organic impact and reach of your posts is now down to approximately 6% of your audience. What that means is that your hard-earned 100K Likes for your company’s Facebook page will result in a mere 6K of them seeing anything you post in their News Feed… unless you pay for your ads. Talk about seeing a reduction in referral traffic!
With just these two examples, you will understand why we like to build marketing plans for our clients that are absolutely rock solid. Marketing plans that give you more CONTROL and evolve around your BRAND while they also include as many spokes/channels as possible to make your “marketing wheel” consistently strong regardless of which channel becomes temporarily less effective for you due to external circumstances.
Ask yourself. What’s the one marketing aspect about your business that you can always control? The answer is “Your Brand.” You can’t control what Google does. You can’t control Facebook’s marketing decisions or magazine circulation numbers, advertising banners impressions, or YouTube’s search algorithms, etc. But you can always control your brand. If you focus your marketing on exposing your brand through as many online marketing tools and channels as you can afford, rather than just targeting 3 or 4 random channels at a time, your brand will always survive. In effect, you will get to a point where your brand stands on its own and you simply use all available marketing channels as a tool to “promote” your products and services rather than to “satisfy” the demands of the individual channels.
Remember, Google is not your customer. Neither is Facebook, or Pinterest, or YouTube or any other marketing channel. They are all businesses just like yours that have done an excellent job marketing their brand to capture a large and loyal audience… and yes, in the process, increase their profits. You should do the same by setting your focus on capturing and growing your own loyal audience. And how do you do that? You’d be surprised how sometimes it’s the small projects that generate the largest brand awareness for your business. It could be an innovative Infographic, or a Photo Gallery highlighting a particular product or event, or a Blog Article that you send out to your email list as an eNewsletter, or an Interactive Map showing other attractions near your location, or creating a Mobile Web App that your customers can add right to their mobile device home screen, and the list goes on and on. We have dozens of examples produced for our clients on our own MGR Lounge website that you can see for yourself. All of these are small and “shareable” marketing tools that will provide a great ROI for your business without breaking your budget.
Like diversifying your investment portfolio, diversifying your marketing portfolio through a Multichannel approach will minimize the effects of any individual channel changing its policy or suddenly no performing as originally expected. Whether it is Facebook changing its advertising policies or Google applying a new algorithm that cancels out your previously achieved rankings or YouTube not displaying your videos for some unknown reason, or your Email Marketing Service flagging your account for review, with a Multichannel Marketing approach centered around your brand, you will be able to enjoy more consistent and long lasting ROI than any company that simply relies on a single source for all of its marketing.
How do you approach your own marketing? What plan do you have in place? Please, share your thoughts with me below. And if you have any questions, our team at MGR Consulting Group can help you design the proper Multichannel Marketing Plan for your company.
Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR)
