Pick the Right Media to Advertise In

A hundred years ago, there weren’t a ton of options for advertising your business.  You could post fliers or you could advertise in the local newspaper.  I suppose you could also have hired a town crier, but I think they had stopped doing that by the early 20th century.  Today, a business has no shortage of options for advertising.   From traditional print media, to broadcast media like radio and television, to internet marketing and everything in between. An advertiser’s biggest dilemma is picking the right medium.

I’m a firm believer that a proper advertising effort needs to be multi-pronged and needs to take advantage of several media.  That’s not where most businesses go wrong.  The idea that you need to diversify your advertising is accepted.  The issue that most businesses face however, is that they don’t differentiate between media and seem to use every media in the exact same way for the exact same purpose.  That’s just crazy.  A bicycle and an airplane are both transportation methods.  They both get you from point A to point B, but beyond that they have entirely different purposes.  You wouldn’t take a plane to get exercise or commute to work, and you wouldn’t ride a bicycle to your business meeting in Beijing (unless you live in Beijing, in which case, you almost certainly are taking your bicycle to your business meeting).  The point is: all advertising media serves the same basic purpose, but beyond that each medium has its strengths and its weaknesses and should be used as such.

This is true in online, just as in traditional media.  Different media work better for different demographics and for different marketing purposes.  If your target demographic is 18-25 year old males, are you going to advertise in Home & Garden?  Of course not. So, why do I frequently see products geared towards that 18-25 year old male demographic advertised on primetime television?  Have they not looked at the numbers?  18-25 year old males don’t watch primetime TV (unless it’s Monday Night Football).

Similarly, if you have a super-niche product, don’t buy a billboard.  Last time I checked, billboards were expensive and their conversion rate was low. How effective can they be for a product that only appeals to 1 in 200 people to begin with?

If your goal is to maximize your return on investment in the short term, use a medium that is going to do that.  In my experience, the best way to accomplish this is to use a pay-for-performance medium.  The best known is pay-per-click advertising on Google, but don’t neglect Yahoo or MSN (Bing!).  Also, aside from pay-per-click search advertising, there are a ton of pay-for-performance options coming about.  Some publishers are offering pay-for-performance video products now, where you have options of paying by the play, or by some form of other conversion.  This kind of advertising is great for short-term ROI maximization.  What it’s not great for is branding.

Far too often, clients will ask me what it would cost to appear first on Google’s search results page under the sponsored links section.  This practice has been popularized by certain agencies that have built an SEO-like price structure around SEM (pay-per-click) advertising and are selling “guaranteed 1st place” positions.  This dubious agency practice aside, using SEM to give yourself position is a bad idea, and is often a case of ego-marketing.  First off, the structure of SEM is based around garnering the most relevant click-throughs possible for the least amount of money.  For various reasons, using the medium to rank first on Google is like using a billboard to market a new fMRI technology.  First off, it’s ridiculously expensive.  Secondly, because it’s an auction format, if you have two players in the same market making the same mistake (and there always are), they’ll blow the roof off the cost of appearing first, and the only winner in that battle is the publisher of the ad.  Third, even Google has determined that you don’t have to be number 1 to convert well.

If you are looking for branding and exposure for your brand, use a different medium that will get a lot of eyeballs for a fixed price.  These pay-for-placement media have been around longer than pay-for-performance media and are still valuable.  Examples include buying ad space on websites or in print media, buying a spot in a directory, either print or online depending on your business, billboards, tv spots during appropriate time slots, etc.

You also see this issue arising a lot in newer media when advertisers haven’t quite figured out how to use the medium yet.  The topical example is advertisers who use Twitter as simply another broadcast advertising form.  These advertisers haven’t had tremendous success and are blaming the media for the short fall.  However, other advertisers, who are using Twitter for permission marketing are having great success in improving their brand image and connecting with their customers.

Bottom line, figure out what each medium is good for, and use it for its purpose.  Don’t ride a bicycle to Beijing.

What are your favourite targeted forms of media?  What do you use them for?