WHAT IS 360 MARKETING?
If you’ve ever looked at our website, you will undoubtedly have seen the term ‘360 Marketing’ mentioned in various places, but what does it mean? It may seem pretty self-explanatory, but here we’re going to take you through our interpretation of what 360 Marketing means and why it’s critical to the success of any marketing strategy. In simple terms, it’s about a holistic marketing approach, using multiple channels to place your brand and messaging in front of prospective customers, seeing it through to the end to generate leads.
We often see and hear about marketing plans that are not delivering a return; there may be a variety of different reasons for this, for example:
- It needs to be aligned with the business’s goals, objectives and messaging. Using the wrong channels to reach a target market.
- Not targeting relevant audiences within chosen platforms.
- Lack of analytics or monitoring to understand what is working and what isn’t.
- Wrong goals, for example, focus on traffic, likes, followers, and call stats rather than leads and conversion.
- No accountability; someone to take ownership of success and failure and hold other departments in the business to account.
- And last, but by no means least, NOT FOLLOWING UP ON THE OPPORTUNITIES CREATED.
So, what does 360 Marketing mean to us…
What we are about to tell you is nothing new; it is simply about ensuring all marketing elements are aligned.
A key to any marketing is ensuring your plan is mapped out from cradle to grave, providing your brand, website and company goals and objectives are all aligned and reinforcing the same messaging across all marketing channels, right through to the humble ‘Telephone’.
Your website should form the hub of your marketing activities, whichever channels you use to reach your audience; these campaigns will typically drive users to your website, whether email campaigns, social media, AdWords (PPC) advertising or offline campaigns.
In this digital age, it is becoming commonplace for companies and even sales teams to shy away from the good old-fashioned telephone, turning to digital marketing as their golden ticket to success. This is often met with disappointment, leading to them wondering which ingredient they still need to include.
You can send email campaign after campaign to keep refining and improving (which is undoubtedly a reasonable effort and will lead to occasional results), but guess what? Those who pick up the phone and call the people who have clicked or opened their campaigns consistently generate leads from every campaign they do. Why? Because those contacts are warm, they’ve seen your brand, and you know what interests them before you even speak with them.
Let Digital Marketing open the door for you.
Given what we do, we certainly do not doubt the power of digital marketing when done correctly; what we are suggesting is that Digital Marketing can be used to create demand and create warm prospects, enabling your team to spend more time speaking with warm, qualified contacts and less time cold calling and cleansing data.
Telephone follow-up by people with in-depth knowledge of your products/services to individuals who have already shown buying signs leads to better conversion.
Digital Marketing has its place, but conversation builds relationships.
So, in summary, 360 marketing can be explained as a series of online and offline multi-channel marketing activities, which are planned and executed consistently in a joined-up manner, with actual human follow-up resulting in NEW Customers…
As previously explained, your marketing starts well before your actual campaigns are delivered, and measuring is critical to understand which activities are working (converting), which are not and, therefore, what needs refining or dropping altogether.
Please get in touch if you want to find out more or discuss any aspect of your marketing or online presence.
