People Don't Watch One Channel, They Watch TV

Are you one of these people who can remember the bad old days of marketing from not too long ago? It was a time where on a daily basis a different person would be on the phone trying to convince you to do any, some or all of the following:

•       Buy some magazine advertising space
•       Put your company on a huge billboard
•       Print some T shirts with your slogan on it
•       Sponsor a sports team
•       Make a TV commercial
•       Sponsor a large event

The list goes on. The only problem was it cost way too much and it gave a seriously high level of control of your budget and its affairs to third parties.

Things have changed very suddenly. Channel diversification is now incredibly cheaper and controlled entirely by you in regard to online marketing.

Measuring the value of a Channel

I have written a blog discussing the calculation of the return on investment (ROI) of a marketing activity. What better way is there to measure the success of a specific marketing activity than how many dollars an activity generated?

It is best practice in regard to marketing your business to have ‘many irons in the fire’. If you are employing a broad range of channels to deliver your marketing activities, then you are more likely to achieve success or at least know which channels work best in your industry of expertise. You should expect that you may attract a client that you would not necessarily normally have access to than if you were following the same tried and true channels.

• Email campaign
• Social media advertising
• Google AdWords
• Banner advertising
• Retargeting 
• PPC

Furthermore, you may be investing in marketing activities in specific channels that are returning a low ROI and with this information you can hone and improve specific activities to a format that actually works – you can awaken a typically dormant channel that can become actively contributing to your lead generation and therefore sales growth.

Force Multiplication

I first learnt about force multiplication from reading some marketing wisdom authored by thought leader, Perry Marshall. He believes that businesses need to be in multiple media: Google search, Facebook, YouTube, retargeting etc. The number of media channels is your force multiplier.

What is force multiplication?

It was first heard from Prussian 17th – 18th Century military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz in his book On War.

To paraphrase the Prussian, if you’ve got infantry and navy (fighting the battle on two fronts), and my enemy has infantry, navy, special forces and air force (fighting on four fronts), then the enemy’s advantage is not 4:2, it’s 4²-2². The enemy has got a 12:1 advantage over you.

This is true in paid advertising too – especially in National markets.

By adding channel diversification to your marketing and advertising strategies, suddenly you’re spending 90% of your budget on the 10% of visitors that show real signs of interest in your company’s goods or services.

Then you can saturate a very tiny market and it’s not expensive to achieve. Your conversion cost typically drops in half. And when your conversion cost cuts in half, that usually means you can eventually buy 4X as much traffic.

This is a really good strategy and the world will slowly figure this out.

To learn more about channel diversification and force multiplication, click through below and let’s get started!