What’s the best medium for increasing your exposure?

We get asked this question all the time: “What’s the most important thing we should do to boost our exposure/get new leads?”
 
Spoiler alert: The answer is: This is the wrong question.
 
There’s a great Ted talk of Malcom Gladwell discussing spaghetti sauce. A company was trying to decide which recipe/flavor was best, and thus would produce the strongest sales. So they did all kinds of market research to find “the best one.” And the results—another spoiler alert—were counterintuitive. There was no single best flavor.
 
As it turned out, different people like different things. So some people’s favorite is different from others.’ That’s not really shocking. But it sure dumps cold water on the “What’s the best flavor to market?” exercise. 
 
If you haven’t figured it out by now (and we know you have), an analogous situation applies to the way you promote your business. In short, there is no one best way. 
 
Certainly that answers one question. But it also poses another. 
 
The media mix
 
If you don’t know this ad-biz term, now’s a good time to learn it. “The media mix” is what’s used to describe the different media which an advertiser employs to promote themselves. “Media” encompasses a lot of things, such as: 

• Print: Magazines (remember those?), newspapers (remember those?), trade pubs, etc. 
• Direct response: This could be anything from outbound telemarketing (“cold calling”) to mailers and e-blasts. 
• Broadcast: Television, radio, cable, satellite. 
• Social media: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., etc. 
• Podcasts.
• Blogs.
• Video. 
• Your website. 
• Digital out-of-home: Think of ads that pop up atop gas-station pumps or checkout kiosks. 
• Paid search advertising. 
• Outdoor: Billboards, bus signage.
• Trade show materials. 
• And so on. 

 
That’s a lot to choose from. And that’s why we always get asked “Which one?” or “Which one is best for us?” 
 
Now you know the answer: It’s not one. It’s several. And thus the new question: “Which ones?”, as in, “Plural.” 
 
This is not easy to answer; nor is it simple. It varies by advertiser, by target audience, and by situation. That said, you can still crack this code. 
 
Parsing the media
 
Understand, first of all, that each medium has its own inherent strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who tells you that one particular medium is more effective than all the others is invariably a sales rep for that specific medium! In other words, don’t believe them. 
 
Here are some pros and cons to consider; these are just a few examples, to get you thinking in the right direction: 

• Radio, unlike print, monopolizes the audience for the duration of a spot (a commercial). In print, for example, you might see a competing ad right next to yours or on the facing page. Radio doesn’t work that way. It’s linear and temporal. 

 

• A great video or TV spot looks amazing and can be incredibly powerful. It can also be incredibly expensive to produce. 

 

• You can do targeted emails. But they can get trapped as spam. And you can’t even control the font that appears on the recipient’s end. 

 

• Direct-response mailers, done right, can be powerful. Done wrong, they’re simply junk mail. 

 
So you need to weigh the media’s pros and cons against your needs. That’s the single most important consideration. 
 
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re doing B2B (business-to-business) advertising. For social media, that says “LinkedIn” before it says “Facebook.” And you may be interested to learn that, in this mobile-dominated age, LinkedIn is the only social platform that’s actually desktop dominant. That affects how you use the medium, because now you know what devices (e.g., desktops and laptops) your content will appear on. 
 
Prioritizing
 
There are big ad agencies and media-buying companies (they “place” ads for you in different media) out there, and they charge a lot for what they do. We won’t say they don’t earn it; but we’ll also tell you that you can do most of what they do, yourself. 
 
As ever, the big considerations here are 1) understanding your target customer, and 2) having a well-crafted offering to present to them (what’s often called the customer value proposition). If you have those—no small feat, by the way—then the creation of the media mix is actually quite straightforward. You simply “back into” the needs of the given audience(s), prioritizing by the ones they’ll most likely frequent, tempered by what you can afford to spend. 
 
Don’t think for a minute that big budgets eliminate this exercise. Even the largest marketers out there—think of brands like Apple, Verizon, and Geico—sweat out the creation of their media mixes. You can be sure there’s lots of arguing going on behind the scenes. 
 
But now you know what they know! So you can get started. Or you can get help. We’re not media buyers, but we sure know how to help you prioritize your media mix. Contact us today to learn more. 

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