Cross-Pollination of Marketing

This excerpt is from an eMarketer article I read this morning. It documents a subject that has been coming up in a lot of discussions lately - the value and necessity of cross-pollination in your marketing efforts. There is no silver bullet that is going to bring you fame and fortune. No marketing tool that is going to make your business a success. You absolutely have to tie all the efforts together so they support each other.  It is a harder way to market. There are more pieces. There's more work to check all the details. In many ways, though it is less expensive. You can do many small things which can be easily adjusted instead of one big, expensive effort that is boom or bust. There is a lot of opportunity for a small business to be a successful marketer.  One manufacturer recently put on a huge happy hour / product introduction event. All the salespeople had to attend. Lots of money for food. Lots of money for beautiful printed materials. Lots of effort. But they picked an off night. Their name wasn't that well known. Less than 10 people attended. For less money, they could have sent a year's worth of e-newsletters to educate their prospects and build name recognition. They could have sponsored a couple of professional organization events and met the attendees one-on-one. Of course, they would have to join the organization and participate! They could have built a social media campaign to reach out to prospects. The chances of drawing a large crowd and wow-ing them a presentation that immediately results in a purchase are pretty slim. We're cautious consumers these days. But steady, cross-polinated efforts will bring steady, long term results.

For example, a January 2009 study commissioned by iProspect and conducted by Forrester Consulting showed that Internet users exposed to a promotional ad might not click on the ad itself, but often took some other form of action:

• 27% searched for the product, brand or company using a search engine.
• 21% typed the Web address directly into their browser and navigated to the advertiser’s site.
• 9% investigated the product, brand or company through social media or message boards.

Measurement of display ad effectiveness must take into account such cross-pollination, not simply click rates, in order to be accurate.

Full eMarketer article

Here's another really good example from Steven Groves' blog about a small coffee shop's efforts.  Good blog, by the way, if you're wanting to learn about social media.