All About Blended Marketing Campaigns

Do you have something special to offer from your business? Of course, you do! Blended Marketing Campaigns take your special offer or promotion and turn it into a sales-driving machine. Whether you offer a free consultation, a percentage off for a holiday, or a free product with purchase, there is always a little something that any business can provide as value upfront for potential customers. Keep reading to learn more about blended marketing campaigns, what they are, how they work, how much they cost, and how you can get started on yours today!

What is a Blended Marketing Campaign?

Creating the perfect blended marketing campaign is essential for any business looking to generate leads and nurture their customers from the first interaction, all the way through to the sale. For the sake of this blog, let’s pretend your business is a local health clinic. As a way to entice new, prospective clients, you would like to offer a free consultation to get them in the door. It’s a great idea, but now what? A Blended Marketing Campaign is what will get the word out about your business and your offering. It is exactly what it sounds like: a blend of a number of different marketing campaigns! Every business is different and has different needs when it comes to marketing. We find what your business needs and wrap it up in one easy-to-understand campaign.

Running a comprehensive marketing campaign that targets your audience is critical. Your audience is very specific. They live in a particular area, they have a disposable income, they are more likely to be a man or a woman, they are within a specific age range— the list goes on. We use that data to run your ads on multiple platforms and ad networks and track everything as one large campaign. If it is a lead-gen campaign, we set up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and program the leads to flow to the CRM. We can also train your employees to manage the leads using the CRM for the highest conversion (turning leads into paying clients) so that your shiny new promotion is a revenue-generating machine.

How Blended Marketing Campaigns Work

Blended Marketing Campaigns require a commitment of one to three months, depending on many factors. These factors include:

• Your audience
• Your budget
• Ad creative
• Responsiveness
• KPI
• Your goals

During this time, we continually optimize everything to improve results. It’s not just a set-it-and-forget-it campaign like most other marketing agencies offer. Instead, we measure the response and arrive at a cost per conversion. A cost per conversion is how much money it costs you to gain a new paying customer from the promotion.

After the initial testing period, if the cost per conversion makes sense, then we scale the campaign to generate more leads as needed. If the cost per conversion is higher than desired, we try changing the campaign parameters like the offer, the claims, the ad creative, and the audience targeting. Of course, these factors depend on how the ad is performing, which we will learn from reporting. Once we determine which of the campaign parameters needs to be adjusted, we take care of it and test again. Rinse, wash, repeat until your campaign is a success!

Developing Your Strategy

Now that you know what a Blended Marketing Campaign is and how they work let’s break it down piece by piece. Yes, we are willing to share all of our secrets! The more you know about what is going on behind the scenes, the more confidence you will have in your Blended Marketing Campaign and our expertise behind it.

There are several steps involved in creating your Blended Marketing Campaign and developing the strategy behind it. Many marketing agencies like to just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. While there is a little bit of a fun guessing game element to finding out what works for your business, it all needs to be rooted in research and proven strategies. Our research and strategy teams are the best in the biz, using only the latest and greatest tools and standards the industry has to offer.

Finding Your Audience

The first thing is first: We need to know who we are going to speak to. Learning your audience is what will determine the entire creative process as well as the ad placement process. Without discovering your audience, you will create and place ads that do not resonate with your target audience. This results in lower impressions, conversions and will ultimately lead to a failed campaign from the get-go.

An easy way of obtaining all this information to gain an idea of your target audience is to get a Target Audience Persona. A target audience persona outlines a typical member of your target audience. It is fictional representations of your audience, rooted in demographic and behavioral data that we gleaned from the Audience Insights report.

We also use a creative process called Empathy Mapping to dig deep into your ideal customer’s psyche. With empathy mapping, we learn how your audience perceives their world related to your products or services.

Finally, we take advantage of the work your competitors have already completed. By doing a comprehensive competitor analysis, we can learn more about what is already working with your target audience, what isn’t working, and how we can make it better through your competitors’ marketing efforts.

Creating Your Ads

Throughout the Blended Marketing Campaign process, you will hear your marketers talk a lot about “ad creative”. “Creative” is the blanket term used to refer to just about everything that goes into creating your ads. For example, placing ads require many types of ad creative such as:

• Writing the campaign idea.
• The campaign’s headlines, ad copy, call-to-action.
• Designing graphic banner ads in 20-30 sizes as per the requirements of each ad network.
• Writing a video script for actors and voiceover talent.
• Licensed Music for the video.
• Licensed stock photos and stock videos.
• Producing a video commercial

While this might all sound simple, it is far from it. There are many spokes on the wheel of your ad’s creative, and any part of it that isn’t right can lead to a failed campaign. Think of it this way:

• 50-somethings like different music than 20-somethings
• Women like different imagery than men
• CEO’s care about different news headlines than Teachers
• People of color like to see other people of color in their targeted ads
• People who live in Los Angeles like to see imagery of Los Angeles
• Hikers and nature lovers like to see videos about nature, not cityscapes
• Older women have different hobbies and interests than younger women
• Older generations get their news from other places than younger generations

This makes it very important to make sure that your ad speaks entirely to your target audience. The more correct and on-point it is, the more it will resonate with them and the more likely they will be to lead to a conversion.

Placing Your Ads

Once your audience has been defined, and your ad creative has been developed, it is time to decide where to place your ads. Depending on your campaign strategy, your ads are placed on one or more of the following marketing channels:

• Paid search ads on Google Ads Search Network
• Paid banner ads on Google Ads Display Network
• Local digital ads on Google, Yelp and Nextdoor
• Video ads on Facebook Ads and Instagram
• Video ads on YouTube
• Classified Ads on Craigslist, local newspapers, online newspapers
• Banner and video ads on Business Directories
• Geofencing ads targeting people who enter specific buildings or areas like your competitors location
• TV ads on cable and satellite
• Video ads on smart TVs and streaming devices

The placement of your ads is all dependent on your target audience. You may have a completely different ad placement than the business next door to yours, even though you both serve the same exact area. If the majority of your target audience makes their spending decisions online, it will not make sense to put your ads on TV or local newspapers.

Testing Your Ad Campaign

As we mentioned, most marketing agencies take the approach of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. With us, we root everything in strategy and research, but that’s not to say that it is 100% foolproof, either. There is an element of trying things to see what is successful or not, and nothing can 100% predict what will work or not work until it is tested. This even includes your target audience.

Are your ad campaigns generating leads? Are they driving sales? With Testing Your Ad Campaigns, we can get detailed insights into which ads are performing better and why. Once your Blended Marketing Campaign has begun, and your cost-per-conversion is high, we will assess to see what is not working. For example, if you are getting a ton of views but no click-through, it is likely that we need to change the call-to-action. However, it is also likely that we will need to change the offer. Furthermore, it is also likely that we need to adjust the audience to be larger or smaller. Which is it? We find out during the testing phase until we get our desired cost-per-conversion.

Comprehensive Reporting

Depending on the scope of the blended campaign, you may receive multiple reports via our project management tool, Basecamp. To make things simpler for our clients, our team will create a custom summary report where you can see the overall performance of your campaigns across all channels.

Don’t worry — our reports aren’t just pages and pages of numbers and colors that are difficult to understand. We use Google Data Studio to compile data from the various campaigns and distill it down to one or two pages. This means you’re only getting the critical information on the performance of your Blended Marketing Campaign.

How Much Do Blended Marketing Campaigns Cost?

This is what you really want to know, isn’t it? While keeping in mind that every campaign is individually curated, the cost of creating and running a blended marketing campaign generally consists of the following components:

• Ad creative. This is the cost of writing and producing the ads and commercials for your campaign.
• Setup Charges. The setup charge is the cost to create ad campaigns, CRM, and other infrastructure necessary to manage the campaign. It can also include training your staff to manage the CRM, such as your receptionist or front-of-house staff.
• Media Buys. This accounts for the airtime and media charges that are paid to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TV stations, and other ad networks where your ads run. This is usually the bulk of the cost and, as mentioned, all depends on your target audience.
• Agency Commission. This is the fee that Navazon charges for managing the ad campaigns. It covers the costs of continuous monitoring, testing, and adjustments of the ads, targeting, and your reporting.

Your Navazon strategist will devise a blended marketing campaign that fits your budget. Depending on your agreement and budget, creative and setup charges may be divided across the campaign term.

Getting Started

If you are ready to get more customers or clients, you are ready for a Blended Marketing Campaign. We will help with everything from developing your offer, researching your target audience, creating, placing, and managing the ads, and helping you manage all of your new customers.

Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency. This is accomplished through targeted graphics, videos, and websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics.

Ready to get started? Click here to contact us.