Customer journey – picking your media

It is vital to understand the typical customer journey to understand how consumers become aware, consider, choose, buy, use, re-purchase and recommend. At each point of the journey, different media can reinforce the message and create greater relevance and urgency in the consumer’s mind, generating a response and ultimately a purchase.

For example, TV is famously good at generating awareness and consideration, which, in turn, increases response rates to other media. TV is thought to lift response to direct mail by between 20% and 40%.

More recent analysis shows a distinct ‘multiplier effect’ for online media too.

Email and direct mail ‘multiplier’
At a more tactical level, email, direct mail, and the principle of multiple contacts work to deliver significant uplifts in results. This can be in the form of email teasers to a direct mail or reminders to follow up.

Facebook’s ‘multiplier’ on email response

More recent studies show that Facebook advertising seen by e-mail recipients and openers results in a 22% higher purchase rate and therefore higher email response rate.

The aim is to get your ‘consideration’ marketing to appear to consumers before they are exposed to the ‘purchase’ advertising. To optimise the multiplier effect ensure that your media is timed correctly. You can use a simple flowchart to visualise this.

This offline example would need consideration of online advertising, paid search, social media advertising, as well as ‘conversion’ offline media including direct mail and door drops.

Key points to maximise the multiplier effect

• Understand who you are targeting and why.
• Ask yourself: what action do you want them to take?
• Understand the typical customer journey and the differences for key segments. Sometimes it can help to work with media specialists (internal or external).
• Prioritise media which best encourages the consumer to become aware, consider, choose, buy and use our product or service.
• The multiplier effect works best when the timing of different media matches the role it plays in the awareness to purchase cycle.
• Testing and measurement of a multi-channel campaign will highlight the multiplier effect and potentially how to improve it for maximum performance.

Join the discussion

As a customer, which media channels do you engage with most frequently? Which media channels do you ignore? Leave your comments below.

Use the discussion section below and let us know your thoughts. Once you’re happy with your contribution, click the “Mark as Complete” button to check the Step off, then you can move to the next step.