The ins and outs of a cross-media campaign

By Melissa Busch

Watch and Learn

Sometimes the best way to get a grip on a new concept is to show, not tell. So, here they are: examples of cross-media campaigns and how they worked.

Rockford, Illinois-based Trekk, Inc. created a cross-media campaign for NewPage Corporation to create awareness for its papers targeting retailers, catalogers and magazine publishers, Laura Terry, CEO, said. It used industry research to make the point that in a multi-channel world, print communications increase sales of products across all commerce channels—print, mail, in store and online. A chance to win $100,000 in print services provided a strong call to action for successfully generating quality leads for the company’s sales force.

The program’s objective was to create a promotional campaign that spoke intimately and directly with the target audiences and build a promotional database to continually collect prospect information and provide a foundation for ongoing communications, Terry said.

Print ads, web banners on trade publication websites and Facebook ads brought prospects to a general URL (g-URL), while purchased lists drove potential buyers to personalized URLs (PURLs). Qualified prospects already in the company’s internal database received dimensional mailers that included a folio, brochure and product sell sheets. Additional e-mails and letters targeted print service providers, merchants and paper brokers encouraging them to spread the word to their customers.

Terry added, data was very important in the development of the creative. It allowed NewPage to align messaging and imagery by segment and give special treatment to high-value prospects.

“NewPage was able to use this campaign as a springboard to continue the conversation with new and existing leads,” Terry concluded. “Collecting additional information about potential customers’ wants and needs allows us to deliver increasingly more relevant content and offers. Subsequent communications offered white papers and a paper selection kit to move prospects from awareness to consideration.”

Freedom, Pennsylvania-based MSP worked on a campaign with Metropolitan Sales Company, a hardware distributor operating in a highly commoditized industry.

MSP Director of Digital Solutions Chris Wright said the company wanted to increase the number of point-of-sale value-added resellers reselling its products and specifically increase the sales of its Epson line of printers. The 90-day multi-channel, multi-touch promotional campaign centered around a sweepstakes to win an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Caribbean. The campaign, dubbed “Sail Away,” used five communication channels, each with a PURL or specific, trackable landing page as the primary means of response.

The five channels included a highly personalized, multi-drop, direct mail with a PURL; a highly personalized, multi-drop HTML e-mail with a PURL, a full-page trade ad in a leading industry  pub with a g-URL, a link on Metropolitan Sales Company’s corporate home page with a g-URL  and telemarketing efforts by the  company’s sales team with a  g-URL.

“The success of each initiative was tracked by a custom report page that recorded and tabulated each method of response separately and sent real time alerts to the business development manager,” Wright concluded. “The results were exponentially higher than the single channel campaigns that were executed in the past resulting in a double-digit response rate.”

Legend has it, actually Wikipedia claims, one of the first successful cross-media marketing campaigns centered around disco.

According to the site, the first notable  occurrence of cross-media marketing occurred in 1977 with the release of the film "Saturday Night Fever" and its soundtrack. The single "How Deep Is Your Love" by the Bee Gees was originally meant to be recorded by Yvonne Elliman for an unrelated album, but it was decided by RSO Records to have the Bee Gees record it and released in an effort to promote the film. The film's release ended up promoting the single and the entire soundtrack.

Well, cross-media campaigns have come a long way since the Bee Gees. Campaigns have gotten much more sophisticated during the last 30-plus years with the help of technology. Understanding cross-media campaigns is the first step to building one and eventually making one work.

A cross-media campaign combines print, e-mail, the Web, personalized URLs (PURLs), QR codes, mobile and/or social media on a one-to-one basis and provides multiple opportunities to reach every recipient. It delivers relevant content and a call to action through multiple channels simultaneously as an integrated campaign. This type of marketing can be very helpful because it can provide a company or organization with an increased return on investment (ROI), more opportunities to interact with audiences, greater response rates and the ability to view customer responses and create a database in real time. The key elements of any well-integrated campaign are audience, media and message. The best channels to use vary depending on audience demographics and the campaign message.

James Michelson, founder and principal at Indianapolis-based JFM Concepts and author of "Cross Media Marketing 101: The concise guide to surviving in the C-Suite," followed this by saying, cross-media campaigns are really nothing new.

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The Anatomy of a Cross-Media Campaign

The Anatomy  of a Cross-Media Campaign