Choosing the right medium.

How do you know what advertising to use? Should you advertise on television? Online?

Choosing the right advertising medium (or media) is an important part of building a successful advertising strategy. The types of media you select will determine your budget, the types of customers you'll reach, and the type of awareness you'll generate about your business.

Each platform has its own unique strengths and weaknesses that should be considered before it is selected as part of your campaign. What is the best medium to reach your customer?

Your Media Options

Find out what advertising works best for your business.

Online

Advertise where prospects are searching for or reading about your business. Online is cost-effective to run year-round, and can drive an immediate response through clicks and phone calls.

Television

Now cost-effective for the local business, television has an incredibly high prestige factor and is great for brand awareness or direct response. Television is a longer term platform, but users can see an exponential growth in response the longer they run.

Newspapers

Easily reach prospects with offers and promotions, but don't count on greatly increasing awareness of your brand.

Outdoor Advertising

Reach a captive audience over and over, but you're limited to one image and basic messaging.

Radio

Reach large numbers of listeners, but with limited targeting abilities.

Direct Mail

Highly targeted, right down to the individual, but can be shockingly expensive to do well.

Magazines

Expensive, but high-impact with tight targeting. Your ad can be seen over and over in the same magazine for months, though tracking an exact number of impressions is difficult.

Yellow Pages

An old standby, but crowded and rapidly losing effectiveness with the rise of the Internet.

Often the most effective businesses will use a carefully selected multi-platform mix to ensure they reach their ideal customers as many times as possible, as many places as possible, throughout the day.

Imagine that your prospect wakes up, reads the newspaper while having a cup of coffee, and listens to the radio in the car on the way to work. At the office, he checks e-mail and visits a variety of websites from his computer. He also listens to the radio on the drive home from work. Once home, he turns on the TV, flips to the news and goes through the day's mail. Later that evening, while watching sports on TV, he goes online to search for a gift for a family member whose birthday is coming up.

—“Using an Effective Media Mix,” by Kim T. Gordon, Entrepreneur Magazine, January 2007.

This example highlights many of the ways customers may be exposed to your message. Although your business might not use all of the platforms mentioned above, creating a marketing mix ensures that you reach your customers multiple ways and helps make your marketing memorable.

Figuring out the right mix of media may take some time. Survey your customers, learn what they read, listen to, or watch, and make sure you're using media that reaches the customer you want to target. Testing is key. A good rule of thumb is to try three types of media (e.g. TV, Public Relations, and Search). The right media yields the most traffic and phone calls. You'll know when you hit the right mix!