Think Quality Over Quantity

Gone are the days of big media spending, at least for a while. Aside from a few media categories showing slight growth (mostly online), 2009 was an absolutely brutal year for the media business, particularly television advertising. (For a particularly startling snapshot, see this LA Times item)

Sure, companies all over the globe are jumping into social media, but the reality of that phenomenon shows that 75% of budgets are still under $100k, and most of that is dedicated to Human Resources. Twitter your heart out, but smart marketers know that, while it’s important to participate, social media won’t get you all the way home.

It’s relatively easy to try lots of new things, and with something new everyday, there will be no shortage of distractions. Delivering results demands a higher quality strategy. So while we all need to keep thinking about innovation, we still need to dedicate space in our heads for best practices and bankable marketing operations.

Quality isn’t all about media choices

For most travel-related businesses, it’s fairly clear that you can’t be all things to all people,and that certain consumer segments deliver a greater proportion of your business than others. Combining this fact with the scarcity of mass media dollars formerly used to blanket your message over wide swaths of the marketplace, it’s imperative to think about the quality of your positioning and your message. Simply put, you probably can’t afford quantity, so you better optimize the quality.

If you have the luxury of a real media spend, you better know that it’s well targeted, and reaching the audience you know will buy. The C-suite isn’t likely to have much patience for marketing strategies that haven’t embraced the realities of our current economic climate.

To notch up the quality, reengineer your thinking to get intensely focused on sending the perfect message, to the perfect consumer segments. This works better than mass media efforts, shows more return, and requires far fewer resources. It’s not as easy as simply buying GRPs, and requires some deeper thinking and tougher planning, but makes much more sense strategically.