Cross Media Marketing increases your brand’s reach and frequency by including more consumer touch points in a single campaign.  Cross Media Marketing’s core concept is to distribute targeted messages through more than one communication channel.  Each message should be unique, but also relevant to the other messages sent out through each of the various communication channels in your marketing mix.

Before creating and sending messages to your target audience, it’s important to come up with goals, objectives and a plan for not only how you’re going to reach your audience, but also with what messages you are going to reach your audience with.   Once you’ve created a plan and set goals, it’s time to turn to your database, sort, analyze and segment your target market into multiple like-minded groups to send relevant and targeted messages to each group.  By creating and sending targeted messages through multiple touch-points your increasing your reach and frequency and ultimately going to increase your return on investments.

Using both print and digital in your cross media marketing mix enables your brand to send targeted messages through more than one consumer touch point.  Print and digital media should not be seen as competing communication channels, rather complementary methods that help to increase your brand’s reach and frequency.  And according to the Power of Print Custom Content Blog, 75 percent of consumers feel the same.  They believe that print and digital messages should relate to each other and they also expect digital content to be similar to the printed content.

Cross media marketing campaigns should be used to gain brand awareness and ultimately increase ROI.  Using a combination of database management and variable data printing, both your print and digital cross media messages have the opportunity to be targeted and personalized to your audience’s interests.

Timothy Freeman

President

Print & Graphic Communications Association