360 marketing is, as the name suggests, a way of ensuring your brand is present all over the place, which usually means different forms of online and offline presence, such as in-street advertisement, social media, videos, podcasts, etc. However, resources (human resources, time, and money) are always limited. Therefore, you need to choose where and when to make a presence with your brand. Let’s imagine for a minute that you had unlimited resources to put your marketing strategy in place: chances are there are more efficient ways of using them than bombarding the whole of humankind with the same message.

Reaching your audience is a process that requires strategy and consistency. Since people interact in everyday life in more than one channel, understanding the platforms your potential customers use, how and when to send messages through them is crucial to succeeding in your sales strategies. 360-marketing is the strategy that strives to answer this problem. Keep reading to discover its principles and how it can help you take your business to a new level.

First of all, know your audience

Before considering what to do marketing-wise, the first step is knowing your audience and potential customers. Without doing this, it is utterly impossible to succeed in reaching out to the right people and closing sales. 

By designing your buyer persona correctly and doing the proper research on the things this persona likes (the places they visit, their habits, interests, income level, etc.,) you will be able to choose the best way to talk to them. 

This is crucial for 360 marketing because, as Janice Chou would put it, “developing a 360 marketing campaign is ultimately a balance between message and channels.” 

After you know the basics about your audience, one of the great virtues of 360-marketing is that, as you implement the strategy, it will provide feedback about your audience, which you can use to continue your current campaign or for the next you implement. 

Decide your purpose and plan

360 marketing is effective, but because of the number of resources it involves, it requires focus to work correctly. Before writing the striking messages that will make your company’s sales grow, you need to choose the objective of your campaign. Usually, 360-campaigns are implemented for one of the following reasons: 

• To create or change brand positioning 
• To implement a rebranding strategy
• To revive a product that has been performing poorly
• To prioritize a campaign when it is necessary to have several going on simultaneously 

The purpose of your campaign should also determine for how long your 360 campaign should go on, how often to evaluate its performance, and whether to make changes or stop. For example, if Nike wants to bring interest to a new tennis design, that 360 campaign will likely stop once the next model is out. But if a meat company is launching a new line of vegan products, then probably that 360 campaign will have to go on for much longer because they are after a deeper change in the way the brand is perceived. 

Decide which channels you are going to use

Once you have determined the objective of your 360 campaign and clearly identified your target audience’s favorite channels, it is time to decide which channels are the right ones for your brand and specific campaign. It has to be this way because the fact your potential customer uses a channel doesn’t mean it is the ideal one for your campaign or brand. 

Imagine this for a minute: 

You are an executive looking for a lawyer buffet to represent your solar energy company in a critical legal case in a third country. Also, you like to record videos with your children on TikTok at night just for fun. 

If you found a lawyers’ buffet offering their services on TikTok with all their lawyers dancing to the tune of Baby Shark, would you hire them? 

No. Of course not. Perhaps you would love and share the video, but you wouldn’t hire them.

Even though you are the same person that works on the solar energy company by day and enjoys dancing to Baby Shark by night, you wouldn’t hire those lawyers because the tone and context of the channel and message don’t match your context and needs. 

Hence, you need to choose the channels for your campaign and plan carefully according to:

• Your objective
• Your target preferred channels
• Your resources

Chances are that, even if sales don’t match your expectations, if you choose the channels and messages correctly, potential customers will learn about your brand and keep you top of mind for the next time they need the kind of service or product your offer.

Implement and evaluate

It is show time! Publish your social media content, send the HTMLs, open the doors to the gala, and share your commercial videos. Then see what happened and what you can learn about your audience based on how they interacted with your content. This is precious information that should influence your future marketing strategies because it is the most straightforward feedback you will get from your target audience. The challenge is to be able to interpret it correctly. Was it the right channel but the wrong message? Was the CTA inviting and clear enough? 

Why 360-marketing can help you take your company to the next level

A 360-marketing strategy can be incredibly beneficial for your brand because it has the potential to help you better understand your possible customers, reach out to new clients due to its broad reach, and give you feedback on your audience, which, in turn, helps perfect your marketing strategies. 

Additionally, if your analysis points out that the best option is to stop your 360 campaign (let’s say because now you want to emphasize the promotion of another product), frequently, the assets can be repurposed. For example, you can use ideas from the social media content you developed for new HTMLs or vice versa, use the video you created for the landing page to share later on LinkedIn, and so on. 

If you would like to learn more about 360-marketing, leave us a comment or contact one of our specialists to know how would be the best strategy for your brand.