The great Facebook outage of 2021 showed many brands the danger of relying on single platforms for their advertising efforts, bringing the importance of diversifying the media mix to the forefront of many brands’ minds. 

But Facebook and Instagram are not the only platforms vulnerable to problems. If you’re using any other platform alone in your advertising efforts, you could be just as vulnerable, or at the very least you could be missing out on effective ways to boost your online presence.

Just as there is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, there is no one-size-fits-all digital marketing channel. Diversifying your media mix gives you the best chance of capturing your audience’s attention, boosting your brand recognition, and achieving your business goals.

What Does it Mean to Diversify Your Media Mix?

When we talk about diversifying your media mix, we are talking about using multiple channels for your brand’s marketing strategy instead of relying on only one or two.

These channels can include your website, pay-per-click search ads, email marketing, video marketing, display ads, blog posts, and social media channels.

By diversifying your media mix, you are using several of these channels together to drive better results for whatever goal you’re focused on. You’re using a more dynamic marketing strategy that is better suited for the tasks at hand.

Traditionally, digital marketers and ecommerce brands have heavily relied on Facebook as their main channel, but this is starting to change. According to a recent article by Digiday, most digital marketers are starting to move up to 30% of their budgets away from Facebook into new channels. Digital brands are re-allocating spend into traditional media as well as emerging paid social channels: e.g., Pinterest and TikTok, where impressions and clicks are cheaper and reach is growing rapidly.

5  Important Reasons to Diversify Your Digital Marketing Media Mix

1) YOU CAN MATCH YOUR CUSTOMER’S JOURNEY

Digital marketing is all about finding your audience at the right time in their buying journey to encourage them to make a sale. Each channel available to you can be optimised to reach out to your audience at each different point of the closed-loop. 

Email marketing can be particularly useful for retargeting those with abandoned carts or retention for those that have bought once but not yet bought again. If you’re only using pay-per-click advertising you’re targeting acquisition, but not missing out on retention, retargeting, and re-engagement, all of which are important stages of your customer's buying journey. Using both platforms allows you to focus on all four goals at the same time. 

Additionally, your target audience is using different platforms to discover new businesses, research specific products, and engage with brands that suit their desired lifestyle. If you’re not able to capture their attention on the right platform, you could be missing out on their business. Think about why your customers use different platforms, and how you can use this information to optimise your campaigns on each.

2) YOU CAN BUILD TRUST AND LOYALTY WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS

When you’re able to reach out to your customers on multiple platforms you are surrounding them within your brand’s story. This will lead to your customers feeling more connected with your brand, creating an atmosphere of loyalty and trust, which is something more and more consumers are looking for from their brands. 

If you’re already using social ads to help retain your existing clients, incorporating email marketing into your strategy as well will give you an additional opportunity to deliver personalised appreciation that your social ads won’t be able to provide. 

Creating blog content on your website can place you in a position of influence that could lead to you becoming someone your customers come straight to for advice or marketing information. Video marketing can attract new customers, entertain existing customers, and make your brand seem more established and authoritative. 

If you’re communicating with your customers on social media, through email, and on any other platforms that suit, they will feel fully integrated into your brand. When consumers feel integrated into a brand’s story, they keep coming back.

3) YOUR MARKETING WILL HAVE A GREATER REACH

This one is pretty straightforward— if you’re on more platforms, you’re going to reach more people. If you want to make sure you’re targeting your complete pool of potential customers, you need to target on multiple platforms. 

If you increase your reach across platforms you’ll be able to gain exposure from multiple angles, and you can make adjustments to your content by platform to help this. If you’re posting content on LinkedIn, it will have more of a business spin to it than if you’re posting it on Instagram or TikTok. Anything posted on social media will give a different impression than a PPC ad. 

The best example of expanding your reach by using multiple platforms has to be the classic combination of mixing social ads with Google ads. While Google ads are incredibly effective for those who are searching for the keywords you target, social ads on Facebook and Instagram can reach users who are not directly searching for products and services you offer but are in a potential audience segment based on related interests.

This example can be expanded beyond PPC and social advertising. If you’re not sure if a platform is right for your brand or business, test it out. Gain some data and solidify this fact as you may not be able to afford to assume it to be true. The worst-case scenario is that you learn something important about your audience. The best-case scenario could be that you gain some new customers from an unexpected source that you can capture and keep within your marketing sphere.

4) YOU REDUCE YOUR RISK OF LOSING YOUR INVESTMENT

Investing in digital marketing is more similar to investing in the stock market than many realise. The end goal of both is to increase your initial investment and both should require taking calculated measures to negate any potential losses. 

When you diversify your marketing media mix you are reducing your risk.

Diversifying your media mix can help you reduce your risks because: 

• You can avoid dependency on a particular channel;

• You will have alternative channels operating already if you are kicked off a platform or if a platform shuts down;

• You have more opportunities to adjust campaigns in the event of price increases on a particular platform;

• You will be more resilient to market forces or changes to a platform; and 

• You will have more leeway to pivot if you experience a crisis.

5) YOU CAN GAIN DATA YOU WOULDN’T HAVE OTHERWISE

Since Apple’s release of iOS 14.5, digital marketers have to rely more heavily on the bigger picture the whole sphere of marketing paints. And to do this we need to have data from multiple sources. 

Gathering data from multiple sources allows you to have a unified view of your customers, their interests, needs, and their content consumption patterns. This data helps you create helpful and engaging content for your existing customers but also other customers just like them that may also be interested in what you can offer. 

Testing out new platforms and seeing how they perform is vital to your businesses long-term survival. All that we know about the current digital marketing landscape came from testing, and the future of digital marketing will be discovered the same way. The assumptions you have been using to guide your marketing strategy up to this point may no longer be accurate. Testing and diversification are undoubtedly the way forward. 

Want to take more of a deep dive into this topic? Check out Outpoint’s The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing Channel Diversification (2021).