Why a diverse marketing mix matters more than ever

Most businesses can point to the one channel that's carrying their marketing and bringing in the majority of sales or leads. Perhaps it's the Google ranking that brings in half your enquiries, or is it the viral social post that never seems to stop converting. But we all know the saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and this couldn’t be more true in the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing. 

That risk made itself very apparent for a lot of businesses this year when an algorithm update quietly reshuffled search rankings, or when a Meta outage took Instagram and Facebook offline for hours. We know this can happen, but it’s the unpredictability of the changes that make them impossible to plan for and they hit hardest when one channel is doing most of the work.

• The single channel problem
• What a healthy marketing mix actually looks like
• Building something that can take a hit
• Where to start

 

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The single channel problem

Relying on one channel usually starts as a good decision. Somebody finds a channel that performs, doubles down on it, gets results and repeat. That’s good marketing, right? The problem is what happens next: budget, time and attention all follow the winning channel while the other channels get left behind.

And that's fine right up until the channel that's carrying everything has a bad month. For example; a platform changes its algorithm, an ad account gets suspended over a policy update nobody read properly. Suddenly the business is down one channel and it’s mirrored in the company’s pipeline.

What a healthy marketing mix actually looks like

A diverse marketing mix isn't about being everywhere at once or spreading a small budget so thin that nothing works properly. It's about making sure no single channel going down tomorrow, would take the whole operation with it. Let’s go through the channels that need to stay afloat.

Email is arguably the most important channel because it keeps a direct line to people who've already chosen to hear from you. It’s also the only channel that no algorithm or ad platform can switch off.

Social builds visibility, trust and relationships over time and gives a business somewhere to show up consistently between transactions.

SEO and its compounding effect simply cannot be ignored. It's slower to build than most channels, but once it's working it keeps working with less spend than most ad budgets. 

Content marketing does the quiet job of proving expertise before a prospect ever picks up the phone or a buyer begins to browse and it feeds the other channels with valuable content to link back to.

PR builds the kind of third party credibility that no amount of paid media can buy and done well, can positively influence SEO.

Paid ads move fast and can be switched on when a business needs a result now, but they stop the moment the spend does.

None of the above is a replacement for the other. Each channel does a different job and each one can fail in a different way and that's exactly why they belong together, working in alignment to collectively bring results.

Building something that can take a hit

The real value of a diverse mix isn't that every channel performs equally well all the time. It's that when one channel has a bad quarter, the business doesn't fail completely. If a paid campaign underperforms, organic content is still bringing people in. If a platform changes its rules overnight, the email list is unaffected. If SEO takes a temporary knock from an update, social and PR are still doing their job.

This is what resilience looks like in a marketing plan: making sure no single disruption can take a whole operation down.

Where to start

Getting the mix right means being honest about which channels are currently carrying the majority of the lifting and then building the others up. A healthy mix means when one channel wobbles, it doesn’t disrupt the entire business.

At Serenity, our individual experts always work collaboratively as a team so each part of the marketing mix compounds to get results. If you’d like to talk about what this could look like for your business, get in touch and we’d be happy to review your current set-up and make recommendations to ensure your marketing has the resilience it needs.

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