What's the Big Deal About the 'Combined Campaign' Strategy? Given that 'combined campaigns' has recently been elevated as one of the most sought after buzzwords of 2015, it is in your interest to be updated.

For those of you in the advertising and marketing industry, you may have come across the term "combined campaigns." You may be curious to know what all of this hype is about. Given that combined campaigns has recently been elevated as one of the most sought after buzzwords of 2015, it is in your interest to be updated.

While labelled an important and emerging term, combined campaigns are technically not registered as a virgin or "new" term. Television game shows, for example, requesting viewers to pull out their phones to cast their vote or infomercials offering limited-time discounts are early examples of combined campaigns leveraging the cross channels of television and phone networks. Nowadays, combined campaigns are gaining immense leverage as consumers tap into various types of media, enhancing the rate of network connections at unprecedented levels. So what exactly are combined campaigns and how can you utilize them in your marketing efforts?

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What is a combined campaign?

Combined campaigns utilize multiple media facets, including but not limited to: traditional advertising techniques of print and/or television ads, social media, online video advertisements and text content. This practice yields increased engagement and network traffic across the marketing spectrum.

There's no doubt that the inclusion of new marketing channels are powerful standalone forces. Brand names, for example, which integrate into a multi-channel digital marketplace, have shown results of achieving increased ROI sale values up to 300 percent (source via CJG Digital Marketing). As marketers continue to observe the enhanced benefits of utilizing new, combined channels are exponentially more affective than the standalone campaigns, they have steadily begun to convert— changing the tides of online marketing.

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Why use combined campaigns?

Motivating consumers to connect with your company through multiple connection threads fuses a relationship between a brand and a consumer in multiple ways. It also encourages conditions for further engagement. Using multiple forms of media greatly assists in the use of analytics, which can be accessed in each medium to gauge global involvement. This allows you, for example to understand how and where customers are interacting and what strategies and mediums are effective. This allows you to maximize campaign effectiveness while maintaining finances via real time performance monitoring for quality assurance. Moreover, the ability to individually monitor and assess campaign performance allows for the detection of patterns, and in turn serve as lessons as to where and when different advertising tactics should be used.

What's the fuss about?

All ads affect different target groups differently. Different advertising mediums will receive varying treatment across various demographics. A younger demographic, for example, may be more in sync with the marketing channel of social media on their computers and/or their mobile devices; while older demographics may be more in line with text advertising via paper mediums. In the end, the use of multifaceted media outlets enables you to focus and tailor your efforts toward sub-targeted markets with great accuracy and efficiency and receive higher returns. Therefore, forget wasting your precious time and energy dealing with traditional ad campaigns; change things up by interacting with customers on a higher level and with better more interactive means.

These are just a handful of ways combined campaigns can benefit your marketing plans. The bottom line is that this campaign technique allows for the retuning of the best advertising practices. The days of using the same monotonous track of one advertising stream as the benchmark to reach audiences is over. Today's innovative advertisers know that re-imagining how they create new content that sustains attention is the next evolution of ad campaigns—reaping the rewards before your competitors.

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