Building better budgets

Designing a targeted marketing campaign budget is a complicated task. The multichannel nature of cross-media marketing, combined with the nebulous statistics on the effectiveness of any particular channel, can make it difficult for marketers to know where to spend. In order to understand where to spend, marketers must first know why they're spending. Chad Giddings, executive vice president of marketing and planning for J. Schmid &Associates, listed several factors that can influence the perceived impact of targeted marketing, including how relevant the advertised product is, how aware or educated the target customer is about the product's value, and how easy it is to act on an offer or message. According to him, the targeted, cross-media campaign remains an effective marketing tool, but its constantly evolving. Debora Haskel, vice president of marketing for IWCO Direct, mentioned direct mail as one of those methods.