How to cut channels from your advertising plan

Most owners never chose a media mix. They accumulated one. A directory subscription renewed since 2019. A newspaper the founder has always liked. A hoarding somebody offered at a good rate, an agency retainer covering social media, and a search campaign nobody has opened in five months. Choosing a mix is mainly an act of removal: four eliminations, a decision about depth or spread, and then changing it slowly enough that you can read what happened.

The companion piece to this one, how to choose a media mix, gives every channel a job and a number to be judged on. Do that after this. First decide what stays.

Write down the mix you already have

One sheet. Every line you pay money to, including the ones that stopped being decisions years ago, with what it cost you over the last twelve months.

Directory listings. Sponsorship of the local association's annual day. The apartment noticeboard. The retainer. The hoarding on the road nobody in the office drives any more. The pamphlets going out with the morning paper. The festival ad in the community magazine.

Two things come out of that sheet almost every time. The largest annual line is one nobody has reviewed since it started. And there is at least one line nobody in the room can say who approved.

Four eliminations, in this order

Does the medium stop where your buyer stops? A city FM station sells you Yelahanka and Whitefield when your showroom is in Jayanagar and your customer will not cross Bengaluru on a weekday. A district edition of a newspaper sells you four talukas for a shop that serves one town. Cut any medium whose footprint is many times your catchment, unless your offer is genuinely worth a drive.

Is your buyer a crowd or a list? If you can write the names of your forty buyers, you do not have a media problem. Forty purchase managers at food processing plants are reached by a phone call, a visit and a sample, and no amount of advertising shortens that. Media is for when the buyer cannot be named in advance.

Can you convert what you already get? Count the enquiries from last month and how many were answered within the hour. If a third of them were answered the next day, more media buys more of the same loss at a higher price. Spend the next month's media money on answering the phone instead, and mean it.

Can you fund it to its floor? Every medium has a minimum below which it does nothing at all. A hoarding needs a full cycle. Nobody registers a name in one or two passes. A radio flight needs enough spots a week that the same person hears it more than once. A search campaign whose daily budget runs out by eleven in the morning is not a small campaign, it is a campaign that misses every afternoon. Anything you cannot fund to its floor comes off the sheet, and its money goes to something you can.

Now choose the shape: depth or spread

This is the decision that separates two businesses with identical budgets.

Depth means one catchment, several media, many exposures. The same buyer sees you on the arterial road, in the apartment lift, in the local paper insert and on Maps when they search. It is the right shape when your customers come from a few kilometres, which is true of clinics, showrooms, restaurants, gyms, schools and most home services.

Spread means one medium across the whole territory. It is the right shape when the buyer travels to you anyway, or you go to them. A builder selling flats to buyers from all over the city. A hospital taking referrals from three districts. A dealer covering Karnataka through a service van.

The expensive mistake is the middle. A bit of everything, everywhere, at a weight too thin for anyone to notice. For example, a diagnostic lab in Vijayanagar with a modest monthly budget can own four wards or it can be faintly present in Bengaluru. One of those produces walk-ins.

Pick the second channel to cover the first one's weakness

Your first channel should be whichever one captures people already looking, if anyone is looking. Search, Maps, IndiaMART for industrial goods, the marketplace your trade actually uses.

The second one exists to fix what the first cannot do. Capture channels only harvest demand that already exists. If the searches are few, the second channel has to create them: local outdoor, society media, Instagram and YouTube in your catchment, cinema in the right hall. If demand is plentiful and you are losing it to competitors, the second channel keeps you in front of the people who did not buy the first time.

The pairing that works for most local businesses in India is unglamorous. Be findable when somebody searches, and be known in the eight kilometres where your customers live.

Changing a mix without losing a quarter

Change one thing per cycle. Two changes in one month means the result cannot be read by anybody, including the agency defending it.

Give each medium the time it needs before judging it. Six weeks for a search campaign, a full cycle for outdoor, a season for anything seasonal. Search optimisation shows you nothing at all for half a year. Keep one control, which is the channel you do not touch this quarter.

And do not switch everything off in a bad month. The thing that goes first is brand media, because it is the hardest to defend and the easiest to stop. Four months later the enquiries it was feeding into search stop arriving, and nobody connects the two.

When the mix is not the problem

Sometimes the answer is that no mix will help. Your reply time is a day. Your follow-up stops at one call. The showroom looks shut from the road. The price list has not been updated since the GST change. Advertising a business in that state buys complaints at full rate.

Say it out loud before the next plan is approved. Marketing budget optimisation starts in the same place, by finding out how much of the current spend is reaching people you were already going to convert.

What to do next

Print the sheet of what you pay for now, and put a line through everything that failed one of the four eliminations. Then look at what is left and decide, in one word, whether you are buying depth or spread. If the list is still six channels long and you cannot choose, book the free audit and argue it through with somebody who does not sell you any of them.