Most prospective customers follow a clear path to becoming loyal customers:

The path starts with awareness, and awareness often begins with paid media. Paid media refers to print ads, radio ads, TV ads, internet ads and other forms of marketing where you pay a third party to deliver your message.

Paid media can be highly effective with consumer goods. These decisions tend to be impulsive, entailing low risk and low cost (like buying a candy bar), so consumers quickly leap from awareness to adoption. In the B2B sector, customers consider purchase decisions more carefully, because these decisions tend to be high risk and high cost. In this sector, paid media helps with awareness and interest, but it’s not likely to move your customer further along the adoption path. For that, you need owned media — assets such as your online presence, your sales force and your sales presentation materials.

Do you have the right mix of paid and owned media?

You could be focusing too much on paid media if:

• You dedicate a large portion of your marketing budget to paid media
• You’re unsure whether your advertising efforts are increasing sales
• Your sales force is spending more time than expected to land sales

If you recognize these signs in your products or services, it might be time to recalibrate your media mix.

5MetaCom provides an owned media calibration process to help you find the ideal mix. This process helps you derive maximum marketing value from the owned media you are already paying for and eliminates waste from any paid media that raises awareness but doesn’t drive sales. The resulting media mix makes the most of your media assets to move your customers along the path to product adoption.