Balancing the Budget

What you do as far as tie-ins will ultimately rely on budget (in most cases, at least.) How do you decide what portion of your budget should go to the core elements of the online ecosystem and what part to the traditional tie-ins? The tie-ins are only meant to act as stimulators to drive people to the ecosystem itself, but they can be critical in starting the snowball effect that the organic ecosystem tends to have.

If you’ve got a generous budget, you can afford mechanisms to engage rather than simple call-to-actions and trade ads. But it really has a lot to do with what your brand is, what your market is, what your culture’s open to. If your budget is tight, then you’ve got to put most of your money into the organic ecosystem itself rather than these traditional tie-ins.

You don’t necessarily want your marketing dollars to drive what your messaging or your medium is, but often that’s just the way it works. So depending upon where you are, whether you’re B2C with a high engagement factor or B2B with a high call to action or a long sales cycle factor, you’ve got to weigh that in when you consider how to use some of the other formats. Keep in mind that you’ve got to get people into that ecosystem and keep them over a relatively long period of time. You can do that with a compelling core value.