The channel activation marketing prioritisation

Many marketing managers face the challenge of deciding what are the channels that should be activated, tested and how we prioritise this process, as there are so many, some examples are: Paid search, Display, Paid social (Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram,..), video, Display native (outbrain or taboola), Email, SEO, Organic social or Affiliates.

A good way to start would be looking at what is the objective that you are looking to achieve. Some advertising platforms will even have specific campaign types focused on this criteria. Will this be driving traffic, generating leads, generating sales for an ecommerce or driving app downloads for example.

A good first step would be understanding our target audience, what are their media consumption habits and behaviours. We can also look at understanding how good each channel is at reaching this specific audience. To begin with, understanding if we are in a b2b or b2c environment is key, and will determine a selection of channels.

In generic terms, a visual way to represent this can be in a matrix. What we would see here is how many users we can target and at what cost or what is the same, we would be looking at representing scale and efficiency:

We have to bear in mind that some channels take time to develop. We can use different ways of grouping these by: paid, earned, owned.

• Paid channels can be modulated and scaled at will by increasing spend, they tend to produce diminishing returns as we increase spend but are easily scalable. In this group fall channels such as: SEM, Display, Paid social, Affiliates or ATL channels (Cinema, print, direct mail, any other offline media activity), sales team calls.
• Owned channels tend to be limited in how we can scale them compared to paid but are owned and managed by the business. These tend to grow organically, examples are: email, owned social or SEO (content).
• Earned channels are those that are a direct representation of what the business has done over time as it matures, these are very hard to module but can be influenced by what we do with the paid and owned channels, some examples are: shares, links from other sites, referrals.

How to prioritise? If there’s enough budget focus on high volume / high reach paid channels such as search, as channel activity mature and campaigns are refined start testing other channels that are less efficient but have higher reach or provide less volume such as affiliates or paid social. Channels like display & video tend to be very effective at generating awareness and high volume of traffic, but are not that effective at driving conversions.

If there’s no budget or it’s very limited focus on the owned channels by developing high quality content that can be distributed through a blog or social networks. This is a mid to long term strategy as acquiring followers in social networks or improving rankings in google organic search takes time.