All marketers face the challenge of proving the value of their efforts. The idea of incorporating more channels in the mix can be daunting. But in a world of ever evolving markets and media, new channels are frequently under consideration within marketing departments. Knowing how to evaluate a channel before investing in it will guide your efforts toward channels of greater value.
So how do you effectively evaluate the merits of incorporating new channels in your marketing mix?
Goals: Clearly define the results you are looking for from your marketing initiatives. Lead generation, brand awareness, education, and site traffic are all things to consider.
Budget: Set your overall marketing budget. Explore the costs associated with channels you’re considering and note the costs of alternative options.
Buyer Persona: Different demographics interact with certain channels more than others. Establish your target audience. Consider where those consumers are most likely to encounter your messaging.
Team Strengths and Expertise: Determine the specific skills of your team and play to their strengths – your team is driving your campaigns. For channels in which your team has little experience, external resources are a solid option.
Existing Channels: Take into consideration what you’re already doing. Building off your already successful campaigns provides a steady foundation for new initiatives.
Putting it Together
Once you have gathered the above information, use it as a framework for determining if a channel has valuable potential. Our marketing team has used the above points to inform our decisions when adding new channels to the marketing mix. We’ve found this approach to be particularly helpful in two instances:
- Social media. The nature of social media plays to the strengths and knowledge of several of our team members and can be a very cost effective channel. After determining the outlets our customers were most likely to engage with along with researching lead generation methods in social media, we were confident this channel could prove valuable.
- Remarketing. Building off channels which are already driving traffic to our site, we decided to experiment with and expand our remarketing efforts. This channel also perfectly addresses our lead generation goals as one of the primary functions is encouraging site visitors that did not result in a lead or conversion to return to our site.
So now that we’ve decided on new channels to invest in, how do we prove the value of that investment and determine if we’re meeting our lead generation goal? We’ll take a look at that in my next post. Stay tuned.
