Channel Planning

Effective marketing considers both channels and communication techniques needed to enable customer acquisition for particular service or product categories. Each channel has its weaknesses and strengths, costs and benefits, limits and freedoms, and must be scrutinized carefully to understand how it will or won’t improve the campaign strategy. Therefore, let’s discuss how to determine which digital and traditional channels to use for your campaign.

Target audience measurement

First, measure where the potential audience is spending their time. Determine who you want to target; for instance, are you targeting an older demographic that primarily uses TV, email, Facebook, and radio – or are you targeting Gen Z, who are heavy users of TikTok, CTV and new digital media platforms. Use top content creators and brands in your vertical and analyze their audience engagement across several channels. Meaningful metrics to use include content engagement, audience size, video views, and mobile app usage.

Allocate marketing budget across multiple channels

Establish an overall budget for the campaign and then divide the budget amongst targeted channels. Understand that doubling the campaign budget of a high-performing channel may not proportionally increase performance. Therefore, never rapidly invest a massive amount of money in campaigns. Instead, consider running more ads, targeting new markets, or more keywords to determine which channels are getting more results in terms of reach, impressions, views, and conversions.

Determine how to schedule the campaigns across multiple channels

A campaign schedule will help keep you organized; however, there’s no one-size-fits-all perfect schedule. The ideal timing and frequency of the campaign across multiple channels will depend on your targeted industry and audience, among other things. Moreover, some channels can be active during the campaign’s life, while others will provide a better lift by overlapping during specific moments in the campaign. For longer campaigns, this is more difficult as you must adequately plan the budget for the campaign’s duration. For example, a campaign that will be active for 3 months may not necessarily have all paid channels running during the entire duration to be cost-effective. Therefore, campaign scheduling is essential to enhance your chances of achieving goals.

Track campaign channel utilization

If you’re not using a campaign management platform, create a spreadsheet to document which channels have been utilized for campaigns. Use spreadsheets for items like content and financials. For example, you can track ad spend, budgets and ROAS (return on ad spend). Spreadsheets can also be used to manage campaigns, ad effectiveness, social media posts, blog calendars, web traffic, SEO, and many other metrics.

Gather learnings for creating your next channel plan

Do some in-depth market research to find which platforms your audience is using more in that timespan and mold your campaigns and content to their expectations. Then, you need to constantly track the results to determine how well the campaigns and channels are performing and what tweaks should be done. Essentially, channel planning is all about delivering what the customers need and where and when they need it – vital knowledge that’s driven by data.

Conclusion

By integrating digital and traditional marketing channels, you can attract a potential audience in their preferred way; furnish and motivate sales and marketing teams, and maximize your chances of achieving your desired business goals.