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How do you know you are spending your budget in the right media channels for your brand?
Each brand will have its own strategy which works best for them, depending on things like….
Taking some time to look at your channel mix vs benchmarked ecommerce brands can ensure you ask yourself the right questions to help you get closer to the right model for you.
Paid marketing is not a cheap game, and it’s only getting more expensive to play. If you find you are reaching a plateau with a channel (which is being optimally managed) and it’s driving over half of your revenue, it is likely time to have a look at your channel mix and identify any channels you are under-indexing against.
Although tech outages are usually fortunately very few and far between, they can happen. If you put all your spend in one channel and that channel has a global outage, that’s your sales tap switched off.
Having the ability to be able to flow spend across multiple channels enables you to be both strategic and agile. Performance can differ week to week in different paid channels - having the opportunity to put money where you will find the best return against your objectives will allow you to get the best results.
It’s also good to look at your paid vs organic channels to ensure a healthy mix. No one wants to pay for sales they should be getting through SEO, Direct, or Email, so be sure to make sure these channels are pulling their weight.
The Messy Middle
If Google’s messy middle has taught us one thing, it’s that the customer journey is rarely linear and even less likely to be influenced by one individual channel.
Getting your brand in front of new audiences vs keeping them front of mind and then helping them convert with you is a really complex journey. Some channels and platforms are better at delivering results at each stage than others. Holding your customers' hand throughout the journey, giving them the right message at the right time, is critical in an effective growth strategy.
You can’t control the competition
If you aren’t operating a full funnel approach, you risk losing your customers to your competitors!
For example, you might be doing a great job of getting your brand in front of them on Paid Social and driving traffic to your site, but if your brand is nowhere to be found when they are ready to buy and looking at final options on search, then a competitor who is there could take them at that last hurdle.
Our role as marketeers is to make the journey as frictionless as possible, if they have to work too hard to find you, the risk is they won’t!
Driving efficiency, holistically.
Scaling other channels will help unlock potential revenue, which is getting more challenging or more expensive thanks to the holistic impact on your established ones.
For example, if you have been running Paid Search successfully and focusing your attention to the lower end of the conversion funnel with a high ROI, then investing in upper funnel, brand-building activities will help you to get your brand in front of customers and increase consideration. This will then have a halo effect when these customers come to searching for your product online and be more likely to click on your shopping ads.
Ultimately, this will grow that sweet spot between ROI and revenue, delivering an optimum plan for sustainable growth.
Final thoughts:
There’s no one-size-fits-all for the perfect channel mix. It’s something that can evolve as your brand grows. If one channel is carrying most of the weight, it might be worth exploring whether other channels could share more of the load.
