Marketing channel strategy in 2022: the world beyond best practice
Answering "where to play" by thinking through risk, competitive advantage and demand maturity
Last year we generated $250M of Lifetime Traffic Value (LTTV) on ibm.com. As much as I’d like to believe all our success is because our team at IBM is made up of the greatest inbound marketers in the world, that’s missing a big part of the story. Make no mistake, we do have a great team. But we also have ibm.com, a domain with 25 years of backlinks and referring domains.
The more I thought about the impact of those 25 years of links, the more it became the seed of a bigger observation. It was the first time I really experienced the difference between a best practice and a strategy.
A best practice is something like the topic cluster approach in inbound. A strategy is choosing to focusing on inbound as a channel because you have 25 years of links that are impossible to replicate for all but a few companies in the category.
Distribution is part of competition and in the same way a product can have a competitive moat, so can a go-to-market strategy.
In A.G. Lafley’s strategy framework, marketing channels are critical “where to play” choices an organization must make. And those choices should both be informed by, and actively shape, downstream choices like an organization’s core capabilities.
Choosing what channels to focus on is more complicated than just understanding what channels your audience frequents.
In B2B SaaS, odds are that the audience is everywhere. They search. They listen to podcasts. They spend meaningful time on some combination of YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and even TikTok. They read the news. And blogs. They watch TV. They subscribe to newsletters.
Your audience are consumers and participants in the vast world of media that surrounds all of us. They might not be as online as the average marketer, but the channels are the channels.
And so that leaves the marketer asking how they choose which channels to invest in when every channel can theoretically be successful if done well?
One way to approach channel strategy is to develop a marketing strategy and then a message and creative strategy for how you want to show up in market and then select the channels that fit the message and creative. This happens a lot as many marketers view channels as execution choices. The problem is that you could easily build a strategy, a creative concept and a channel mix that emphasizes channels your organization is not well-suited to compete and make an impact in.
I think that’s wrong. And it’s wrong in the Lafley model.
A different approach is to ask which channels your organization is best positioned to be successful with. Choose a handful of channels where you like your fit and odds, and then build big, robust programs around them. After you’ve chosen the channels you intend to major on, then design campaigns that pass effectively through those channels. Even better are campaigns that reinforce or even enhance the advantages you have in those channels. This approach is a more reliable way to develop both durable competitive advantage and predictable growth in demand.
There are two critical dimensions to explore for any organization trying to take a more strategic “where to play” approach to channel strategy:
how to assess channels for overall fit and opportunity
how to prioritize channels based on maturity and natural complements
Part 1: How to assess channels for fit and opportunity
Every channel is different. Some of the major differences are:
The expense and return models – As an example, organic search requires up front expense in content but then has potentially infinite return. Paid search results are immediate but long-term become a tax on traffic.
How audiences connect and engage within them - LinkedIn connections heavily cluster around companies and organizations within them, while Facebook clusters around your friends and family and Twitter is more oriented around following people that are influential/famous/interesting.
Whether they favor breadth/scale or niche expertise – TV is obviously a luxury of those who can afford it. But channels like Twitter, podcasts and even email newsletters, often benefit heavily from deep, niche expertise.
The more you think about the nature and differences of each of these channels, the more you can select a strategy that can work.
You might assume that every channel naturally advantages big brands, but it’s not really the case. TV and SEO are certainly channels that do. But in crowded social/subscription channels, the way to stand out is to bring something new to the conversation. And the way to bring something new is to bring deep expertise in focused niches.
And while most of this will focus on big vs small companies, it’s really even more nuanced than that. For example, let’s assume a company wants to build an audience using social media. How do you prioritize focus between LinkedIn and Twitter? It’s not as simple as LinkedIn is for business. If you have a well connected sales team (either because your company is established or you brought in sales leaders with strong professional networks), LinkedIn can get you far. If you are just starting out but you have charismatic founder that is well-known in the industry, you might get further with Twitter.
Think hard about how the channel works, what types of people and companies are advantaged by chose characteristics and whether those characteristics are a fit for your brand, your goals and your maturity.
In order to explore these questions in a bit of depth, let’s go channel by channel and review their characteristics (e.g., expense and return model, what the channel is good for, how people become successful, etc), purpose (whether they are better at driving awareness/demand creation or conversion/demand capture) and then what type of company (mostly looking at large vs. small) is advantaged by those characteristics.
TV
Characteristics
Most expensive in terms of both creative and placement
But with expense in creative comes opportunity to make a big impact
Most prestigious
By many measures, still the most effective and highest-impact channel, particularly for brand/awareness
Purpose: skews awareness/demand create
Who has the advantage: Large, well-known brands that can afford the channel.
Radio
Characteristics
Still the where the majority of audio consumption happens and still reaches shockingly high percentage on the US population on weekly/monthly basis
Channel under major threat from the rise of streaming
Music (FM) has transitioned more rapidly to streaming than talk shows (AM)
Purpose: skews awareness/demand create
Who has the advantage: Similar dynamics to TV, but prices are much more accessible, putting radio advertising within reach for many brands.
Out of Home (OOH)
Characteristics
Location driven
OOH has turned into digital out of home (DOOH) in many cases, offering dynamic bidding and creative, new forms of attribution and even personalization
The best OOH creative can generate organic buzz (e.g., BBC’s Dracula)
In some cases, OOH ads can be created just so they can be photographed and shared digitally (usually on social)
A less great channel during a global pandemic
Purpose: skews awareness/demand create
Who has the advantage: Brands whose audience is geographically concentrated.
Organic social
Characteristics
Longest runway to meaningful impact/scale
Requires daily focus
Engagement heavily weighted toward people, not brand accounts
Almost impossible to explicitly drive traffic to website
Strongest channel for driving frequency, and thus strongest channel for material brand impact
Niche expertise has great value
Purpose: skews awareness/demand create
Who has the advantage: Companies with socially savvy founders/experts, companies with compelling perspective on a niche.
Paid display and social
Characteristics
Some control over bid strategies (cpc, cpm, etc)
Prices driven by competitive market dynamics
Each audience is a market
The site that can generate the highest ROI per session on an audience, can pay the most for that traffic
Stronger at brand development than immediate conversion
Better to focus on emotional appeal than rational
Purpose: skews awareness/demand create
Who has the advantage: Those with greatest appeal to a specific role in buyer group, like CIO vs. developer. Those that have an offering relevant to high percentage of the audience (like VMware on Cloud, because everyone had VMware).
Podcast
Characteristics
Free to distribute through multiple 3rd party apps (Spotify, Apple, etc)
Up front expenses in equipment and software
Content is often captured on video and distributed on other channels either in full (YouTube) or snippets (LinkedIn)
Has an episodic format that can take 12-24 months to build a meaningful audience, but that eventually becomes a flywheel
Purpose: skews awareness/demand create
Who has the advantage: Benefits from niche expertise and access to popular figures in the space.
Email
Characteristics
No explicit competitive context beyond competition for attention
Easiest channel to grow because so many activities are already oriented around capturing email
Easy to execute poorly and drive open rate to basement and unsubs through the roof
Most powerful when it combines regularly scheduled newsletter people are excited to open with moments of demand gen (sustain and grow an audience for the moment you need them)
Purpose: skews slightly conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: No meaningful competitive context, everyone has equal opportunity to do email well/poorly. Like social, growing email newsletter organically benefits from niche expertise especially because large brands can struggle to maintain coherent voice across multiple product lines without cluttering a user’s inbox.
Content syndication
Characteristics
Often bought on negotiated price per contact basis
Inexpensive contact acquisition and content distribution channel
Poor direct conversion
Purpose: skews slightly conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: While big brands can negotiate better rates, they often already have many of the contacts they’re reaching. Advantage is to smaller brands just building their database.
1st party events
Characteristics
Highest logistical overhead of any channel (speakers, content, audience, etc)
Cost is typically based around vendor software and audience generation
Potential for market moment creation if a large event with prominent industry speakers
Significant brand and demand opportunities
Purpose: skews slightly conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: Advantages large vendors (Dreamforce, Reinvent, THINK, etc) or companies with well-connected founders.
3rd party events
Characteristics
Expense based on combination of speaking slot + booth size/location
Functionally buying the audience of that event
Competitive environment, hard to stand out
Logistics heavy
High-quality leads
Purpose: skews slightly conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: Big brands that can afford the best placement and speaking slots.
SEO
Characteristics
Up front expense for content
Long-term returns because content is evergreen
Sustainable traffic engine
Strong during active research phases
Poor at reaching experts and anyone not doing active research
Rank is driven primarily by strong content and links
Purpose: skews conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: Large websites with years (even decades) of category related links.
Paid search
Characteristics
Prices driven by competitive market dynamics
Every keyword is a different market/category with different dynamics
The site that can generate the highest ROI per session on any keyword, can pay the most for that traffic
The most precise demand channel if executed properly
High commercial orientation (eg convert this session)
The fastest channel from decision to enter to market outcomes
Purpose: skews conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: The company with the strongest LTV per session for a given keyword (usually the fastest growing player in the category, but lots of control over what the category is).
SDR Outbound
Characteristics
Less efficient than inbound responses/workload
Good way to maximize bandwidth of the team and smooth over any fluctuation in inbound workload
More channels, tools and automation than ever
Purpose: skews conversion/demand capture
Who has the advantage: A well recognized brand can help with response rates but SDR teams within big companies often have broader scope, making it hard to deeply master individual products, especially technical ones. A smaller, more focused company will naturally produce a more focused SDR team with more expertise.
While some channels certainly favor big brands, not all of them do. There are real opportunities across social, podcasting, paid search, email, SDR outbound and even 3rd party events to show up and dominate a niche. And in every category, competition could be weak or lazy, so even if channels like SEO aren’t natural advantages, they could be an opportunity if the competition is asleep at the wheel.
And this is where marketing can start to feel like product management in a way. If you notice that in your niche no one has a strong footprint in SEO, no one has a credible podcast or YouTube channel, no one is doing anything interesting with events, etc, then the race is on. How do you beat everyone to market and take channel advantage?
First mover is a powerful thing in marketing channels too. It’s hard to play from behind because the winners grow naturally. The more listeners your podcast has, the more people that can share and recommend it to a friend. The more time you spend on top of page 1 for a key search term, the more time that page sits there and collects backlinks that will make it harder to dislodge. And if your big event becomes the category’s big event (like HubSpot did with “Inbound”), you are now the undisputed category leader.
This is not about creating a standard channels playbook for big companies vs. small. It’s not even proposing some universal truth like small companies shouldn’t do SEO. You should always do the analysis for yourself and decide if there is both fit and opportunity.
But a real recommendation is that every organization should major on channels where they have both fit and opportunity. If 90% of your marketing budgets is in categories where you don’t have strong natural fit and opportunity, that’s a lot of risk. A lot of things need to go right for that strategy to work.
A better approach is to push a higher percentage of your activities into channels your organization has a better shot at success with, while also both aligning those channels to your maturity and clustering sets of activities that are naturally reinforcing.
You also can’t wake up and launch everything all at once, so this next section will deal with the order of operations of demand and how to cluster groups of activity.
Part 2: How to prioritize channels based on maturity and natural complements
If you are building a demand engine from scratch, the first thing you do is not building an integrated campaign. There’s a lot of work to do before you get to that.
And this is not one of those things where you want to rush through all the prior work so you can get to the good stuff. Odds are that everything that precedes an integrated campaign (in this model), will deliver bigger, more durable, more efficient outcomes for the business.
An integrated campaign is an accelerator for an already humming engine.
I broke channel (and some more tactical) execution into five primary phases.
Phase 1 – brand essentials
Phase 2 – foundational demand
Phase 3 – inbound engine
Phase 4 – audience engine
Phase 5 – integrated engine
Phases 1 and 2 are universal. No matter what primary channel strategy ends up being, these are likely the recommended started place.
Phases 3 and 4 could be done in this order, but they also represent a choice. Based on the above work around strategy and advantages, this is when the choosing begins. For most teams it is not going to be possible to build a world-class inbound engine and a world-class audience engine at the same time. They take too much work.
Inbound requires deeply researched, thoughtful content in order to be successful. A great piece of content might take a week to create. But it’s worth it because it might rank for three years. On the other hand, success in building audience requires a social content engine that produces content every day. You can be smart about how you do that, potentially recording a weekly podcast that you then grab a handful of 3-to-5-minute clips from that you then post throughout the week. But it’s still daily content that you need to edit for fit across multiple channels. It’s a lot of work.
And both would be a lot of work to fail. Which is why choosing whether to major on an inbound engine or an audience engine is the first real choice you need to make. And it’s possible to do things like say you want to do inbound but you want to do one thing from audience engine, start a podcast, because you hope that will be the backbone of a true audience engine 18 months from now. I always advocate for smart investments in the future mixed with the engine that will work today.
And lastly, we arrive at an integrated campaign. An integrated campaign makes the most sense when you have already established several other functioning channels. The campaign should be designed to live in, and strengthen, those channels. It should feel native to them.
Not only does this overall approach reduce some of the pressure on the integrated campaign (not expecting campaign to deliver all marketing results), but it also dramatically increases the chances of running a successful campaign because you have years of practical, successful execution in these channels under your belt now. You know what will succeed and what won’t, so you have also de-risked the campaign by informing it with the channel expertise required to land it successfully.
Finally, this approach is also about clustering groups of channels and activities together that are natural complements. If the goal is an outcome greater than the sum of its parts, then it’s critical to think through how these efforts build
Phase 1 (brand essentials)
Company/product stage: infancy
Goal: let people know you exist, provide the core pipes for demand gen
Channels and tactics:
Website – simple site with just home page, pricing page, about, careers, blog, news. Goal is to let people learn the basics about the company/product, have vehicles for sharing news about the company/product (blog, news) and provide the most essential company/product info, which is typically an overview and pricing around the offering
Sign-up/contact us – even at scale, sign-up and contact us will produce the best quality opportunities. Put this in place early and do it well.
Basic corporate social + founder social – at this point you are not doing meaningful demand gen or audience building, you are just putting channels in place you may want to activate in the future, sharing basic news and letting people follow you there if they want to.
Basic marketing ops – before you start to do meaningful demand gen work, you need to get some core systems in place around analytics, crm, etc.
PR and market moments – share meaningful news like new version of product, a new funding round, an exciting hire, a big contract, etc.
Commentary:
You could do all of this with a couple people. What you are doing at this stage is letting the world know that you exist and what you are doing. You are hitting the most foundational aspect of demand. No matter how big you get most of your outcomes will come from people typing in your brand, landing on your home page and clicking sign-up or contact.
The conversion rate of branded home pages can often be 50x higher than other pages on a website. After understanding what you do, the number 1 thing people want to know about every product is what the price is. Some people are transparent about this, some aren’t. It’s better if you are, but you can generate reasonable outcomes, particularly with enterprise buyers, with a contact us flow from pricing pages.
Having the simple experience of overview, pricing and then take the next step is the core nucleus of demand no matter how big you get. Make that awesome early and never lose it.
Social and marketing ops are about establishing ways to capture audiences before you are even really prepared to do anything with those audiences. If all you did on social was share corporate (or product) news and announcements, that is fine at this stage. You can do more later, but across social and email just make it possible to follow you from day 1.
Phase 2 (foundational demand)
Company/product stage: initial product/market fit
Goal: start generating demand with small team and limited budget
Channels and tactics:
Solution/use case landing pages – focus on core, unbranded market categories, ideally targeting queries with commercial search volume.
SEO/SEM – these pages have mid to long-term opportunity to rank organically and can start generating immediate returns by landing paid search traffic.
3rd party events – this is an opportunity to start being present in industry venues, talking to potential customers and partners and getting feedback.
SDR outbound – if you are doing actual demand gen at this point, you will also need an inside sales/SDR team in order to field and qualify those opportunities. Given no one wants idle hands, it makes sense for those SDRs to also include some outbound activities in what they do.
Commentary:
Now that you’ve demonstrated some level of product market fit, you want to start doing some of the most efficient types of demand gen. And ideally ones that won’t take lots of people and years to pay off.
Lower funnel unbranded keywords with commercial intent are next in line in terms of where demonstrable market outcomes will come from. To land and convert this traffic effectively will require new solution/use case pages on the site. After you build those pages, we can immediately turn on paid search and those pages can also start their journey from an SEO perspective.
With some level of fit generated, it’s also time to start hitting the industry conference scene. You can’t do everything. And you’re not going to be the big sponsor, but you’ll meet more people, get feedback, maybe do something creative and fun at your booth and create some buzz.
Both of these channels are reasonably efficient and high-impact, can be done without a big team and enable you to be in market immediately.
Phase 3 (inbound engine)
Company/product stage: scale
Goal: building growing, predictable demand engine
Channels and tactics:
Inbound topic clusters – inbound program centered around pillar pages (e.g., topical explainer content) and blogs, landing pages and video content (approaching YouTube as a search engine can also happen here) targeting all phases of the journey/funnel.
Expanded SEM – as you expand your organic inbound footprint, expand your SEM strategy and footprint alongside it.
Anchor assets – create core anchor assets aligned to the categories you are competing it, and use that content to engage audiences, capture responses and build a marketing database.
Retargeting – as organic traffic increases, use retargeting to engage audiences that didn’t convert by either driving them to the anchor assets (upper funnel engagement) or product experiences (lower funnel engagement).
Content syndication – to get more ROI of already produced anchor assets, accelerate distribution with content syndication.
Automation and nurture – with a meaningful number of responses now coming into the marketing database, getting more sophisticated with.
Commentary:
The inbound engine is anchored in being able to build and monetize a substantial amount of organic traffic. The other channels and activities that are part of the inbound engine all exist to complement the core channel.
SEM efforts are simply expanding in line with the organic footprint. Anchor assets exist to engage upper funnel traffic. Retargeting is for re-engaging with organic traffic that did not immediately convert. Content syndication is simply improving the impact and profitability of the anchor assets you created to convert the organic traffic. Automation and nurture are to take responses and engage and progress them over time.
This is not about creating a balanced mix across several channels. It’s majoring on one channel and then surrounding it with a set of activities that improve your ability to engage, progress and convert that audience.
Done well, the inbound engine is something that can compound in value without compounding in expense.
Phase 4 (audience engine)
Company/product stage: scale
Goal: building growing, predictable demand engine
Channels and tactics:
Social channels – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok, etc all have different dynamics. Twitter likely enables the broadest reach while LinkedIn enables the deepest, most consistent engagement with an audience. They all require substantial daily activity. And they all require a more human touch than just your corporate handle (except maybe YouTube).
Podcast – everyone has a podcast now, but maybe there’s room for one more. Every niche is not served equally but all the shows that exist today. It takes sustained effort, over a long period of time (12-24 months), to build an impactful show (and that’s if you do it right). But if you can pull that off, you can get up an hour of time with your most engaged audience once a week, which is more engagement than you accomplish with any other channel in marketing.
Email/newsletter – with the rise of substack, of Twitter’s newsletter service, ghost, etc, newsletters have never been more en vogue. Maybe they never went anywhere at all. The key to a great newsletter great content, covering a unique niche, delivered at a predictable schedule, in such a way where your audience is actively anticipating its arrival because they look forward to reading it. And unlike podcasts and social networks, your newsletter subscribers are an audience you actually “own.”
1st party events – whether we are talking major conferences, live streams, local meetups or anything in between, bringing your community together for some education and entertainment remains one of the most powerful ways of building and sustaining communities of any size. And while 3rd party events are absolutely a way to engage with the world, 1st party events are truly about catering to your audience.
Commentary:
The audience engine produces less total traffic to the website, but perhaps a greater number of the coveted branded searches that can convert up to 50x better than unbranded. It does that because social is about monopolizing the feeds of your audience every day with new content and insights. By upping the frequency with which you reach a prospect, you break down the problems with mental availability and place your brand in the mix.
In that sense, the goal of the audience engine is not necessarily about managing a conventional funnel at all. It’s more about being consistently relevant in the channels that your audience spends their time on today. It’s not about writing a blog post and then simply sharing that on Twitter. It’s about taking what might traditionally be a blog post, refactoring it into a thread (that maybe took several hours to appropriately hone), having that thread go “viral” and increasing your followers by hundreds, even thousands. The goal of the thread is more engagement and more subscribers/reach. That is consistently the goal.
And you take the leap of faith that the audience that now consistently hears from you across the forums they leverage will eventually reach out to you when the time is right. Some people (this entire approach has been heavily popularized recently by folks like Chris Walker of Refine Labs) call it the “dark funnel” because it’s hard to measure. But you take that leap because it does work. It intuitively works.
And to understand how well it’s working, going back to simple “how did you hear from us” forms can sometimes provide more insight than complicated data science. These forms are also useful for quantifying some of the channels that get used during major integrated campaigns (TV, radio, OOH) as well.
The audience engine is the perhaps the hardest engine to build because it is deeply reliant on the insights and communication skills of the experts in your company. You need the team building your products, including potentially your founder, to be deeply committed to the success of this mission. If they aren’t, and they aren’t in it for the long haul, it will be hard to be successful.
But if you can develop and nurture a major audience across a few channels (do not try to do all of them please), you now can make an impact in the market in an instant. That ability is something unique to the audience engine.
Phase 5 (integrated engine)
Company/product stage: a pivotal moment
Goal(s): establish category leadership, re-position a brand, demonstrate seriousness in a new market
Channels and tactics:
Omnichannel – an integrated campaign should activate one concept or idea across channels in a complementary way.
Commentary:
While it’s understandable for any marketer to want to go straight to phase 5 (it’s often the integrated campaigns that garner the most awards and prestige after all), it’s not advisable to get too far ahead of yourself. Going through the first handful of phases first will help you build the muscles you need to succeed with an integrated campaign. After all, the requirement of an integrated campaign is not only that you execute well across multiple channels, but that those channels complement one another in both interesting and obvious ways.
Put more simply, if you aren’t good at any channels in a standalone way, you certainly won’t be any good at running an integrated, omnichannel campaign.
And there’s other ways that going through the process can help as well. The process of building an audience in phase 4 is really all about finding your voice. And not just finding your voice, finding your voice in a crowded room. And that takes a lot of work, a lot of trial and error. You are a stand-up comic getting heckled every day for months until finally one night you break through with some new material.
If you become successful in phase 4, it will be because you found message/market fit. And once you’ve found that voice, amplifying it with an integrated campaign makes a ton of sense. You can have a high degree of confidence that your campaign narrative will hit the mark if it’s a narrative you have been fine tuning in the trenches for months/years.
And as for why you should launch an integrated campaign, there are lots of reasons. Some companies like Geico are just permanently running an integrated campaign. It’s been going for years (decades?) with just small tweaks.
But for many other companies, it’s smart to think about the integrated campaign as a point in time choice. A significant increase and concentration of marketing spend, focused on achieving a critical market outcome.
Some such examples could include cementing category leadership around a big raise, an IPO or just years of successful product/platform growth. It could be re-positioning the company after significant PR or business challenges. It could be about announcing a new area of focus for a well-known brand. They make a lot of sense whenever there is a moment that demands a step change in the level of corporate communication.
And when that moment comes, you will feel a lot better about your readiness if you have a handful of channels, channels that you know how to operate and that can now be in service of, and (hopefully) advantaged by, a major integrated campaign.
Summary
Every company and every situation will be different. This was never intended to be an off the shelf playbook to making all your channel strategy dreams come true.
But what it hopefully does do is help you think a little bit more strategically about the process of channel selection. Hopefully it helps you to do a little reasoning from first principles about the nature of these channels and who benefits from those characteristics. Hopefully it helps you think about your own maturity and which activities best map to where your organization is.
Hopefully it just helps you think in a more nuanced and interesting way than “three channels are better than one,” or “I heard TikTok is cool.”
I’ll be back in future posts with more thoughts on some of the other strategic choices around how to win, capabilities and management systems. I might write about a few other things before I try to take on another post like this one though, so it could be a minute before the next in this series.
Let me know what you think, what I missed, and if there’s anything you’d add or change (do you disagree with any of the thoughts about who is advantaged?) that would help your peers make better channel strategy decisions.
You can also find me on Twitter where I’ve recently started spending far too much time.
Bryan - as a pmm leader looking to transition to head of marketing and learning more on the performance side. Your writing has been the only one that actually talks about strategy. Thank you