What variables affect your strategic choice of channels, when designing an integrated campaign?

Here are the four most important parameters that determine your Channel strategy when designing an Integrated Campaign. 

1. Who? - Audience

• Are you talking to developers, end-users, or decision-makers? 
• How large is the buying group for your product? 
• Is your product a single or multi-department purchase?

2. Why? - Marketing objective

Is your campaign objective creating awareness, building pipeline, or accelerating pipeline? Each objective dictates the count of audience you have available to target which in turn informs the decision to choose channels. 

For example, if your objective is to accelerate pipeline, you might be limited to using targeted Social (custom audience), emails, closed-door events, and direct mail. However, if your objective is to create awareness, your channel coverage needs to expand dramatically because you are now trying to reach a broader audience to inform them of your existence. Now you are thinking Display, Content syndication, 3rd party tradeshows & publishers, etc.

3. What? - Average Contract Value (ACV) or ARPA

What kind of product do you sell? Typically, it's safe to assume that a product with a higher ACV needs consideration and involvement from senior decision-makers across LoBs. Note that the same decision-makers are not easily accessible via conventional channels such as Paid social, email, Paid search, etc. Therefore your channel mix needs to evolve to match where they pay attention to. In this scenario, your channel mix might include direct mail, exclusive invites to 3rd party events, etc. 

4. How much? - Available budget

If you are well-funded, go ahead and explore multiple channels until you have a mix that delivers predictable lead volume and Qualified Pipe. 

If funds are tight, you might want to prioritize channels based on 3 factors - 

- Does that channel have your buyer's attention? (qualitative assessment) 

- What is the Cost per reach per channel?

- Based on rough funnel math, can this Cost per reach ultimately deliver a respectable Pipe per $ spent over the duration of your sales cycle? 

Overall, two variables determine the effectiveness of this strategy - 

1. Do you have a sufficient volume of buyers who you can target?
2. Are you able to effectively and efficiently access those channels to reach them?

The key variable that affects the choice of channels is -- target audience.

1. Audience type - Is this a new business campaign or install base, cross-sell / up-sell campaign? New business campaigns are heavy on paid media and install base campaigns are heavy on owned media
2. Market segment - Is this an SMB/mid-market campaign or an enterprise campaign? New business SMB/Mid-market campaigns are largely driven by inbound tactics such as paid search, website, SEO whereas Enterprise campaigns require an ABM strategy

Other key variables that affect choice of channels are of course pipeline goals and budget.

When designing an integrated campaign, I recommend starting with the business objective or goal. What are the desired outcomes from the campaign? This is your north star that will guide your strategy and the channels that are needed to support it.

Next, identify where your customers hang out based on your desired outcomes. In X scenario, we would find our customers at Y and Z. Do you have budget needs for these channels? What stakeholders would need to be involved?

Lastly, ask yourself, what measurement, data and analytics is needed to measure the desired outcomes? How will you measure performance across channels for the integrated campaign? How do you take into consideration how each channel impacts the other?

There are many other variables that may need to be factored in depending on your business model, go-to-market strategy and the sophistication of your offerings; this is a general framework. These questions are foundational though and you’ll find the need to layer on additional questions specific to your use case.