My good friend, Aaron Kahlow, posed an interesting question during the Online Marketing Summit yesterday afternoon in Portland, OR. Aaron asked:
If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?
Obviously, the question is a bit ridiculous (given that there's no additional detail provided), but it's designed to elicit an "off-the-cuff" response to a challenging scenario. The answer, of course, is "it depends" - and therein lies the rub. On what does it depend? Well... That's what I hope to answer with this blog post. My goal is not to solve the issue for an individual campaign, but from a very strategic level - asking questions like "where is the company today and where does it want to get to?" then applying those answers to the selection of marketing opportunities. Let's start by defining the macro-level channels themselves, then examine how we'd reach the right conclusions.
Internet/Electronic Marketing Channels
- Display Advertising
- The process of placing ads on third-party websites with the goal of creating branding awareness and/or generating traffic
- Examples: Banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, overlays, interstitials, etc.
- Email Marketing
- The process of collecting email addresses from potential leads and marketing to them via email messages
- Examples: Email newsletters, brand building emails, conversion-focused emails, etc.
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
- The process of bidding for placement at search engines (major or niche) to earn visibility and traffic when relevant queries are performed
- Examples: Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Business.com Advertising, etc.
- Online Public Relations
- The process of generating media from primarily online outlets in order to earn branding and traffic
- Examples: PRNewswire, PRWeb, Internet media focused PR agency work, etc.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- The process of earning rankings in the "organic" results of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing)
- Examples: Keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, etc.
- Affiliate Marketing
- The process of incentivizing other sites to push your product in exchange for a share of the revenue they drive
- Examples: Commission Junction, in-house affiliate programs, etc.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- The process of leveraging social media platforms (small and large) to earn visibility and traffic
- Examples: Facebook Group pages, Twitter marketing, pushing content on Digg, etc.
- Viral Content Campaigns
- The process of generating creative content that will help spread your branding/marketing message and earn traffic
- Examples: Linkbait production, viral videos, guerrilla marketing, etc.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- The process of improving the path from landing to conversion to get more leads/signups/customers
- Examples: Split & multivariate testing, click-through-rate improvements, purchase-process simplification, etc.
Some of these may overlap - for example, viral content campaigns may simply be a means to an end of better search engine optimization - but as they can all be separate entities, engaged in for their own purposes, I've made them distinct.
Primary Variables to Use in the Selection Process
Although other factors should certainly play into the decision making, these three elements are excellent for narrowing down the options:
- Company Goals - What are the top priorities for the business to achieve?
- Brand Awareness - the current marketplace doesn't have enough familiarity/comfort with your brand to visit, engage or purchase from you.
- Education - the market for your product/service needs to be created; potential customers don't yet realize the problem they need you to solve.
- Raw Traffic - your business is monetized with advertising and needs more traffic/page views.
- Sales - your business has clear market demand on the web that needs to be drawn to your site and converted into leads/sales
- Budget - How much do you have to spend on your marketing effort(s)?
- Very High: in excess of $1 million
- High: $100K - $1 million
- Moderate: $25K - $100K
- Low: $5K - $25K
- Tiny: <$5K
- Available Talent - What personnel with free bandwidth or trustworthy, outsourced vendors do you have available?
- Strong Dev Resources - you have technology staff ready and able to make changes to your site to support marketing goals
- Strong Creative Resources - you have writers/artists/brainstormers poised for action
- Strong Search Resources - you have search marketing talent prepared for battle in the results
- Strong Social Resources - you have strong online networkers set to engage the Twit-Face-Digg-o-Sphere
General Tiers of ROI, Effort & Cost by Channel
These are based on my personal opinions (though, based on conversations, they appear to reflect the experiences of many web marketers and internal marketing departments).
I suspect there will be lots of contention about these, particularly from marketers who specialize in non-tier 1 activities. I do think that over time, activities like social media marketing and viral may move to tier 1, but as yet, I believe that companies haven't seen the same consistency or trackability in ROI from these as Tier 1 channels. The eMarketer research I showed this weekend certainly suggests that these newer investments may have a chance to prove themselves fairly quickly.
Formulas for Choosing the Right Channel
Once again, I'm using my own opinions and experiences, but you can use this same format to help with your own decisions, even if the ordering is somewhat different:
And of course, last, but not least, there's the strengths of your organization to consider. If you have amazing talent in these fields, that might sway you to lean more towards particular activities as shown below:
- Strong Dev Resources - lean towards:
- CRO
- SEO
- Viral Content (particularly dev intensive stuff like tools, widgets, etc.)
- Strong Creative Resources - lean towards:
- Viral Content (particularly written/graphic content that can be produced in a standard CMS)
- Email (great copywriters write great emails)
- Display (great designers make great ads)
- Strong Search Marketing Resources - lean towards:
- SEO
- PPC
- Strong Social Resources - lean towards:
- Social Media Marketing
- Viral Content
- Online PR
That wraps up my brief, high level summation of this tough question, and hopefully it can help some marketers and marketing departments to find the right paths for their organizations/clients.
I'd, of course, love to hear your feedback and ideas as well.
Hi Rand,
You obviously put a lot of work into that post and its very interesting to see the thought process that you went through to come up with those matrix grids. I think what this post seems to highlight (to me at least) is that there is no definite answer to the question that your friend Aaron Kahlow posed at the OMS. Its fantastic that you created a complex arrangement of the potential and probable best marketing mix tactics to use based on a number of factors and I wonder if there are any real life statistical studies done by large agencies such as WPP or Publics to back this up. If so, its the sort of thing that would/shoud be circulated in a how and what to pitch company handbook sent to pitch teams. Could be useful for them.
In reality I suspect this is unlikely (definatly in smaller orgs / sme's) and that probably this is where some of the experts in our industry are able to add value and give the benefits of their experience in pitching or working in house in roles such as marketing director. I am currently head of online marketing for the pulse group and I can tell you that most of our money is spend on activities that gain ROI. ROI in SME's (PULSE is an SME i.e. 400 staff) is the key to any campaign yet in larger companies (+1000 staff) branding and education are more important. Kinda fits with what you are saying, specifically where display is concerned.
Tiny tiny point to contend. I am not so sure that PPC advertising should be classed as low effort. With increasing competition and some extremely sophisticated techniques in my experience PPC can be one of the most complex and high effort areas of any marketing mix, particularly when done in house VS outsource AND PARTICLARLY if you are working in a decentralised organisation with a number of different cost centres and budgets per campaign. I manage PPC for about 50 different cost centres and that in addition to some "grey hat" tactics makes is HARD WORK and HIGH RETURN.Great post as always Rand and certainly gets the old brain matter working. For me that’s 2 brain cells. ;)
Peace MOZERS!!
"With increasing competition and some extremely sophisticated techniques in my experience PPC can be one of the most complex and high effort areas of any marketing mix"
Totally agree with FireflySEO on this. If PPC is treated as fire-an-forget then you end up over-paying for not great traffic. I find myself getting sucked in to PPC creating finely honed campaigns that drive some great results - but it definitely takes work.
I am going to have to second Phil and agree with your statement that PPC can be highly complex. I have worked extensively in PPC for large ecommerce, and when you have a million products with stock status, brand requirements, hundreds of thousands of landing page options, and fluctuating margins and prices - PPC starts to get a little bit complicated. :)
Rand - Great post. I think that every organization should look at what you've put together and actually createa custom tailored version of this for their own organization. Some brands actually get fantastic ROI out of display (I know.. but it happens). With a pre-prepared roadmap for your own company, you can take some of the debate and guesswork out of where to invenst time and money.
Yes I agree with both of you Rick & Phil, PPC can be highly complex day by day...
WOW!
It's great BIG comment :)
Great post, but I think that you are selling PPC way short. With the right offering in the right niche, it can provide the best ROI. I wonder why out of 9 techniques, the only one classified as low effort would be PPC. I suppose that you would get only mediocre ROI if you were putting less effort on this than everything else.
Great post Rand. Really makes a complex subject easy to talk around and get across to people who aren't experts in the field.
This will help a lot.
Nice post!
But I want to warn you a bit about having online PR as a marketing channel.
(In my opinion) Public Relations is about "relating" to different "publics" and marketing is one way of doing that. If we reduce PR to a marketing tactic we will miss out on heaps of opportunities.
I firmly believe if more people were thinking "how can i relate to this market" instead of "how can i market to this relation" they would get far more bang for their buck!
Great post. I would maybe include Reputation Management as those issues (and making them go away) can and do impact a website. In some cases i would put it on the same level as CRO...
First thing first i noticed your new picture, i miss the one with the purple t-shirt ;) In sales column of the company goals table i would change email from #3 to #2, imho SEO is a great source of traffic but if the visitor don't buy immediately you can lose the sale (maybe forever) With email you can contact your prospect potentially forever. I agree CRO to be #1 because a tiny change in % can lead to a massive boost in revenues
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Okay just a constructive observation...
No one has a problem with this comment. Aside from some spelling, you seem genuine and excited. Welcome to the community. Nobody cares if english is not your first language, you are welcome to come and learn. (incredible, really)
But you do need to be able to READ what is written here to actually learn how it all works, so reading english or having a really good translation program are going to be important.
At the end of your comment are two little "thumb" indicators. One points up which means someone agrees with your comment. The other points down which means, at least in this community, at least one person found it either bad advice, wrong, or unhelpful.
After your first comment... one little thumb up. (good) no one has a challenge with what you said here. You could get an extra thumb up if someone agrees with your point of view but maybe that will come later.
Those graphs are going to be of great use to me. I tried putting something like that together previously, but these are much better.
My company is struggling with a "very high budget" customer right now. You'd think its an ideal problem to have, but I don't want to waste their money - the problem is that beyond a certain point (in this case large), many types of SEO/SEM activities just can't scale.
Case in point: we've already created about 1000 social media profiles - for each of several key words. Not just created - we've actively updated them (ping.fm helps for some). We've pretty much "edumacated" anyone who ever thought about the topic on this customer's viewpoint. Still not sufficient for their purposes (me talking, not them).
We've also created somewhere in the area of 400 - 500 custom websites (many of them wordpress blogs), each with its own SEO / link building campaign, and most of them frequently updated. Average PR is around 3, with some of them in the 5 - 7 range.
Results for desired keywords aren't bad, conversion rate covers the basic expense of doing all this...but it still just isn't scaling up to what the customer wants. They're willing to pay for more, but I'm running out of things that I can usefully do for them.
Press releases? We use both free sites and PRweb ($200 package). Somewhere in the region of 1,000 press releases in the past 6 months. I think we've saturated Google. Not seeing too much payoff for new releases.
Basically if I can't think of anything more to do I'm going to have to tell this customer that I'm scaling back. Or eventually I'm going to lose them entirely.
Holy crap! How do you guys keep coming up with all this! This is a fantastic article, I mean truly. It has been printed, tacked on the wall and emailed about 30 times.
The company goals chart is great and the General Tiers of ROI is being discussed at great length with my team! :-)
Awesome post! Love it!
SEOs would love to get a hold of some the big brand marketing budgets and funnel some of that TV spend from the boob-toob to the internet, but for the most part display advertising and brand awarness, through display advertising, is usually what fortune 500 companies with huge budgets are looking for.
SEO and SEM marketeers don't practice a shotgun form of advertising, Search Engine Marketing works more like a sniper, not concerning our campaigns with wasted visibility to an audience that may not be receptive to our message but steadily aiming our cross hairs at individuals that are specificaly searching for our products and intent is completely transparent.
Fantastic Post. One of the most informative posts on the various forms of Internet Marketing.
Keep them coming.
Would love to see this article updated for what is working in 2016...
Nice blog indeed :)
However, I would have to agree with some of the folks here that PPC seems under-valued in your assessement. It's a matter of opinion at the end of the day of course :)
Healthy mixture is a way to go IMO. You can't rank for all relevant KWs for your products/company - tremendous ROI is in place for mid- to long-tail KWs with PPC (especially KWs you aren't ranking for - organic that is).
CTR is better with combo presence within a SERP as well. With all things being equal and constant (especially for conversion rate), as long as A/S hold within target range, this results in positive contribution.
It's always better to own than rent - but it's important for one to assess when it is right time to make the transition from renting to owning IMHO. I spoke mostly for non-branded KWs, but this also applies to branded KWs as well.
IMHO, branded KW campaign justifies itself purely to counter competitor bid strategy - in trun, protecting your LTV. Competitor campaigns are very cost-efficient - and provide ROAS beyond bottom-line.
I couldn't agree more on CRO. Traffic is expensive whichever way you slap it - it's best utilize what you already got more effectively.
nice post i really like your charts although they aren't always based on what i would call "facts" but...
i don't get the point of the last column of the second table if your strategy is the same for all the tiers. i would be interested to know how the CRO,SEO and email would change as your budget increases
and...
i think that some of the inconsistency between our answers and yours may be intentional. heres why.. cant rember where it came from but from the point of view of viral marketing and linkbait i bet the controversial posts get alot more links,pageviews and comments so it is smart to drive your community to respond to your ideas even if they arent exactyl right
does anybody get what i mean / agree?
I actually disagree with this post a lot. There is an implicit question of "drive awareness" for early/top of funnel marketing techniques tied into "capture awareness." Things like CRO are sometimes a bit of a misnomer (like transactional emails fall under both CRO and email marketing. CRO is often colloquially used to describe data driven techniques, but the truth is everything in the matrix can be heavily optimized using lots of math) Data suggest techniques can be used to seed the other if done right (eg: SMM to viral).
The real question beyond your team mix is backing out eCPM for each technique (and no, SEO is not free, nor is SMM, nor is Viral, nor is anything) and see how each technique affects overall campaign performance (aka if the technique is dropped, what happens, and does it affect other techniques as well)
A really good example of this recently is Dollar shave club. Most would put them under Viral as their main channel. It wasn't. They bought out Facebook Ads early on to grow out a social community based in LA, primarily of men who cared about their appearances. They also had a mad large pr plan with a strong PR message based on current news event. That PR message was also repeated in the video (economy) and the name of the company. They also used internal connections based on UCB to create quality depanning.
This created enough of a seed to cause the video to go viral. From there, they were able to capture email addresses to actually sell razors (email marketing). Not only that, the email addresses were used as a further support for later viral videos.
Furthermore, the brand messaging drove both backlinks (seo) and search traffic.
Beyond smart, how does this fit into the matrix?
(also note, the entire strategy cost sub $6k according to them)
Playing around with your strengths, weaknesses, and knowing how to maximize effective frequency, eCPM (everything has eCPM), and how different techniques interplay into each other probably is the best thing I would tell people. That and knowing your true message.
Just a quick note that this post is five years old, so a couple of decades in internet years. :)
I love this post. It's exactly what I've been looking for as an overall guideline for online marketing strategy.
Thank you so much for sharing, expecially your illustrations that help a lot.
Which one of these Internet Marketing channels does blogging fit in?
This is a great summary of how to explain to non online marketers where everything fits. I do believe, however that compaines marketing online are probaby using hybrid of the buckets you describe as it's hard to conform to the tidy borders you lay out here.
all in all it's a great post - tks
Great post. It helped me to rearange my thoughts and dicisions on which channel I should go on. Thanks.
Hey Rand: I noticed that you probably developed your Media Channel metrics in 2009; Do these entries still holds today?
Don Stewart
[affiliate link removed]
I think the 'it depends' factor is very significant in this article. For instance, if one has a tiny budget but is working in a competitive (SEO wise) industry, then I would doubt that SEO is the best way to build one's brand. Perhaps a combination of social and viral would work better. Overall, I think this is a very helpful post though. Thanks a lot Rand for simplifying and summarizing complex matters.
Cheers
i think this was a very intersting article and you presented it very well.
i was wondering why seo was alwase dropped to the second on the list does the simplest viral marketing work better than the simplest seo?
in my opinion seo is alwase the most important because it gets you found. emails will stop showing up in inboxes and will get caught by spam filters and people get bored with a product after awhile when the viral stuff has saturated whatever medium it was presented in but the people searching will never run out and its no work on your part just make sure you are indexed well (well you have to keep on the seo but i feel like its impact at least in small to mid sized buisness is much more than anything viral)
what are yalls thoughts?
I agree with you, I think...
For small to medium business good SEO is a far better Return on Investment.
SEO done right is more sustainable then always attempting to create the next thing to go viral.
I think Rand is just trying to break down the pros and cons. If you talk to enough people, eventually your potential customers are going to bring some of these up. Every company has a budget of some kind to spend on promoting their business. They want to get the most bang for their buck so they may want to portion out a small slice to SEO and spend the rest chasing some of these other avenues. In those instances it will be helpful to be able to explain how your service fits into their goals.
Being able to go into detail on the other options out there helps justify SEO as a more sound investment.
I also agree with FireflySEO. If you think PPC is "low effort" you haven't watched your weekly budget vanish in a few hours. For small to medium sized business it is an agonizing consuming effort that in a tight economy can be disastrous in a hurry.
Rand,
You've presented a good way of thinking about how to break out the different tactics / Internet marketing channels.
In my experience, working with mostly small to mid-sized B2B and industrial companies, it's extremely helpful to lay out marketing tactics, tasks associated with each tactic, and the specific goals that are trying to be accomplished.
Let's face it, clients want to know what you're doing, how you're doing it, and for what reason...the simpler you can make the explanation for them, the better.
Without a doubt, using the matrix you've presented here would be useful in presenting or pitching to prospects and clients as FireflySEO pointed out.
In my experience with our clients regarding company goals, sales and ROI always must be contended with. Interestingly enough, the three channels you have listed under sales are the services we engage in most frequently.
"In business, nothing happens until something gets sold."
This is a really great way to look at things, Rand. I struggle with viral content, though, as if it's a thing that people can just create because they're aiming to create viral content. How much of this can be planned and how much of it is just plain dumb luck? I'm sure there are many folks that have dumped a considerable amount of money into viral campaigns but haven't ever been able to produce truly viral content.
Jlbraaten,
I think doing a real good viral marketing campaign is something quiet difficult as a matter of facts. Also notice, that not every site has the content to do so or not every content is fun, thrilling, amazing or whatsoever in order to be pushed through the media. In my case I don't bother doing it because I don't need to much brand awareness which is the main function so to speak. Rand's cart should help you analyze what is your main goal and focus on the best or our strogest marketing channel to do so.
Love the chart, sums it up beautifully.
But I would have to make one point about social marketing, it doesn't have to be difficult.
IMHO social marketing is about getting others to talk about your products and sites, not about pounding out tweet after tweet, or facebook update after facebook update to your adoring audience of 7 people (including your mom).
Social marketing is about making it as easy as possible for your readers/customers to rave about your products/sites.
We've seen single tweets results in hundreds of visitors, and visitors with common interests with the original tweeter.
All because we've made it simple for users to tweet without ever having to leave the page in question.
Kind of an annoying scenario -- the best thing about the different techniques you listed is how well they work together! The best way to spend that money would be on doing conversion-rate optimization, then SEO to bring in qualified traffic, and email marketing just in case you wanted to have some customers on the back burner.
I guess that was the point of the exercise, though.
The problem I see is that many people do think in terms of "Which one marketing technique is best," rather than "Which set of spending gives me the highest ROI?" I think this is why you devalue SMM -- but if you treated it as a branch of keyword research as well as a way to push products, I think you'd see the returns go way up.
Beautiful post. Actually when I heard that question I was shocked I didn't know how to answer it. You did a gr8 job in explaining. Thanks for those grids too, it was helpful for me.
Regards,
Krish!
Great post.
I think there's two other primary variables that can be added to the selection process that fall under the realm of strategic market analysis. Namely an understanding of the customers and the competitors.
If the company has (or develops) a strong understanding of customer needs and behaviour then it will be better able to target those customers to achieve the company goals.
Also, the same is true of competitors - by understanding the competitive landscape the company will be better able to exploit neglected channels, and/or deal with threats from competitive domination in other channels.
These factors can have a massive impact on the ROI, effort and cost for each of the channels.
Thankfully most of this information is freely available and can be gleaned off the net with a bit of focussed research.
Great post! I could have used these charts during countless marketing budget meetings with our clients. It is so much easier to sell using visual aids ;)
A very smart and diplomatic answer. It’s really appreciable and generous.<a href=" https://www.legalx.net/directory/category/family-lawrel="NoFollow"> family law</a>
This is a first I think. Posting a spam link and pasting in your own "nofollow".
Brilliant! You may have singlehandedly changed the way people go about building worthless links links forever.
Actually, and this is a really big secret so pay attention... If you read more, you won't have to work so hard. You'll figure out what you're doing is a bigger waste of time than playing "spin-the-bottle" with your dog.
Now go out and enjoy your weekend.
Interesting post, and pretty fair in its assumptions in most instances.
I feel that putting activities and skillsets in to narrow boxes could lead to a situation where the bigger picture isn't recognised.
PPC may suffice as a good example.
The PPC channel could make use of a skillfull developer to create advanced tracking implementations that in turn provide a good analyst (who both understands PPC and conversion rate optimisation) with data to feed back to the PPC expert (who incidentally will also specialise in KW research making them invaluable to the SEO team). The PPC specialise will use the creative copywriter's resource to develop compelling ads which link to equally compelling landing pages (developed by your creative designer).
I could go on but I think the point is made. Good, rather than astounding skills, in a combination of these areas, when applied to develop a good workflow ensures that inroads can be made in all channels.
Any campaign relegated to only one channel is likely to fail. So it's a silly question. But... I'd probably focus on SEO if I really had to pick just one.
Have to take my hat off to you Rand...you have a great knack for explaining in simple but well thought out language what marketers have been struggling with for years. Yes, a little subjectivity sneaks in here and there but it's also great to see genuine opinions rather than many who might dance around the subject without being definitive.
Fascinated to see Conversion Rate Optimisation appearing at the top and that email still gets a strong report card. As you rightly say, no one would pick a single channel for a multi-million dollar campaign but a CRO/SEO/Email strategy is looking like a winner!
Again, thanks for the insight...and do you ever sleep?
I most certainly do not! Sleep is for PPC practioners :-)
ROFL :)
I must admit that I think you nailed it on this one. Great post.
No a fan of PPC?
Good use of graphics to help make a complex subject understandable.
I realize it is a component of ROI but I wonder if integrating the concept of a time horizon into the charts would add to their functionality?
For us small budget types (I'm a one man publishing business) SEO trumps because of its 'build it into the process' low cost/ongoing return aspect. The longer your horizon the higher SEO should be placed IMHO.
Hi Rand,
Great Summary. I think most things depend on budget of a client. I am not sure of big companies but small companies will choose the lowest possible way we offer them.
As you guys mentioned, I think it is very important to measure the potentials, and capability of a client and it would be easier to choose which direction to go in marketing.
Thanks
fantastic blog! nailed it on the head in terms of how companies should focus on key activities to drive sales and brand awareness.
That is a whole lot of money. If I had to pick just one thing it would be Social Media Marketing because it would probably have the best longevity.
Although I agree that the type of internet marketing channel a company chooses to implement depends on several factors, I can’t stress enough the importance of Social Media Marketing. Widgets and applications that allow you to market to social networking sites are incredibly effective and some are available at no cost to you. Social Media Marketing can decrease your marketing budget, which then allows you to pass those savings on to your buyers.
- Greg Mesaros, CEO of eWinWin
<a href="www.onlineseocompany">www.onlineseocopmay.com</a>
Nice new things!
I hope we are all getting new tip and benefits .
Thanks ;
Regard
@online On your second comment, this one is going to be poorly received because you are trying to post a link to boost the website you are working for in search ranking. So it is going to get at least one thumb down.
But since you made two comments you can see the difference. One type is okay, the other not.
Then there is just one more tiny thing, when you are out working your rear off posting spammy links on whatever blog you can find, SPELLING is going to be important. But since you are an "online SEO cop may", you probably already know that.
Nice website though. Kind of scary actually.