7 ways to evaluate your marketing channels
Here's a better way to evaluate your marketing channels like a world class growth leaders.
Hey 👋 I’m Evan. Once in a while, I attempt to document my learnings in the intersection of growth, marketing, and career 🔥. If you are a first-time visitor, here’s what you missed:
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Q: Our content have been getting a lot of views and engagement, but it doesn’t translate to sales. What did we get wrong?
I’ve seen this type of question being raised by many marketers over the years, fresh-grads or senior folks. Often times, people have the tendency to over-optimize content — how to make a content more engaging, how to create a 2-way interactions with the audience, how to create a content that people find useful, or what’s the optimum video format/duration. All of those are good and you should definitely do that. But that’s a often misguided.
Here’s the catch: An increase in your social media engagement doesn’t always translate to an increase in business metrics.
If you’re in this exact situation, you might not have content problem. You might have channel problem. Think of it this way: Different products, even within the same platform, might require distinctly tailored social media strategies.
Let’s think of an example: Red Bull and Bloomberg has wildly different strategy on Instagram. Red Bull focuses its content around extreme sports and adventurous lifestyles, leveraging Instagram as a way to reinforce its brand identity & brand loyalty, which then leads to sales.
In contrast, Bloomberg focuses on delivering concise, timely, and informative content from quick news updates to in-depth analyses. This strategy expands its reach, attracts a younger demographic, and cements its reputation as a trusted source in the financial sector. Then, it directs curious readers to its website for the full content, leading to subscription growth.
Going back to the topic, a telling sign of your organization having a channel problem is when you’re not sure what specific role each channel plays in your overall growth strategy. You’re also uncertain how it should be assessed / measured.
Below I’ll share a framework that I’ve been using from Reforge to help you understand your marketing channels better. A bit of unpaid endorsement: Reforge is the most life-changing course I’ve ever taken and I strongly suggest you to apply if you can afford it. They cover plenty of topics ranging from product, growth, data, and marketing.
Disclaimer: This is not an exact copy of Reforge’s frameworks, but rather a simplified version that I believe still does the job. In each breakdown below, I also added some practical tips from my own trial-and-errors to help you put this framework to use right away.
Broadly, when I evaluate a marketing channel, I look at seven components:
📊 Level of intent
⬆️ Growth lever
⚖️ Scale
📈 Potential
😰 Effort level
⏳ Time to impact
📏 Measurability
1. Level of intent 📊
(High intent / Medium intent / Low intent)
Understanding the level of intent of your target audience on a particular platform is crucial for tailoring your marketing strategy effectively. This intent essentially measures the likelihood of your audience transitioning from their primary activity on the platform (e.g., entertainment, socializing, learning) to engaging with your product, be it through a purchase or seeking more information.
Here are refined considerations to accurately gauge this intent level:
Why do your audience use that platform? Start by analyzing why your audience frequents a specific platform. Each platform caters to distinct user needs—some may be for entertainment (like TikTok or YouTube), others for professional networking (LinkedIn), or for staying informed (Twitter). If your product aligns closely with the primary motivation of users on a platform, the intent level can be considered high. For example:
Educational products might find a highly interested audience on platforms where users seek knowledge (YouTube or TikTok)
Software products might find a high-intent audience on platforms for professionals (LinkedIn or Twitter)
Your product’s commitment level: The nature of your product significantly influences the audience's intent level. Products requiring lower commitment, such as impulse buys or low-cost items, typically have a higher intent level on most platforms. In contrast, products demanding a higher commitment, whether in terms of cost, time, or emotional investment (like house mortgages or luxury goods), may face a lower intent level.
Engagement vs Intent: It’s important to distinguish between platforms that are high in engagement but may not necessarily translate to high intent towards your product. A platform with high engagement in terms of likes, shares, and comments does not automatically indicate a readiness to purchase. Tailor your content to bridge this gap, moving users from engagement to action.
Why this is important: Understanding intent on each channel allows you to effectively tailor your content to match your audience’s behavior in that platform, allocate resources to channels most likely to give conversion, and to help you understand how to properly assess a specific channel. Essentially, by aligning their content strategy with intent, businesses can effectively nurture leads through the funnel, from initial awareness to final purchase decisions.
2. Growth lever ⬆️
(Acquisition / Retention / Monetization)
There are 3 growth levers: Acquisition, retention, and monetization.
One channel may impact more than one lever. However, every channel must impact at least one. If not, you might want to reconsider being active on the platform. For those that are unfamiliar, identifying which growth levers a channel impacts can be quite confusing. Some channels are quite obvious, whereas other channels might be more ambiguous.
Here are several things to keep in mind:
Don’t assume. Be honest — Maybe you join a company with their social media page already amassing thousands of followers by treating it as an awareness channel. In this situation, you’re tempted to label it as acquisition channel and move on. Borrowing a quote from Jack Reacher: “In investigation, assumption kills.”. You need to do this exercise with zero pre-conceived thoughts. If you can start all over, what role do you think this channel should play? Is it better to build awareness here, or can it be used for monetization?
A channel can impact different growth aspects for different companies — This is in accordance with my first point. For example: Instagram for fast fashion brand is suitable for monetization and acquisition. For luxury sport car manufacturers, Instagram might be more suitable for engagement with the community (retention).
One channel can impact more than one growth lever — For a marketplace, website will have a huge impact on acquisition, retention, and monetization. For sports brand, TV advertising will impact acquisition and retention.
Don’t overthink. When you try to do this exercise for the first time, it’s easy to overthink. You might think that TikTok is good for acquisition, but then you can think of edge case where it might also be useful for retention and monetization. My suggestion is to not overthink it and just write all 3. Once you’re done evaluating all channels, you can always make an adjustment later.
Why this is important: Understanding how each channel drives your growth lever allows you to identify blind spots in your channel portfolio. You will instantly know if you’ve been investing too much in acquisition channels and haven’t given monetization channels enough love. You will notice at glance if you have too many / too few channels for a certain growth lever.
3. Scale ⚖️
(Large scale / medium scale / low scale)
Assessing a channel’s scale is pretty straight-forward. How many of your target audience that you can expect to reach in that channel?
4. Potential 📈
(Huge potential / medium potential / low potential)
Is the channel growing fast? Has it hit a plateau? How fierce is the competition in that channel? If you want to deploy ads, how much bidding price you can tolerate?
When assessing a channel’s potential, most marketers just consider the sheer addressable market size. Usually the train of thought goes like this: If many of our target users are in that platform, then we should pursue this channel.
This is highly misleading. Just because 95% of our audience are on Instagram, it doesn’t mean we should prioritize it.
There are other factors to consider when assessing a channel’s potential (and the likelihood of success):
The platform growth: Is the channel still growing?
Competition: How many of our competitors are on that channel? How much are they investing on that channel?
5. Level of effort 😰
(High effort / medium effort / low effort)
As much as we want to manage all channels to squeeze, it’s simply not feasible. We need to assess the level of effort necessary to manage those channels. In order to do this, we can use the classical triple-constraint of time, energy, and money.
The level of effort is contextual to your company’s resource availability. For example, a channel requiring a substantial initial monetary investment but less ongoing time and energy might be considered low effort for a financially robust company but high effort for a resource-constrained startup.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are channels, like websites, that may be resource-intensive initially but easier to maintain later. Conversely, platforms like TikTok might continuously require high levels of creative input and audience engagement.
In the original Reforge’s channel evaluation framework, you can divide it into two types of efforts:
Effort to start (H/M/L) — This assesses the resources required to kickstart a channel. Factors to consider include the financial investment for setup, the time needed for launch, and the manpower required for initial content creation and campaign management.
Effort to maintain (H/M/L) — This evaluates the ongoing investment needed to keep the channel active and engaging. It's crucial to understand that some channels may demand continuous updates, interaction, and content production, while others may require minimal ongoing effort after setup.
Why this is important: The distinction between the effort to start and the effort to maintain, paired with an understanding of your organization's resource dynamics, allows for a nuanced evaluation of the true level of effort each channel demands. This approach ensures that marketing strategies are not only effective but also aligned with the company's capacity to sustain them over time.
6. Time to impact ⏳
(Long-term / medium-term / short-term)
Time to impact means how long it will take for the average audience in that channel from seeing about your product for the first time until s/he becomes a customer. This aspect is highly correlated with level of intent.
Some common examples:
Instagram’s time to impact for beauty brands is generally short — 1) Finding inspirations or reference is among a reason people open Instagram, which is a great fit for beauty brands, 2) The price point is relatively cheap, 3) Skincare is not a high-commitment product (low barrier)
Instagram’s time to impact for Massive Online Open Course (MOOCs) is long — 1) Nobody surfs Instagram to look for an online course, 2) Online course requires a huge commitment of time and money, 3) Prospective students need detailed information about the course & instructors before enrolling.
Why this is important: Among numerous reasons, assessing time to impact is important to manage execs’ expectation on how a certain channel performs and how it will be assessed. Having this alignment upfront provides understanding that a channel’s performance should be evaluated based on its anticipated impact timeline, which can vary from long-term to short-term depending on the platform’s level of intent.
7. Measurability 📏
(High measurability / medium measurability / low measurability)
The number one reason a lot of companies are unable to replicate their growth success in the past is because they don’t really understand why or how they grew. They might have some data, but either they don’t have enough data or they don’t have the right data. What ends up happening is they rely on few intuitive random wins. They have to guess a lot. And the reason for this is the lack of useful data in the first place.
Conversely, companies who manage to grow sustainably use data to inform their decision making. Those data allows them to build a system that yields repeatable, predictable, and defensible growth. This is where measurability comes to play.
Deciding a channel’s measurability depends on how you use that platform and what kind data do you need to inform future decisions. Here’s an example:
A brand that leverages TikTok Ads for acquisition might find its measurability as high since the data allows them to know which content brought the most traffic, which content brought users with the highest quality, and what content should they experiment with.
However, the same can’t be said for those who wish to use TikTok (organic, no ads) to drive engagement / product activation, solely due to how limited the amount of actionable data that would be useful for us. Metrics such as followers and likes do not give us enough insight on what content to make
Knowing the measurability of every channel helps you decide your social strategy, your annual budget, and your experimentation plan. Obviously, you don’t want to invest too much on a platform that doesn’t give too much insight into what’s happening.
How to tell if you’re doing it right ✅
Evaluating your marketing channels requires constant efforts and multiple trial-errors. But with enough hours and commitment, you should be able to:
Bring more clarity to your team and allow them to operate faster now that everyone is in complete alignment about the overall strategy
Clearly define the key metrics for each channel (putting less focus on vanity-yet-overused metrics like followers and likes and more on numbers that actually mean something)
Contribute more unique insights to the team, given your deepened understanding of your overall channel portfolio and its landscape
Have an easier time to decide which channel to invest on (prioritization) and convince others why those channels are worth investing
Bravely take more calculated-risks to explore new channels, given that you are well aware of the constraint of each channel
Gain trusts and buy-ins from the execs since you prove to be capable of thinking one step ahead
After reading this, I hope that you decide to do a proper evaluation on your channels. I have Reforge’s Marketing strategy course to thank for this valuable frameworks and my wish in sharing this is that you will find these useful for you as it did for me.
Once again, I strongly recommend you to apply to Reforge if you want to level up and learn from some of the world’s smartest minds in product, growth, and marketing 🔥.
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