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How to Coordinate the Chaos of 15 Marketing Channels

Nik
Rajpal
Nik Rajpal
August 2024 | 5 min read

Over the past decade, five big changes have forced marketing executives to revisit how they invest, plan, and use different marketing channels to hit goals:

  1. Conventional channels are becoming broad-impact. Google Ads was once just for search ads. Today, it boasts targeting capabilities and ad types meant to drive awareness (display and demand gen), conversion, and loyalty.
  2. Stagnant channels are becoming vital. Channels that were once overlooked are now powerful tools across the entire customer journey and are vital to driving growth activities. As of 2024, Meta commands over 1.5 billion daily active users. YouTube users watch 1 billion hours of video per day, viewing over 2 billion ads each day.
  3. New channels are taking center stage. Channels that didn’t exist in 2015 are now staples. TikTok, which was formed in 2016, now has over 1.5 billion daily users and is an increasingly powerful marketing tool.

  1. Marketplaces and websites work together. During the pandemic, brick and mortars closed and customers had to shop online. Amazon stopped advertising and prioritized key categories for fulfillment. Customers turned to brand websites and social media to meet their demand, and now marketplaces and websites operate fluidly in a customer purchasing ecosystem.
  2. You can’t easily compare data across channels. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA, along with privacy-centric changes in iOS and internet browsers, have left channels with varying degrees of reporting capabilities. For some businesses, Meta will under-report, and for others it will over-report. The sum of components is often greater than the whole.

The number and complexity of channels has rapidly increased over the past decade, leaving marketers and business leaders scrambling to cope with the chaos. At the same time, businesses eager to maximize touchpoints with prospective buyers have exciting new opportunities to blend nascent and saturated channels into a harmonious mix, thereby reducing acquisition costs.

The Monstrous Challenge of Too Many Options

Our challenge today is to balance 15+ dynamic marketing channels, when not too long ago, we only had six. And it’s important to note that those six channels rarely overlapped in their functionality in the past.

Google Ads, for example, was just a tool for search experts. Today, you need to know how to define target audiences, manage customer remarketing lists, build video shorts, use AI gen tools, and set up the most accurate attribution model from an endless list of sources, options, and tagging systems.

For veterans and long-time ecommerce business owners, this feels chaotic and inefficient. It forces marketers into niche skillsets. It promotes small thinking, myopic strategies, with limited scope to scale.

Today, businesses find themselves in one of two camps: 

  1. Settled in the old way: Investing in saturated channels like Google and Meta, old-school marketers cannot navigate toward the cheaper, faster-growing channels that reduce overall cost per engagement.
  2. Forged in the new school: Retailers taking off on the newest platforms like TikTok and SMS are sheepish about retro-activating the rocksteady platforms that have the highest engagement levels.

Finding the Throughline Between All 15 Marketing Channels

In 2022, our team was tasked with looking into the expanding channel mix issue and presenting some solutions. The most effective answer was one that didn’t invent anything novel or new, but instead offered a way to organize the chaos—and that’s it.

When comparing audience targeting features, ad types, goal types, and how each channel was being used, commonalities became inescapable. Each channel was built in nearly the same way as the next. And no wonder the platforms are so incredibly similar, with the massive number of former Google employees now working at Meta and vice-versa.

Once you start to identify the simple intersectionality between channels, the answer becomes increasingly clear. All of marketing is trying to further certain desired outcomes, and every single platform allows you execute a strategy for any of the five desired outcomes:

  1. Awareness: Increasing visibility and awareness of your product, brand, or service.
  2. Consideration: Showing up when buyers are considering a purchase in your market.
  3. Conversion: Sticking with past engagers until they buy.
  4. Loyalty: Getting past customers to buy again.
  5. Advocacy: Asking for likes, shares, and reviews from happy customers.

You can coordinate and increase the activity levels of any of the five outcomes. Then, when these five activity centers are working together at their full potential, they should act in concert as a virtuous cycle.

For example, awareness for your brand can become so successful that it further influences loyalty and conversions, and even encourages advocacy. And that’s how you get Agital’s framework—the Virtuous Activity Cycle.

The Virtuous Activity Cycle is a strategic framework that allows you to harness the full potential of every channel in your mix by ensuring they work together. All awareness tools in every channel, working in concert. The same for each of the remaining four desired outcomes.

The result? You increase activity levels in each of these five areas in such a profound way that it activates a giant flywheel, expanding your customer relationships and leveraging them to help bring in more customers.

Sound like a plan? 

Harnessing the power of various channels, touchpoints, and opportunities to captivate and expand your customer base may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s often easier said than done. That’s what Agital is here for. We help businesses of all sizes put our strategic framework into action to grow their brand and achieve their key objectives.

To explore some of the transformative results we have driven for clients in ecommerce and beyond using our Virtuous Activity Cycle framework, check out our case studies. If you’re ready to see how we can help you achieve similar success, contact us today.

Thanks for reading!
Written by Nik Rajpal, VP of Strategy
Despite his trademark rasp, Nik Rajpal has been considered the voice of clarity in online retail marketing since 2008, sharing insights and innovations with tens of thousands of viewers through his comprehensive webinar series. After managing SEO fo…
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