Online Marketing 101 Part 3 - Marketing Stack
Marketing Stack 101
Ever year presents a new marketing technology, and with it, new opportunities to try to grow your business. The total amount of marketing technologies and techniques you use is referred to as your marketing stack. Unfortunately, not everything in everybody’s marketing stack is worth your time - your business is unique and you need to be able to evaluate what belongs in or out of your stack. In today's blog, we're going to cover the broad types of online marketing strategies, and we're going to supply you with a framework by which you can evaluate their efficacy. If there is one takeaway we want to establish early, it's that as a small business, not every channel will be worth your time. Ideally, you will find a few that you execute on very well, and strategically avoid utilizing the ones that are least likely to pay dividends.
The Channels
Before we go any further, let's ensure we've identified the top four marketing channels, and establish a specific example that we use as a proxy for that channel. This model will scale to any marketing technology you wish to use, but for the sake of brevity, we will stick to four examples in today's blog. Some of these examples have a much more obvious best example than others, and your mileage may vary as to whether the example we've provided is the best opportunity within a given channel for your business. For SEO we're going to use blogging as our example. Google AdWords will be our proxy for search marketing. For video, we will use YouTube as our example. Social media is trickier because different types of businesses will have dramatically different results from each other on social media channels. Facebook and Instagram have very different strengths and therefore different populations who use them. We're going to be using a gardening supply store as our example today, so we'll use Instagram. Now we need to know how to evaluate the ROI for each of these channels. We don't need to be right on. This exercise is for directional correctness, and that should be fairly easy to determine once we start thinking about things in a specific evaluation framework.
The Evaluation Criteria
Now let's create a table and assign each channel two scores - Investment and Return. Investment will represent an estimate of the amount of effort and cost that a given channel will take. Return will represent how valuable we expect the activity generated by this marketing strategy to be. We will designate a score of one to five for each of these marketing strategies.
We'll assign some numbers here as a straw-man, but remember your business will have different rankings for these channels than other businesses. The numbers here are an example only.
With these scores in mind, let's visualize these differently - let's put the activity in a graph instead of just a number. Visualizing the fit within your marketing mix is often an easier way to conceptualize the worthiness of a new marketing technology or technique. We've now put in our scores from the previous table, and can see right off the bat that some of these activities stand out from the others.
Blogging, for example, has a five for return and a three for investment whereas Instagram has substantially less Return and less Investment. This doesn't necessarily mean that Instagram isn't worth doing. It's low effort, after all, and in fact, that might be a good candidate for your organization to do internally, while contracting out to a vendor to take on some of the heavier-investment strategies, like video marketing to an agency, who will help ease the burden of getting started with a new marketing strategy.
To Wrap Things Up
In this example, we've only filled out four marketing technologies, but as you do this exercise for yourself, make sure to include everything currently in your mix. Add more, too, as you hear of new technologies. New marketing strategies can be enticing by virtue of being cutting edge, but they're not always worth it, and by applying some basic evaluation tools, you can avoid wasting time and money on something that just isn't right for your business.
Have you ever over-committed to a technology that just wasn't worth it? Let us know in the comments below.
