The Business Benefits of Identifying the Best Marketing Channels

January 10, 2012

Recently, our Research and Analytics team has been working on developing a process to help our portfolio companies comprehensively identify and prioritize all marketing channels that are appropriate to their selected product market. This will eventually become a hands-on, self-contained “Research Kit” that our portfolio marketing teams can use when doing such projects on their own, or together with our research and analysis support. A lot of these come directly from our own experience working on similar projects with portfolio companies in the last few years. For example, our Marketing Associate Amanda has touched on identifying “influencers”, and my teammate Brandon has previously written about the art and science of prioritizing marketing channels. I will also be writing another post on competitive research for marketing channels.

A question keeps coming up time and again as we start those projects with the portfolio companies:

“What are the benefits of comprehensively identifying and prioritizing the marketing channels? How do you know if we are not wasting too much time and precious resources doing research, while we should be executing with what we know and what we have right now?”

Granted, there is a lot of virtue in executing expeditiously and seizing the opportunity, especially when you have a fast growing sales and marketing engine in a receptive market. But on the other hand, there are many other reasons why you should consider executing a more comprehensive effort, because the project directly informs the marketing plan development cycle and thus ultimately has impact on the sales and marketing operations of the company.

  • Because “knowledge is power”, the output of the process, which is a prioritized list of best marketing channels is the ideal starting point for the marketing team to develop an annual marketing plan that is optimal (because it takes into account of all options and choose the best ones). Moreover, having more options available will spur creativity and experimentation in future marketing campaigns, helping the team to stay ahead of the competition and market norms.
  • Its full set of prioritization data is also helpful for the Marketing Team in setting realistic goals that align with their activities based on the marketing channels that are being used. Marketing campaigns results are extremely dependent on the marketing channels and the media, and they often fail to deliver the promised results not because they were not executed well enough or because there is a deficiency of skills, but rather because the goals were unrealistically ambitious for what the channels can deliver.
  • It allows the marketing managers to understand the skill sets and expertise they need to invest in to execute the planned strategies. Knowing in advance the skills requirements will help the company make a better hiring and training plan for its marketing team, allowing the team to be scaled up more effectively.
  • In addition, the output provides crucial competitive intelligence on how competitors and related vendors are marketing their products to the same market segments, which are important input into the company’s ongoing competitive strategy and positioning.

Ultimately, there is always a trade-off between comprehensiveness and speed of execution. There is no clear right or wrong answer, and not all product markets require an in-depth research effort to uncover the best marketing channels. Still it’s important to consider these benefits of such an effort, especially when its longer term impact on the marketing strategy development is considered.

 

 

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.