Choosing the Right Marketing Channels: How to Get It Right from Strategy to Selection

GOALS

Before you touch a media plan, align on business, marketing, and sales goals.

• Business goals – Where is the company heading this quarter, this year, in three years? Growth targets, expansion plans, market share objectives – they all dictate how ambitious your marketing can be.
• Marketing goals – Are you building brand awareness, improving salience, driving trial, or pushing for loyalty?
• Sales goals – What revenue shifts do you need? Which products or services are the priority?

AUDIENCE

If your audience definition is fuzzy, your channel choices will be too.

Definition – Be specific. Who are they, what do they think, what do they value, and what gets in the way of them buying from you?

Needs – Are they looking for information, reassurance, inspiration, or a deal?

Research – What’s proven? Where are the gaps? Invest in data or research that plugs those holes.

Segmentation – Are you talking to one homogenous group or multiple micro segments with distinct needs?

Targeting – Focus on the segments that give you the most impact for your spend – and be clear on who you’ll exclude.

Consumption habits – What do they consume, when, where, and for how long? That insight will steer you away from channels that won’t stick.

CONTENT

Even the perfect channel mix will fail if your content doesn’t land.

• Positioning – Does your brand have a clear, consistent perception in-market?
• Competitors – Who’s dominating in your space and how? What messages are they winning with?
• Value proposition – Is your offer a product push, a service proposition, or a brand story?
• Messaging – Tailor it to fit each channel’s format, tone, and audience expectations.
• Offer – Ensure every touchpoint has a clear, appropriate call to action.
• Cohesion – Your channels should complement each other. Mixed messages dilute impact
• Creative – It needs to stand out and not blend in as ‘noise’. 

BUDGET

Budgets dictate not just how far your campaign can go, but also how it’s structured.

• Short vs long-term – Are you making a big splash now or building slowly over time?
• Brand vs product/service – Decide the weighting between brand-building and sales activation.
• Phases – Will it be bursts, always-on, or seasonal?
• Event-based – Are you leveraging a key date, product launch, or industry moment?

CHANNELS

Before choosing, interrogate each one:

• Evaluation and suitability – Does it bring your proposition to life in a way that matters?
• Engagement levels – Can it reach and hold attention, and to what extent?
• Relevance – Where does it fit in the buyer journey? Is it part of the story or a disruption?
• Share of voice – Can you afford enough presence in that channel to shift perception or behaviour?
• Single vs multi-channel? – Multi-channel always!

HERE'S HOW TO THINK ABOUT IT:

1. Performance Metrics
   These are your short-term indicators — CTR, CPC, conversions, ROAS. They’re useful for optimisation in real time, but they only tell you what’s happening at the bottom of the funnel. Relying solely on these can create tunnel vision, where you end up “harvesting demand” without creating any.
   
   
2. Brand Tracking
   This is about measuring shifts in salience, awareness, consideration, and preference. Tracking brand health over time tells you whether campaigns are building the foundations for future growth. Tools like Tracksuit, YouGov, or bespoke brand trackers can show how your investment is moving the needle beyond immediate clicks.
   
   
3. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM)
   MMM gives you the long-term, holistic view. It looks across multiple channels and isolates their contribution to sales. While it’s more resource-intensive (and warrants a larger investment than brand tracking tools), it’s one of the most reliable ways to prove marketing’s impact to the board and CFO. As privacy changes reduce access to granular digital tracking, MMM is making a serious comeback.
   
   
4. Incrementality Testing
   For more agile brands, incrementality testing (e.g., geo-split or audience-split tests) is a smart way to measure the true lift of a campaign or channel. It helps you understand whether spend is driving new demand or simply capturing what you would have won anyway.
   
   
5. Balance and Integration
   The strongest measurement frameworks don’t pick one approach; they blend them:
   - Performance metrics to optimise in-flight.
   - Brand tracking to monitor audience impact.
   - MMM or incrementality testing to validate the big picture.
   
   
6. Continuous Optimisation
   The “analysis” part is just the start. True optimisation means acting on the data: reallocating budget, refining creative, or shifting weight across channels based on what’s working. A good framework is living, not static.