Communication Channels, Measures and KPIs
Innovation & New Business Planning - TUHH Institute of Innovation Marketing & Institute of Entrepreneurship, Hamburg · part of my Technology Management MBA · study notes for revision.
A communication plan in this course is built from four blocks: the recipient (who am I talking to), the objective (why am I talking to them, and what should they do), the message (how do I say it), and the channel (where does the message physically travel). The earlier chapters worked through the first three. This chapter is the fourth block plus the part that keeps the whole plan honest: the measures and KPIs that tell me afterwards whether any of it worked.
The two halves belong together for a simple reason. The plan’s own checklist asks, in the same breath, which channels are most suitable to achieve the objectives in the target groups, and what the KPIs of the communication activities are and how they can be measured to assess the success of those activities. A channel chosen without a KPI attached is a bet I can never settle. A KPI without a channel behind it is a number with no owner.
The practical stakes are the assignment itself: a communication plan for the first two years after market introduction, two to four recipient groups, and a budget somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 EUR per year, with the exact amount depending on how convincingly the activities are justified. That budget has to be split across a set of channels, and every split has to be defended.
1 · Where channels and KPIs sit in the plan
Section titled “1 · Where channels and KPIs sit in the plan”Plans get complicated fast because every block multiplies with every other block. The slides show it as a grid: each recipient group runs through several phases or objectives (awareness, information, repurchase), each phase is served by one or more channels (email, LinkedIn, trade show), and each channel needs its own measurement (KPI 1, KPI 2 up to KPI m). One venture with three target groups and four channels is already a dozen cells, each of which needs a message, a budget and a number to track.
2 · The channel catalogue
Section titled “2 · The channel catalogue”The deck walks through a long list of channels, and for each one it gives the mechanics and then the goal. These are the digital ones.
| Channel | How it works | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|
| Search engine optimisation (SEO) | Publish original content about the industry or product category, include the keywords potential customers search for in tags and headings, earn links from other sites | Lifting the website’s ranking in organic search results for the keywords and phrases that matter to the business |
| Search engine advertising (SEA) | Bid for placement among the search engine’s sponsored links, bid on the keywords that should trigger the ad, pay only when a user clicks and lands on the page | Boosting traffic to the site or a landing page quickly |
| Content marketing | Original articles, infographics, blog posts, guides, ebooks, photos and videos | Letting potential customers learn about the business, its existing customers as use cases and its portfolio, and positioning the company as a competent problem solver and leader in the field |
| Company website | Usually the first point of interaction, built to convert visitors into leads through a call to action such as leaving contact details, subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a trial | The easier, more enjoyable and more informative it is to browse, the longer visitors stay and the more they learn |
| Email marketing and newsletters | Relevant news, insight and tips to subscribers, announcements of online and offline events, invitations to get in touch | Building and then maintaining a standing information channel with potential clients |
| Social media presence | Facebook, XING, LinkedIn, YouTube and the rest | Making the business accessible, keeping customers in the loop, building brand and reputation, announcing and supporting events, carrying content about the portfolio |
| Display advertising and affiliate marketing | Affiliates such as publisher sites, price comparison and review portals, blogs and influencer channels send visitors to the advertiser and earn a commission, with clicks and sales tracked through affiliate links | Cost effective, because commission is paid only for actions such as sales or leads; a quick way to create traffic, efficient to manage, may earn backlinks; the honest caveat is that many affiliate programmes simply do not perform well |
| Webinars | Engage an audience online in real time, explain new products and services, solve usage problems, answer questions | Offering information, know-how and resources that generate traffic, plus a regular event for direct communication |
And these are the offline and personal ones.
| Channel | How it works | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|
| Fairs and exhibitions | Meeting business partners directly, usually on a regular cycle such as once a year | Generating sales, building and intensifying customer relationships, launching new products, researching competitors and customers, brand building |
| Conferences and industry events | Organising an event that brings many stakeholders and players in the industry together, informing them about trends, demonstrating a leading position | Consolidating relationships across the industry, researching trends and competitors, spotting new market applications, appointing agents and distributors, promoting alliances |
| References and referrals | Building a positive effect on the vendor’s reputation, using customer references as a competitive advantage | Reducing a new customer’s uncertainty and perceived risk, and building a reference portfolio that credible value propositions can be built on; increases reach cost effectively |
| Personal sales | Visits to new leads and existing customers, presence at exhibitions and trade shows, webinars, telephone calls, personalised emails | Establishing direct contact with prospects, and showing existing customers the rest of the portfolio for cross-selling and upselling |
The slides then add a reminder not to forget the good old mass media channels, plus a set of smaller ones: product placement (corporate placement, product placement, event marketing), sponsoring (of sports people and sport events, of social initiatives, of culture), public relations (press releases, press conferences, company brochures, open days, company congresses and seminars) and in-shop advertising (product displays, free samples).
3 · Four ways the deck sorts channels
Section titled “3 · Four ways the deck sorts channels”- Outbound / push: social media advertising, search engine advertising, display advertising and affiliate marketing (all pay-per-click), plus direct mailing and newsletters
- Inbound / pull: search engine optimisation and onsite content, that is owned media
- Peer-to-peer: offsite content, shares and referrals, that is earned media
- Paid media is rented: TV, display, social media ads, and SEA
- Owned media is yours: the website, onsite content, the newsletter list
- Earned media is given to you: referrals and recommendations in blogs, forums, social networks and online magazines
- The plan has to select and prioritise both digital and offline channels for every recipient group
- Offline carries trade fairs, conferences, personal sales, PR, sponsoring, in-shop advertising and classic mass media
- The two are not rivals; the question is which combination works
- Traffic: public relations and advertising, to make the company known and build trust in the brand
- Leads: search engine marketing, emails and content marketing, to communicate the quality of the portfolio
- Qualified leads: webinars, trade shows and conferences, to show the fit to the customer’s needs and start personal contact
- Opportunities to customers: inbound and outbound sales, to convince the prospect of the specific problem-solving fit
That last column is the B2B sales funnel version, and it is the clearest illustration of why one channel cannot do everything. A trade show is useless for creating first awareness at national scale and excellent for turning a warm lead into a personal conversation.
outbound / pushinbound / pullpeer-to-peerpaid mediaowned mediaearned media
Why startups usually start on the pull side. The deck is explicit about this. New ventures often have to begin with inbound and pull channels, and not only because the marketing budget is small. They also need to create awareness, interest and a positive image of the company and the brand first, and paid push spending into an audience that has never heard of you converts badly. The same point comes back in the quotation from the founder of Dropbox that the slides use: search advertising is good for harvesting demand, not for creating it, so SEA is often the wrong tool at the top of the funnel or in the early phases of the customer journey.
4 · How a channel is actually chosen
Section titled “4 · How a channel is actually chosen”The deck turns the choice into two blocks of triggering questions. The first block is about fit, the second about feasibility. A channel has to pass both.
- Which digital and offline channels do the different target groups have access to?
- Which channels do they prefer?
- Which channels reach the most important customers, such as innovators and opinion leaders, and the hard-to-reach recipients?
- Which channels encourage conversion along the funnel, which can be expected to be most effective, and which create the highest engagement?
- Which channels serve the upper, middle and lower funnel? For awareness, which offer the greatest exposure and enough message frequency, that is repetition, and where can attention actually be won? For the buying decision, which let the audience see other people who have already adopted and can act as role models, and which motivate a decision?
- What resources does the channel require, how costly is it, and can we afford to communicate there at all?
- How hard is it to manage and steer communication through that channel? Is it practical for a small team?
- What other limitations and risks exist, for example negative reputation effects, and can those risks be accepted or mitigated?
The three rings. Alongside the questions the deck borrows a picture from the traction literature: the outer ring is what is possible, the middle ring is what is probable, and the inner ring is what is working. The instruction is to get to the inner ring, and then focus on the small number of channels that work best for the business. Everything else is a distraction that costs money and attention.
| Ring | Meaning | What it contains for my venture |
|---|---|---|
| Outer | What is possible | The whole catalogue from section 2, which is a list and not yet a plan |
| Middle | What is probable | The shortlist that survives the fit and feasibility questions, tested with small budgets |
| Inner | What is working | The one or two channels the tests proved out, where the budget then concentrates |
Focus is the whole point of the picture. Designing, testing and improving campaigns costs time and money, so spreading a small budget across ten channels means learning nothing about any of them.
5 · The mix, the budget and the saturation problem
Section titled “5 · The mix, the budget and the saturation problem”A single channel is rarely the answer, which is why the plan’s checklist asks not only which channels are suitable but also which combinations or integrations of channels need to be designed. The slides give three recommendations on channels, and they pull in slightly different directions on purpose:
- Do not get distracted. Designing, testing and improving campaigns needs time and money, so focus on the one or two channels that performed best in the tests.
- Different channels support each other. Be aware of the effective combinations when the campaigns are designed, rather than treating each channel as a separate silo.
- Channels saturate. A channel that worked well for a while becomes saturated; to keep growth going you have to unlock the potential of the next effective channel.
The saturation point has its own picture in the deck. Plot new leads or new customers against time and against spending, and each channel traces a curve that flattens: channels tend to become less productive over time and with increased spending, so a new business may have to move on to the next channel even though the current one is still delivering something. This is why the assignment asks explicitly whether the channel mix and the budget per channel will change between the first and the second year, and why.
The SEO plus SEA combination is the deck’s worked example of channels supporting each other. Keyword and conversion data from paid search feeds the organic strategy, so you can test in pay-per-click before committing to a long-term SEO plan. A/B tests of ad copy and landing pages feed the organic listings and landing pages. High-cost, high-volume or low-converting keywords that still matter can be shifted from paid ads into organic search. And targeting clicks in both paid and organic for a high-performing keyword increases total traffic as well as confidence and awareness.
How the budget is laid out. The plan structure in the assignment is a grid. Rows are the recipient groups, two to four of them, with their characteristics and their communication objectives. Columns are the channels, for example the own website, trade shows and SEO. Every channel column carries four things:
| Element per channel | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| KPIs | The specific numbers that will show whether this channel achieved the objective for this recipient group |
| Message | The key message and story shaped for that group in that channel |
| Media | The format that carries it: text ads, articles, pictures, animated banners, advertising videos, product presentation videos, native paid content, native own content |
| Budget | The money assigned to that channel for that group, with a stated reason, and an indication of whether it shifts from year one to year two |
Underneath the grid sits one more row that is easy to forget: the relationship and integration of the channels, that is how they hand recipients on to each other. The plan runs across a stated timeline of years, and the whole thing is judged on five quality criteria: differentiating between recipients, objectives and channels; being precise about budgets, KPIs and recipient characteristics; using information and data from different sources such as commonly used KPIs, published channel costs and existing discussions of pros and cons; substantiating the channel selection and the key messages with arguments; and prioritising, which means explicitly not doing a little of everything just to be safe.
6 · Contact cost and the auction arithmetic
Section titled “6 · Contact cost and the auction arithmetic”The deck’s cost logic is concrete rather than theoretical, and it lives mostly in paid search and display.
- Cost per click (CPC) is the pricing model of search and social advertising: the advertiser pays only when someone clicks the ad and arrives on the landing page.
- Cost per thousand impressions is the pricing model of display: banners, whether animated, audio, video, interactive or dynamic, are billed most often per thousand impressions. Advertisers define parameters such as context, sociodemographics, keywords, previously visited websites, location, time of day, device or operating system and retargeting, and buying happens mostly through real-time bidding on marketplaces for users rather than for websites, which makes tracking and targeting central.
- Cost per action is the pricing model of affiliate marketing: the affiliate is paid a commission only for a delivered sale or lead, tracked by URL, cookies, session, database or pixel through an affiliate network sitting between merchants and affiliate websites.
Where the clicks actually go. The deck cites a distribution of search clicks that is worth memorising, because it decides how much organic ranking is worth relative to paid placement.
| Position in the search result | Share of clicks |
|---|---|
| Top 5 organic results | 77 percent |
| Organic results 6 to 10 | 8 percent |
| Organic results on pages 2 to 3 | 4 percent |
| Paid results | 4 percent |
| New search or leaving search | 7 percent |
A second number sharpens the same point: the average number of organic blue links displayed on a result page has fallen from 10 to about 8.5, so the organic space being fought over keeps shrinking.
How a paid position is priced. The four terms the deck uses are max bid or maximum cost per click, click-through rate, quality score and ad rank, and they combine into an effective cost per click.
Working the deck’s four-bidder, four-position example through both formulas gives this:
| Bidder | Max CPC | Quality Score | Ad Rank | Position | Effective CPC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 2 EUR | 8 | 16 | 1 | 12 divided by 8 = 1.50 EUR |
| B | 3 EUR | 4 | 12 | 2 | 8 divided by 4 = 2.00 EUR |
| D | 1 EUR | 8 | 8 | 3 | 6 divided by 8 = 0.75 EUR |
| A | 6 EUR | 1 | 6 | 4 | no bidder below, so a floor price applies |
The lesson jumps off the table: the bidder willing to pay the most per click, 6 EUR, ends up in last place because the quality score is 1, while a bidder offering only 2 EUR takes the top position and pays 1.50 EUR for it. Keyword matching is the other lever, with the options broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match, and the recommended tactic is to start broader with modified broad match plus many negative keywords, track which keywords perform, define those as exact match, and then delete or lower the bids on the broad ones.
7 · Measures and KPIs
Section titled “7 · Measures and KPIs”A KPI here is a quantified indicator, attached to a specific communication activity in a specific channel for a specific recipient group, that shows whether the communication objective for that group was reached. The plan’s own wording is the test: what are the KPIs of our communication activities, and how can we measure those KPIs to assess the success of our activities. The objectives block adds the money question on top of it: which return on the investment in communication is expected, what is the minimum and what is the desired return, for example return on ad spend, and how can the effects be measured in a valid way.
The deck admits there are countless KPIs in circulation, and orders them along a funnel logic. Sorting the full list it prints gives this.
| Stage | KPIs the deck lists |
|---|---|
| Awareness and exposure | Number of impressions, number of clicks, click-through rate, cost per click and cost per thousand, keyword rankings, brand recognition and recall, brand reputation, affinity and attitude, share of voice in the market, brand mentions, number of followers |
| Consideration and engagement | Likes, retweets, shares, posts and comments, time spent with the ad, video or website, engagement and call-to-action metrics, bounce and exit rate, signup rates and unsubscribers, references and sharing |
| Conversion | Conversion rate, cost per acquisition, value per order or subscription, campaign revenue, new customer rate, ROI or ROAS |
| After the sale, value and retention | Revenue and profit increase, new-to-lost ratio, customer satisfaction and loyalty, customer lifetime value, cancellation, churn rate |
The point of the ordering is not the list but the rule attached to it: different KPIs dominate in different areas of the funnel and journey, so an awareness campaign judged on conversion rate will always look like a failure, and a bottom-of-funnel campaign judged on impressions will always look like a success.
How KPIs attach to the journey. The class model runs the journey as a set of parallel rows, and the KPI row is only one of them. Reading two ends of the same table:
| Row in the model | Early in the journey | Late, after purchase |
|---|---|---|
| Customer activity | Recognises a need | Repurchases in the category |
| Customer goal | Wants to understand his needs | Wants to upgrade the product |
| Emotion and need | Is overwhelmed by information | Is disappointed or satisfied |
| Channel, instrument, touchpoint | Online video ad | Face-to-face sales meeting |
| Company goal | Making the customer aware of the brand | Upselling |
| KPI | Brand awareness ratio | Revenue increase |
| Responsibility | SEO and SEA team | Field sales |
Between those two ends the KPI row runs through conversion rate and then churn rate, and the responsibility row passes through in-house telephone sales. The same idea reappears as the shorthand TOF, MOF and BOF, top, middle and bottom of funnel, with the main objectives changing between them. Monitoring is done with specialised tool categories for landing pages and SEO, affiliate marketing, social media advertising, SaaS or e-commerce metrics, influencer marketing, email marketing, Amazon Ads, SEA and feed management.
ROAS has to be tracked over time, not read once, so that you can see whether a change to the campaign actually paid off. The deck attaches a short case for exactly this: a direct-to-consumer fashion brand whose management wants to understand why return on ad spend declined even though the advertising budget went up. The exercise is to name about two plausible reasons, tie each one to a step or phase of the online fashion shop’s customer journey, and then propose one way to test or validate whether that reason really is the cause. The structure of the exercise is the lesson: a falling ROAS is a symptom, and the diagnosis has to be located at a specific point of the journey before it can be tested.
The statistical route gets two named methods. The first is the Shapley value, introduced in 1951 and recognised with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012. The logic comes from cooperative games: players form coalitions, up to the grand coalition of everyone, and negotiate how to split the value the coalition creates. Fairness means each member is paid in proportion to the marginal contribution it brings to the possible coalitions. Applied to marketing, the question becomes: what is the contribution of one touchpoint within a sequence of touchpoints? The deck’s worked example takes three touchpoints with these coalition values: v(1) = 100, v(2) = 125, v(3) = 50, v(1,2) = 270, v(1,3) = 375, v(2,3) = 350 and v(1,2,3) = 500. Touchpoint 1 is then evaluated across all six possible orderings:
| Order of touchpoints | Value before 1 joins | Value after 1 joins | Marginal contribution of 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1, then 2, then 3 | 0 | 100 | 100 |
| 1, then 3, then 2 | 0 | 100 | 100 |
| 2, then 1, then 3 | 125 | 270 | 145 |
| 2, then 3, then 1 | 350 | 500 | 150 |
| 3, then 1, then 2 | 50 | 375 | 325 |
| 3, then 2, then 1 | 350 | 500 | 150 |
The six marginal contributions add to 970, so the average marginal contribution of touchpoint 1, its Shapley value, is 970 divided by 6 = 161.67. Note that the slide prints the sum as 907, which must be a typo, since the average it states, 161.67, only follows from 970. Notice also how much the order matters: touchpoint 1 is worth 100 when it goes first and 325 when it follows touchpoint 3.
The second method is Markov chains, which simulate customer journeys by asking how likely each next touchpoint is given the touchpoint that came before it. Beyond attribution the deck offers a much cheaper instrument, the A/B or split test, which can be used to generate pre-orders or sign-ups and determine conversion rates, test revenue models such as flat rate against usage-based fee or freemium against free trial, test price levels and bundles, test reactions to different campaign elements including recipients, channels, messages, media formats, influencers and affiliates, search keywords, budgets, locations, timing and length, test design elements in websites, landing pages and exhibition booths such as navigation, pictures, sign-up forms and call-to-action buttons, and test different sales approaches. The class example is a reporting software vendor that tried two different positions for the download-trial call to action to see which produced the higher conversion rate, with version A winning.
Case corner
Section titled “Case corner”Purple Innovation, Inc.: the online to offline marketing challenge.
Purple is a Utah-based comfort technology company founded in 2015 by two brothers, a rocket scientist and an engineer, who had spent decades developing cushioning materials before deciding to build their own product. The mattress uses a patented hollow buckling column grid that redistributes pressure, manufactured on a machine the brothers designed in-house, and it sold direct to consumer at roughly 999 dollars for a queen against an average of about 4,000 dollars for other luxury mattresses. Growth was almost entirely digital: a 2015 Kickstarter that beat its 25,000 dollar goal by nearly seven times, a viral raw-egg video campaign starring a Goldilocks character that ran digital-only on Facebook and YouTube and drew tens of millions of views, 123 million dollars of sales in the first 18 months, a 2016 pillow campaign that raised 2,640,852 dollars from 17,733 backers, and a 2018 SPAC merger that took the company public at a 540 million dollar valuation. By 2018 revenue was about 286 million dollars with roughly 104 million dollars spent on sales and marketing.
The problem is a ceiling. Direct-to-consumer accounted for only 12 percent of the 16.5 billion dollar US mattress market in 2018, at least 150 online-only rivals had appeared, easy-to-convert customers were exhausted and digital advertising costs were rising. Around 75 percent of consumers would not consider buying a mattress online at all, and the single most common question from prospects was how they could feel the mattress before buying. So Purple went offline through retail partners rather than its own stores: a pilot in 51 Mattress Firm stores out of 2,500, then 142 stores by mid-2018, then over 1,600 stores by the end of 2018 including Bed Bath and Beyond, Macy’s and Furniture Row, sold at wholesale with a minimum advertised pricing policy so the shelf price matched the online price.
The decision the case puts to me. As the CMO, design a mainly digital but partly offline communication campaign that drives traffic into partner brick-and-mortar stores, covering objectives, recipients, message, media format, channel selection and measurement. The stated business goal is to grow total sales and move towards a 70 to 30 split of online to in-store, accepting that the two channels may serve different people.
The trade-off, read through this chapter’s framework. Online is where Purple already lives: it is measurable to the click, it targets precisely through broad, lookalike and interest prospecting plus retargeting on video views, add-to-cart and landing page visits, and it has a proven creative formula. Its weakness against this particular objective is that it optimises for the conversion that happens on the same screen, and the deck’s warning about search advertising harvesting rather than creating demand applies: a bottom-of-funnel machine is being asked to do a top-of-funnel job. Offline, that is TV, radio, print and in-store display, gives broad reach and the physical proximity that a store visit needs, and it plugs the in-shop advertising channel from the catalogue directly into the moment of decision. Its weakness is that once the sale happens in a partner store, Purple’s visibility into customer behaviour collapses. Retailers order from the distribution centre months in advance, so orders cannot be tied back to a campaign, and the honest question becomes whether the marketing mix is working as a whole.
My recommendation. Keep the majority of the budget in digital, as the company itself intends, but split it by funnel job rather than by platform. Fund an upper-funnel video reach and awareness layer on the platforms where the brand’s humour already works, since a new pool of prospects has to be created before anyone will drive to a store. Add a local lower-funnel layer: geo-targeted ads around the postcodes of partner stores, with a store-locator call to action and a book-a-try message built on the case’s own strongest insight, that people want to feel the mattress before spending on something they replace only once in eight years. Use offline selectively rather than broadly: in-store displays and trained sales staff at partner stores, plus regional TV or radio only in the markets where store density justifies it. Integrate the two by making every offline asset carry the same visual hook as the video creative, so the in-store display finishes a story the ad started.
KPIs I would track. Replace a single ROAS number with a layered set that matches the funnel logic. Upper funnel: brand recall, brand awareness and brand preference measured through brand lift tests against a control group, the way the 2018 influencer campaign was measured when it produced 5 times brand recall, 7 times brand awareness, 3 times brand preference and 3.4 times return on ad spend. Middle funnel: cost per engagement and cost per action, including video views, link clicks, comments and shares, which is exactly the KPI shift the case describes as necessary when moving from conversion campaigns to reach campaigns. Lower funnel: store-locator clicks and directions requests per 1,000 impressions, and partner sell-through per store in exposed versus unexposed regions. And because attribution here is genuinely unsolvable, I would build the evidence experimentally: geographic holdout tests, going dark on a channel in selected regions for a period and comparing store sell-through, which is precisely the make-shift control-and-test approach Purple already used, plus a fresh baseline for every new KPI before the campaign starts.
Worked example
Section titled “Worked example”A small channel-mix plan for a plausible venture: a Hamburg startup selling a retrofit predictive-maintenance sensor kit to mid-sized manufacturers. One recipient group, the maintenance manager in a plant of 200 to 800 employees. Objective in year one: generate qualified leads, since in B2B the main goal is lead generation. Budget: 200,000 EUR for year one.
| Candidate channel | Recipient fit | Objective fit | Cost | Measurability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Content marketing plus SEO | High: maintenance managers research problems by searching, and read case studies | Medium for leads, high for traffic and credibility; slow to build | Low cash, high time | High on traffic and rankings, weak on the lead itself |
| Search engine advertising | Medium: only reaches people already searching for a solution | High at the middle of the funnel, useless for creating demand | Medium, pay per click, priced by ad rank | Very high, click and conversion tracked end to end |
| Industry trade fair | Very high: the decision makers attend, and the kit can be demonstrated physically | Very high for qualified leads and personal contact | High: stand, build, travel, staff time | Medium: badge scans and follow-up meetings, but no clean attribution |
| LinkedIn advertising and outreach | High: the role can be targeted precisely by job title and company size | High for awareness and for booking demos | Medium to high cost per click | High, though a long lag to the actual deal |
The chosen mix and split. Trade fair 70,000 EUR (35 percent), because it is the only channel where a physical retrofit product can be touched, and it is the single strongest qualified-lead channel for this audience. Content plus SEO 50,000 EUR (25 percent), as the owned, pull-side foundation that keeps producing after the spend stops and that a startup should start with. LinkedIn 40,000 EUR (20 percent), to build awareness in the target job titles and to fill the fair’s meeting calendar in advance. SEA 30,000 EUR (15 percent), kept deliberately small and aimed only at high-intent problem keywords, to harvest existing demand rather than create it. A 10,000 EUR (5 percent) test reserve to try one new channel per year, because the productive channel of year one will start saturating in year two.
| Channel | KPI I would set |
|---|---|
| Trade fair | Number of qualified leads captured at the stand, and cost per qualified lead against the 70,000 EUR |
| Content plus SEO | Organic sessions per month and keyword rankings for the five priority problem keywords, plus newsletter signups as the call to action |
| Cost per booked demo, with reach and video view rate as the upper-funnel supporting numbers | |
| SEA | Conversion rate on the landing page and effective cost per click, watched together with quality score |
Apply it to your project
Section titled “Apply it to your project”-
Write down the recipient groups first, two to four of them, with the characteristics that matter for communication: which media they use, what they already know, what they expect, and how they buy. The channel choice is downstream of this, never upstream.
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State one communication objective per group and per journey phase, in quantitative terms wherever possible, and note whether the objective shifts between year one and year two.
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Attach a KPI to every objective before choosing any channel, and check that it belongs to the right funnel stage: awareness numbers for awareness objectives, conversion and cost-per-acquisition numbers for conversion objectives, churn and lifetime value for retention.
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Run the fit questions over the catalogue: which channels the group can access, which they prefer, which reach the opinion leaders and the hard-to-reach, and which suit the funnel phase you are targeting.
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Run the feasibility questions over the survivors: what resources each needs, what it costs, how hard it is to steer with your team size, and what reputational or other risks it carries.
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Design the combinations, not just the list. Say explicitly how each channel hands the recipient to the next one, in the way paid search data feeds organic search, or an ad feeds an in-store display.
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Split the budget and defend every number. Assign an amount per channel per recipient group, justify it with published channel costs and expected KPI performance, and say what changes from the first year to the second and why.
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Test small, then concentrate. Start on the middle ring with modest test budgets, measure, and move the money to the one or two channels that reach the inner ring. Do not spread thinly to feel safe.
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Plan for saturation and for attribution. Diarise a review at which the productive channel is expected to flatten and the next one is opened, and decide now how you will estimate contribution: rules-based, statistical, or a geographic holdout test that you can actually run.
Key terms
Section titled “Key terms”| Term | What it means in plain words |
|---|---|
| Communication channel | The route a message physically travels to the recipient, from a search result to a trade fair stand |
| Outbound / push | Channels where you pay to interrupt someone: social and search advertising, display, affiliate, direct mail, newsletters |
| Inbound / pull | Channels where the recipient comes to you: search engine optimisation and your own onsite content |
| Peer-to-peer | Recommendations, shares and referrals that other people produce about you, off your own sites |
| Paid, owned, earned media | Space you rent, space you own, and space others give you |
| Channel mix | The deliberately chosen combination of channels, with a budget split and defined hand-offs between them |
| The three rings | Outer is what is possible, middle is what is probable, inner is what is working; the goal is to reach and then focus on the inner ring |
| Channel saturation | The tendency of a channel to deliver fewer new leads or customers over time and with more spending |
| KPI | A quantified indicator, tied to one activity in one channel for one group, that shows whether the communication objective was met |
| Quality score | Google’s rating of an ad, driven mainly by the expected click-through rate plus relevancy and landing page quality |
| Ad rank | Max bid multiplied by quality score, the number that decides the position in the auction |
| Effective CPC | The ad rank of the bidder immediately below you, divided by your own quality score |
| ROAS | Return on ad spend: the revenue generated per unit of currency spent on advertising, tracked over time |
| Attribution | The science of assigning credit for a conversion across the touchpoints the customer met, split into rules-based and statistical methods |
| Shapley value | A fairness method from cooperative game theory that credits a touchpoint by its average marginal contribution across all possible orderings |
Test yourself
Section titled “Test yourself”- Name the four building blocks of a communication plan and the one-word question the slides attach to each.
- Sort these into outbound push, inbound pull and peer-to-peer: search engine optimisation, newsletters, offsite shares and referrals, display and affiliate advertising, onsite content, search engine advertising.
- Why does the deck argue that startups often have to begin with inbound and pull channels, and what does the Dropbox founder’s point about search advertising add to that argument?
- Calculation. Four advertisers compete for four positions. Their maximum cost per click and quality score are: A pays 6 EUR with a score of 1, B pays 3 EUR with a score of 4, C pays 2 EUR with a score of 8, D pays 1 EUR with a score of 8. Compute each ad rank, put them in order, and compute the effective cost per click for the top two positions.
- A campaign is designed to build awareness at the top of the funnel and its performance is reported as a poor conversion rate and a high cost per acquisition. What is wrong with that report, and which KPIs should have been used?
- Explain in two sentences why Purple could not simply measure which advertisement produced an in-store sale, and name two things it did instead.
Revision summary
Section titled “Revision summary”Next: Digital Marketing: Outbound → - search, display and video advertising, and how to measure it.