The channel that delivers the right message to the right customer is not the most expensive one
A marketing channel is the route through which you communicate with the customer: e-mail, SMS and messaging, social media, search engine and digital advertising, website and content, trade fairs and events, dealer and in-store marketing, printed material, and direct sales contacts.
What distinguishes it from a sales channel is that it is where the message flows, not the transaction. A marketing channel strategy is deciding in advance which customer segment will be reached through which channel, with which message, at what frequency, and with what budget,
how the channels will complement one another, and by what each channel’s success will be measured. Channel selection is not a matter of habit or fashion; it is a decision based on where the customer is and which message they are open to in which medium.
Without a strategy, marketing channels operate independently of one another. The social media team manages its own calendar, the e-mail team its own list, the trade fair organization its own budget; the same customer receives three
contradictory messages from three channels within a week. The budget goes not to the channel whose return can be measured, but to the most visible one, or to whatever was done last year. The most common problem is attribution: which channel, which campaign, is an incoming order the result of?
When this question cannot be answered, every channel claims the success, no channel owns the failure, and the strategy is rewritten the following year on the same assumptions.
In Minerva, marketing channels are a defined structure within the marketing module to which campaigns and activities are linked. Every campaign is tied to one or more channels, a target customer segment, a budget item, and a period;
e-mail and message sends are made from within the system, trade fairs and events are recorded as corporate activities, and dealer and store campaigns are reflected on the B2B and B2R portals. Because the contacts, requests, quotations, and
orders arising from a campaign are linked to the campaign and channel record, the opportunities, sales, and cost generated by each channel are reported directly. In this way, budget allocation is replanned not by estimate at year end but by channel-based return;
which segment responds to which channel is measured, and message consistency across channels is managed on a single calendar.
Manage your marketing channels not as the separate calendars of separate teams, but as a consistent roadmap leading to a single customer.