Rating Tactics With The AM Marketing Cube

Bottom Line First

What’s most important to you in your Internet marketing campaign? Quick results? Long lasting results? High ROI? Use the AudetteMedia Marketing Cube to identify what tactics to use:

The AM Cube Live - Try It Yourself

Then head back here for more detailed information on what went in to building Da’ Cube.

Behind the Building of the Cube

Internet marketing offers a number of powerful tactics that can be employed to maximize the attainment of campaign goals. To use them most effectively, it’s important to develop an integrated strategy in advance that does the following:
1. Defines specific goals
2. Establishes a baseline
3. Defines specific tactics
4. Defines budget allocation
5. Defines implementation milestones, metrics and measurements
Steps 1, 3 and 4 will be discussed here. Steps 2 and 5 pertain to analytics and will be discussed in another post coming soon.
Step 1: Define Specific Goals
Measurable Return on Investment (ROI)
There is always a goal to achieve some type of return on investment (ROI). But that can vary, depending on the type of the ROI desired. For example, a focus on building brand awareness will employ different tactics than a focus on building immediate bottom line sales. And it is more difficult to establish a measurable ROI with a branding campaign than with a campaign that is more direct marketing oriented.
After establishing measurable ROI goals, two other variables that should be identified are related to time:
Time to Results
This is defined as how long it takes to achieve measurable results after launch of a campaign. There are times when Time to Results is of the utmost importance, as might be the case where an initial marketing campaign is used as a pilot project with future efforts based on the early results.
Persistency of Results
Persistency is defined by how long results are produced after a formal internet marketing campaign is ended. This is an often overlooked aspect of Internet marketing tactics and can be a real added bonus to ROI. Tactics such as SEO and Content Development rank high on the Persistency scale, whereas display advertising and PPC rank low.
Although there is undoubtedly a subjective element in grading one tactic versus another using these criteria, it can still be a useful tool in designing an Internet marketing strategy tailored to match specific goals. In the AudetteMedia Cube we rate the following internet marketing tactics as to the three elements of ROI, Time & Persistency:
• Search Engine Optimization (On-page)
• Pay per Click (PPC)
• Display Advertising
• Blogging
• Content Development
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Networking
• Online PR
• Email Marketing
In building the AudetteMedia Cube, we use a scale of 1 to 100 and rate each tactic on each of the three criteria using subjective judgment based on our experience:

Time to Results: 1 is slowest, 100 is quickest
Persistency of Results: 1 is least persistent, 100 is most persistent
ROI: 1 is lowest measurable ROI, 100 is highest measurable ROI

As mentioned, these ratings are based on our subjective judgment. We would like to hear from you if you disagree with our numbers (or even if you agree!). For example, we rate Organic SEO 25-90-90: relatively slow to produce results, results that persist for a long time, and high measurable ROI. Do you agree?
How about Display Advertising? We rate it 90-5-50: quick to produce results, little or no persistency, and medium measurable ROI.
Or PPC? We rate it 100-5-60: immediate results, little or no persistency, and relatively high measurable ROI.
What do you think?
Step 3: Define Specific Tactics
The next step is to rank the priorities of the marketing campaign on a scale of 1 to 10 and to plug them into the AudetteMedia Cube worksheet. Here’s an example of a campaign heavily focused on direct sales results and the two highest priorities of the campaign are Persistency of Results and ROI. Time to Results is of lesser importance as this is budgeted as a long-term campaign and there is no pressure to achieve short-term results:

You can see that Content Development and SEO (Organic) run a close first and second when these are the priorities.
There are times when Time to Results is of the utmost importance, as might be the case where a marketing manager is using an initial campaign as a proof of concept in order to justify a more extensive campaign. Here’s how the tactics rank under such a scenario:

Pay-per-Click (PPC) is ranked as the #1 tactic when the goal is for quick results and not much importance is placed on persistency of results. Unlike in the first example, where there wasn’t much concern about quick results, SEO and Content development are further down the scale.

The Cube Live! - Try It Yourself - Interactive Worksheet

Step 4: Define Budget Allocation
Once these priorities are set, it is possible to make an initial budget allocation of resources to the tactics that are most likely to produce desired results. This will inevitably shift over time as results are monitored and measured, but it provides an informed way to begin the implementation process.