About this tool

Most marketing channels get cut for the wrong reason. An agent stops the newsletter because it “doesn’t generate leads” — but the newsletter’s job was never leads. It’s the reason a referral arrives already warm eighteen months later. Judge a recognition channel on direct-response numbers and it will look like a failure right up until you stop it and find out what it was holding together.

So this planner assigns each channel one of three jobs before measuring anything. Recognition makes you familiar over time and pays late. Direct response produces a lead now and stops the day you stop paying. Relationship keeps existing people close and produces referrals on nobody’s schedule. All three are legitimate; they are simply not the same thing.

Then it asks what each channel has actually produced and how much time it takes, and returns a verdict per channel: keep it, one more quarter, wrong job, or stop it. The “wrong job” verdict is the one worth having — a channel returning real outcomes that don’t match its assigned job isn’t failing. It’s filed incorrectly, and the fix is to change the job rather than cut the channel.

It also checks where your effort points. If half your business is meant to come from people who already know you and a tenth of your marketing aims there, the arithmetic doesn’t work — and almost nobody notices until they lay it out.

A note on the vocabulary. Not every marketing channel is a recognition channel. Paid leads and targeted mail buy a transaction; a newsletter and a community relationship build familiarity that compounds. Recognition channels are a subset of marketing channels, and this is the tool where both live side by side.

Part of the Marketing Edge™. Free, no signup, nothing saved.