Reallocate your marketing efforts without losing what audiences value most.
The Portfolio Value Matrix shows what each of your marketing and communications programs costs, what it contributes, and how audiences respond, so you can keep, grow, refine, or retire each one with confidence.
You’re being asked to do more with less.
Marketing and communications teams usually feel cost-cutting mandates first. But many teams can't easily summarize, program by program, the full impact of their newsletters, events, publications, webinars, and other campaigns. Their value spans several revenue streams — advertising, sponsorships, new subscriptions, member renewals, and more — while costs are spread out and often poorly attributed internally.
So budget decisions fall back on whatever is easiest to measure, which means marketing leaders risk killing flagship programs and saving ineffective campaigns. What are leaders missing?
What programs really cost. Staff time, shared tools, and overhead sit outside the budget line, and they often make up most of the true bill.
What programs contribute, in full. Revenue, retention, and new acquisition live in different systems and on different time frames.
Overall audience impact. Effectiveness, in terms of reach, engagement, or other essential KPIs, is an essential pair to the finances of a program, but it is often not tracked in tandem.
You need one comparable scale for every program, and actionable recommendations.
The Portfolio Value Matrix puts each program's fully loaded cost, contribution, and audience impact on one scale, so you can compare all your offerings on an apples-to-apples basis across your portfolio. Each program is clearly categorized with a recommendation: keep, grow, refine, or retire, with the evidence behind it and a test of which calls hold up under different assumptions.
This lets you redirect time and resources for maximum impact. Freed-up effort and budget can instead go to flagship programs and new offerings, making your team more effective and efficient and helping you meet budget mandates with ease.
What this looks like in practice.
Duration: A one- to two-month project, beginning with a kickoff intake meeting to align on programs for analysis.
Activities: A program-by-program review of team costs, revenue contribution, and audience KPIs. An onboarding checklist will show exactly what data is needed to support the analysis, and team interviews will fill in the gaps.
Deliverables: A leadership-ready readout, including a keep, grow, refine, or retire recommendation for each marketing or communications program, including any necessary exceptions or caveats.
Pricing: Fixed fee, scoped to the size of your portfolio.
Want to see how it looks for an example organization? Get in touch for a sample readout.
Built for organizations that run a diverse portfolio of marketing and communications programs.
Membership associations. See which member benefits drive renewals and which cost more than they return.
Publishers. Weigh magazines, newsletters, events, podcasts, and subscriptions on one scale.
Marketing and communications teams. Any organization that runs a mix of content offerings can use it, from webinars and campaigns to publications and social channels.
Agencies. Working across multiple marketing teams? Let's talk about partnering.
About Me
Joshua Lasky is the founder of Waveform Intelligence. He has 15 years of media and marketing experience across finance, audience research and content strategy, and he built the Portfolio Value Matrix to give marketing and communications leaders a clear, evidence-based way to decide what to keep, grow, refine or retire.
Previously he led the Audience & Insights practice at Revmade. Before that he spent several years at Atlantic Media, working across its brands, including The Atlantic, Government Executive and National Journal, from financial planning and strategy to marketing and analytics.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. Associations and publishers are a natural fit because their programs often earn revenue and renewals, but the method works for any organization that runs a portfolio of marketing and communications programs.
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Program-level cost data (who works on what, vendor and ad spend), the revenue and renewal or conversion data that show contribution, and one audience measure per program. A short readiness screen shows what you have and what to pull together before we start.
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Typically about two months from receiving complete data for smaller portfolios. Larger ones are scoped individually.
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No. It uses the data you already have, puts it on one scale, and shows where the numbers are solid and where they are estimates.
Let’s have a conversation.
Tell me about your portfolio and we'll see whether a diagnostic fits.
