How to Choose Your Marketing Channels

You spend hours creating and perfecting your content. You make sure every detail is perfect. You follow all the steps to make it enticing, shareable and engaging. You post it and wait with excitement for everyone to see it, for your website views to go up, for your sales to soar.

And it never happens.

People are just not interested. Or maybe your message is wrong. Or the Gods of social media don’t like you. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Creating great content isn’t enough anymore. Gone are the good times when you could post any picture on Facebook and see thousands of views. Now, you have to be smart about it. Choose your channels right. And respect their rules. What we often see people doing is trying to use all channels they can think of at the same time. But it doesn’t work like that.

“Do one thing, do it well, and you will make money.”

Knowing and understanding a channel are different things. In order to truly understand a channel, you need time and experience. It takes testing, tweaking, and analytics to master a channel. Don’t overestimate yourself; do this for all your channels now.

Instead, shorten your list and focus on channels that bring results. It doesn’t mean you stop testing and analyzing. Rather, it means you set up a “marketing machine” that constantly brings results, and then you look for ways to expand it.

Imagine a situation where you are selling dresses. You want to create your online presence and you set up all your accounts. After a while, you realize you are working like crazy just to keep up with staying relevant. You don’t have time to focus on business development and growing your company. You cut down to 3 main channels that have the highest ROI – Instagram, Pinterest, and advertising.

Now, you have time to focus on building your company. The content you are creating is getting better and better results because you genuinely understand your audience. This means more visitors to your website and better revenue. You can reinvest the money you make into hiring someone to build upon this.

In short, that is how the process works. But that still doesn’t answer the question of how to choose the right channels.

Choosing the right channels

Before anything else, you need to define your goals. They will determine everything else you are doing. Choosing the right channels starts from your assumptions. Research into what your competition is doing. Try to uncover new niches and build your presence there. But most importantly, TEST.

To figure out what works best, you need to start with many channels and then narrow it down. Picture a target – the widest circle is all the channels available to you. You realize that some of them are too costly, too old-fashioned or make no sense right now. Cross them off and you are left with a smaller circle. These are the channels you want to test.

Invest time to learn the basics of them all. Ask for advice – try Quora, Reddit or any other marketing related groups and forums. Get feedback on your plan. Set up metrics and begin. What will happen now is that you need to analyze the data you collected. If you set up your metrics and tracking right, you will have a clear picture of where most of your visitors and sales came from.

Cut down your list even further. Narrow your list to 5-6 channels right now. Continue testing them. Try to conclude what worked best and replicate it. And don’t forget to track. After a while, 2 or 3 channels will stand out. That is your golden circle. Those are the ones you want to put your maximum effort in. That 20% will bring 80% of your results. Use them, engage them and continue studying them and you will see how you need less and less time to achieve better results.

But not only is your revenue growing. You will notice people are asking you questions. They will want your advice. You will get messages at all times of the day. What you did is, you positioned yourself. You created meaningful relationships. Built a community around yourself. Now is the time to expand. Remember those 3-4 channels you ditched last? Reactivate them. You have a follower base – invite them to join you in those other channels. They are the base you need to expand. Treat them fairly and it will pay off.

Choosing your channels is not a one-time thing. You need to follow the trends and adapt. Channels can get oversaturated or obsolete so always keep testing. Here is a list of channels we propose to consider for starting out. It is not a complete list and you might find that something completely different works for you. There is no right or wrong answer here.

• PR
• Unconventional PR
• SEO (search engine optimization)
• SEM (search engine marketing)
• Social media advertising
• Display and keyword advertising
• Offline advertising
• Content marketing
• Community building
• Viral marketing
• Email marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Product marketing
• Referrals
• Affiliate marketing
• Existing platforms
• Events marketing
• Speaking engagements
• Business development