Growth ideas: Why marketing channels matter
Growth is more than activities you check off on your daily to-do list. Growth is a mindset, and I want to help you get into it.
Your mix of channels are the pillars that hold up your marketing and sales within your company. Remember that if you’re not building, you’re selling, so it’s imperative these pillars are all built up and experimented with.
A few notes on channels:
- The audience doesn't come to the channels where you're at, you go to them.
- Find the lowest-hanging channels first, understand what works, and then double down.
The post photo is a reference for understanding where your time can be better spent
Owned (Content & Community)
- Built from understanding the problem. Communicate how you help the audience solve it (Yoda guides Luke, doesn't show him).
- You'll need SEO started asap because it takes a long time to grow (but worth it once you grab the traffic).
- To build a community, you help people help each other. To build an audience, you help people only.
- Be where customers are, hiding in plain sight.
- Provide clear, useful answers to questions without shilling product.
- Great community tools like Slack, Discord, and Reddit are ways to get started.
Paid (Search, Out-of-home, etc.)
- Don't turn this on until you've tried lower-hanging fruit.
- "Every 3 out of 5 VC dollars is spent on Google, Facebook" (Check out Andrew Chen's "Law of shitty clickthroughs").
- You are typically fighting incumbents who have 1000x the spend you have when you could be trying things these companies can't do (startups are nimble, use to your advantage).
- Rather than optimize for clicks, go talk to your customers.
At the end of the day, the growth mindset is focused on one thing: What is the highest leverage thing I can do today?
In my next post, I’m going over KPI reporting and attribution.
Btw, I help founders and technical folks understand marketing. If you’re curious to learn more, check out Grow Your Co (https://growyourco.io)
Great post!
I love when you said:
“ To build a community, you help people help each other. To build an audience, you help people only.”
👏🏽
One of the items I would like to add to the list of channels is Referral Marketing. Most companies start off with any form of referral marketing pretty late, and that is such a common sense channel IMO.
If u have product market fit, then naturally there would be happy users.
These happy users need just a nudge to go talk about your product to their friends. Most good products get a positive WOM any which ways, but putting a referral program makes it easier for the business to track/cater to those WOM inbounds.
Happy to hear your thoughts on this 👍🏻
The world is a noisy place, and it's only getting noisier. So how does a company reach its customers? How does it let them know about all the great products, services, or resources that it has to offer?
Marketing channels.
Marketing channels (or touchpoints) are different ways that businesses connect with their audience. They include:
● Social media
● Blogs and other content channels
● Email newsletters
● In-person events (like conferences)
● Sales calls
● Ads (display ads, search ads, retargeting ads, etc.)
One of the most exciting things about marketing channels is how they've changed over the past few decades. When TV was first invented, businesses could only connect with consumers through newspapers, radio, and in-person events. Now they have an almost infinite number of potential avenues to reach potential customers.
Great breakdown, thanks!
Just a heads up that https://growyour.co has expired and should be available soon. Perhaps that would be interesting to try to get?
Marketing communication channels are just tools (or bridges) to reach your audiences. The most important things are your product value proposition (is that resonates / relevant to your target audience) and your Customer Personas – they represent your target audience, you should know them with the right details.
Talking about why channels matter:
– you know/have a hypothesis, that your target audience is there
– you have an opportunity to integrate properly key messages about your product to your audience (as Guest Post, Ads, whatever)
– you can communicate with the audience / potential customers of your business or product any time, any day
– the amount of money (that you will pay for every generated lead, click, or customer from that channel) is relevant for your business and okay for your budget.
If you need to review your activity in marketing channels or plan new campaigns there, just drop me a message or schedule a free call here: https://spacetime.ooo/free-20-min-consultation/.