As a small business owner, your best marketing channels may differ from your competitors’ due to your unique strengths and your unique season of business. Additionally, you can differentiate your brand even further by adopting a human-first mindset, which values connections over mere transactions. That’s why I’ve created this step-by-step guide for prioritizing your best marketing channels, complete with relationship-building opportunities for new and repeat customers, as well as numerical rankings for a customized marketing mix.
Human-first marketing begins with an outward focus on people, and moves through a process analysis, but ultimately needs the spark of people on the inside to bring it to life. You can call it a people-process-people approach.
Start out by better understanding your marketing channel options.
On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the strongest, write down an alignment score for a few channels or all of them, as it relates to the factors below. This alignment scoring can be used for an annual or quarterly marketing mix analysis, or toward a single opportunity or challenge.
Download a free marketing mix template to get started.
Audience #1 estimated engagement
Beginning with your primary audience, you’ll focus on their pain points, marketing channel preferences and the content that’s important to them throughout the customer experience. What your audience needs from you will be carried out differently from channel to channel. This aspect alone shouldn’t determine your top channels, but it’s the most important aspect.
Audience #2 estimated engagement
Repeat the step from above. Customizing messages and selecting channels for each unique audience is best, as your resources allow.
Industry
Explore what marketing channels are working well within your industry.
Direct competitors
It’s good to note which channels are generating positive and negative outcomes for your competitors, so you might learn from them, rather than purely mimic them.
Estimated ROI
Based on available data, how might a particular marketing channel increase awareness, engagement, and ultimately sales?
Cost-effective
Weigh the projections above against the expense of a channel. Keep in mind, even if the best marketing channels for you cost more than you expected, it could cost you two or three times more in the long run if you try “cheaper” less effective channels first.
Previous success
If you’ve gone through a learning curve and are having great success with a particular marketing channel, that’s fantastic. Keep using it. If success has been low for a particular channel, consider why it’s weak and may need to be omitted from your marketing mix.
Risk-free
Consider how risky a particular channel might be. Perhaps the risk lies in the execution or the risk is high due to industry regulations. Might there be ways to minimize those risks by utilizing experts or reconfiguring the execution?
Novelty
Using a novel marketing channel, one that’s new or a change of pace from what’s dominant in the marketplace, can draw attention. This one factor shouldn’t stand alone, but should be considered alongside the strength of other factors listed here.
In-house strengths
Rank the skill level of one or more of your employees as it relates to each marketing channel. Ideally, you’re providing your team with the necessary guidelines and opportunities to innovate beyond their silos and carry new ideas to completion.
Creative partner strengths
If you have trusted creative partners with expertise in a promising channel, that’s beyond your current internal capabilities, explore that channel with clearly defined guidelines and benchmarks.
Intuition
This is the gut-check. What is your intuition telling you about a particular channel?
Once you’ve assigned an alignment score to each channel, you’ll be able to compare them side-by-side. Note where your emotion and logic may be out of sync. Additionally, some of your leadership team members may have different rankings than you do. If so, this approach provides you with a structure for comparison and deeper discussions about each marketing channel. If you’re a consultant or agency working with clients, this approach allows you to show them why you’re recommending a certain set of marketing channels.
As you activate and review your best marketing channels over time, you’ll be able to re-examine the factors and update their scores. This adds depth to your brand empathy and your ongoing marketing mix discussions for which channels to keep, drop, or test.
Reach out if you’d like assistance with selecting your best marketing channels, building brand strategy, or creating a new or improved website.
