Why focusing on Marketing Channels?
In today's topic, we're going to talk about the wellknown question of business.
How to get more clients, how to acquire more users, how to get more traffic to my website.
The very first piece of information I can give you is that it all comes down to marketing channels. A marketing channel is basically a place where you can find your audience, maybe online, line, offline, whatever. But Why focusing so much on marketing channels?
Well, that's because especially for early stage companies, but basically that happens all the time. Most of the growth will come from only one marketing channel. And the goal here is not to spread too thin, but instead focus our efforts on the one that will be very interesting for ourselves and the business.
All right, so let's do our own research and trying to find out some answers to that question here. We're only going to be focusing on two things.
- It has to be scalable
- It's only going to be online. No offline channels right now.
There are only 19 marketing channels
So a very good start is the book traction, how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth. Now that book is pretty interesting because it basically states that there are only 19 different marketing channels and here they are:
As you can see, it has a lot of different things from viral marketing to SEO to Facebook ads and online ads actually. So this is obviously a very great start to answer the initial question.
But right now I can see two problems:
- Some of these marketing channels are not really scalable. If we take the tradeshow example, well, it is going to be kind of hard to scale trade shows.
- The second problem I see here is I want to have a more global overview kind of understanding of what kind of marketing channels I can use.
And maybe channels is not the right term. Maybe it's about marketing channel categories.
Marketing Channel Categories
So for example, in this list we have Bizdev and sales, which are not the same, but kind of similar in a way.
So this is why from now on I want only marketing channel categories. So let's go with another book. This time it's 100 million leads from Alex Hormozi.
In the book he says that there are basically four ways or 4 marketing channel categories this time to get leads:
- Warm outreach
- Cold outreach
- Posting free content online
- Running paid ads.
So this is this time way better because you see, it doesn't specifically talked about a marketing channel, but really about the category itself. So this is basically a more global view of the kind of different options we have here.
But I still see a problem (Yeah, always).
Warm outreach. So basically using your network is not that much scalable strategy, except if you're very famous or something like that, but not very applicable to everyone.
The Racecar Growth Framework
So I guess I still need to keep searching. And this is the last resources I found on the subject, which is very interesting. This is from Lenny Newsletter. It's a very famous newsletter among the startup community.
And here it says that there are four common growth engines.
It's a concept that is a little bit different than marketing channels, but here we're going to keep things simple and use both of them for the same meaning.
Anyways, the four ways are:
- SEO or content
- Paid ads
- Outbound Sales
- Virality.
This is it. And this is something I think closer to what we're looking for in the first place. But I still think that there are some issues with this one.
For example, there's a lot of focus on the SEO channel and not that much on social media, especially in the content. So if you see, this is the exact opposite of the book from Alex Hormozi, and this is something you can see quite often in the startup resources, to focus really heavily on the SEO and not that much on social media.
So I think it's time to combine everything we've learned so far and try to make the perfect guide for the primary marketing channels categories if you're looking to get new clients at scale.
These are the only three primary marketing channels categories.
Well, there it is. These are the only three primary marketing channels categories. Let me show you and explain to you all of this. Starting from the right.
Outbound
So this is Outbound Sales:
- Cold Email
- Cold Call
- Cold DMs
- Direct Mail
- ...
That works great, especially, and actually only if you're in the B2B space. So if you're selling to other businesses, and this is pretty much your only option if you're selling high end product, especially to big companies with long sales cycles.
The great thing with outbound is that it works both in the short term and the long term.
The kind of bad thing about this, there's no trust involved here, especially if you just contact someone out of the blue, well, they don't know you, they don't trust you and all those kind of things.
Paid Ads
Then we have paid or online ads, whatever you want to call it.
Now here it is going to be a little bit more interesting, I think, because we have three main subcategories
- Search Engine Ads
- Social Media Ads
- Sponsoring Ads
Now, you might say that all of those are ads, and that's pretty much the same thing, right?
Well, no, for one main reason: The intent of the buyer and of the users.
What does that even mean? Well, basically, if you're doing SEA, the audience that you're targeting is already in a mindset of looking for something.
Now, okay, that's obvious. I'm doing a search on a search engine. Right. Well, this changes everything, because if you're showing me an ad of a watch, while I'm doing some research on a specific watch term on Google that is completely different from showing me an ad when I'm just walking outside or just browsing Instagram.
In one hand, you have the audience searching for something and is looking have that kind of intent of search, of going and solving a problem somehow. And in the other hand, just browsing and doing something else.
So in one hand, you are interrupting the users, the other not.
And what about sponsorings?
Well, sponsoring is very much similar to social media ads in the way that you are interrupting the users. The big difference, however, is the trust, because if you're sponsoring someone, an event, something like that, the users and the audience already trust that thing, that event, that influencers etc.
And that trust, at least some of them, is going through your brand. So again, completely different use case. This is why I made those three kind of subcategories.
Content
And lastly, but maybe the most important one is content marketing. When we think about content marketing, there's usually two ways:
- Doing blog posts / SEO
- Positing free content on Social Media
Even though there are some kind of in between mediums. I'm thinking about a podcast. Is that a social media thing? Well, not really, because you're on Spotify or audio platforms. You got to see my point. So in order to keep things simple, let's just keep SEO and social media.
Now, inside you have two kind of very different content:
- Editorial Content
- UGC Content
The first one is the editorial content. So basically, you or the company writing the actual content.
The second one is UGC user generated content. Basically the user and the clients and your users are generating the content for you.
In the case of SEO, it's not that much uncommon. If you think about companies and software like Zapier, every time you type a name of a software and integration in Google, most of the time it's going to be a Zapier link, for example. Yet the team at Zapier doesn't actually write these pages. They are just automatically created the moment the software is integrated to Zapier.
UGC social media. Now this one, however, is very much uncommon. The only example I can think of are Figma and Notion. If you think about that way, notion, most of their marketing is done by their users who just post contents on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, whatever, to talk about the product and how to be more productive.
Why Virality is not included in the list?
That leads us to the big question, why I haven't included the Virality effect as a way to get client at scale?
Because if you remember the article from Lenny newsletter, it has a fourth way and it was virality. And virality is getting user through your product. Your product is so good that people talked about it...
But is it?
I do believe that Virality isn't a thing in a term of primary marketing channels.
Getting clients through your product because it is so good can work BUT it is very rare and is very dependent on the actual product, meaning that the product has to be in the first place very shareable or collaborative.
If you think about the Notion example. A big reason for this is also because notion actually allows you to build things and do your own thing and customize everything you want in your own workspace, not something a lot of tools, products or even services can do.
This is not a strategy you can use once your product is done and say, all right, how are you going to find new clients? Well, we just have to go viral. It doesn't work like that.
So anyway, I hope you see my point. If not, let me know your thoughts on the comments.