How To Choose The Right Marketing Channels In 3 Simple Steps

If you've ever looked at the vast array of channels that you might market your business in and become overwhelmed, you're not alone.

With channels by the likes of social, print, mail, web, SEO, and a whole range of mediums, there's a lot to choose from. Add in thousands of individual publications within each of those channels and the choices quickly become overwhelming.

To sort through the noise of options, there is a quick and easy strategy to find the right channels for your business - work in reverse.

Here's how it works:

Take a few moments to put yourself in your customer's shoes for a day so that you can pretend to live out their life.

While this might seem a little strange, it is absolutely critical to understanding how to understand what your customer is giving their attention to... and how you might be able to catch it.

At the end of the day, where your customer gives their attention is the basis of all marketing. It is an unbreakable rule defined by the 7 Laws of Marketing.

This means that if you are going to have success in your marketing efforts then you are going to need to know where your customer gives their attention. The best way to do this is to imagine yourself going through a day in their life.

When you do this, you begin to visualize some of the daily habits that your customer might have - what their stresses are, what their daily drive looks like, what they dream about, what questions they might want answered, and how they try to disconnect from the world (amongst a whole range of other things).

Once you know the inner workings of your customer's day-to-day then you can start to map out what channels they might be paying attention to. You can start to answer questions like:

The list of channels and specific publications that they are already giving their attention to is likely only a handful. While there are hundreds of thousands of places they might focus their attention, each and every person tends to focus on only a select few. Take note of those.

The more common the channel, the more it will cost to market through it.

For example, nearly every person on the face of this planet gets mail in their mailbox. It is probably the most common individual channel there is. And, since nearly every person can be reached via this channel, it isn't cheap.

That's not to say that it isn't impactful, though. Print mail is one of the most surefire ways to get your message in-front of your buyer in a way that they will pay attention to. But you're not here to learn about print marketing. That's just one channel.

The point being made here is that each of the selected channels that your customer gives attention to will have its own cost and return. Depending on your business type, you'll need to evaluate the channels and select the ones that will give you the highest return for the cost.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you should go for the lowest cost marketing channel (as many businesses tend to do). Instead, you should look at the channels from a value perspective - which of the channels give you the best value for your investment and returns?

To help get your gears moving on which channels are out there that might work for you specific business, we've provided this list of different channel types that might be helpful as you're going through the process:

To put it simply, distribution channels are any medium by which a message is communicated to more than one person. That's it. Anything that meets that criteria can be considered a distribution channel.