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How to choose the right marketing channels for your small business

Writer's picture: Heidy RehmanHeidy Rehman

Updated: Dec 1, 2023

Are you searching for the right marketing channels for your small business? In this article, I explore how businesses commonly use the main channels and lay out their pros and cons. I also show you how to decide which ones will fit well into your wider business marketing strategy. Armed with these insights, you should be well placed to make the right choices.


This article will introduce you to the most common marketing channels: how each one works, what businesses commonly use them for and their advantages and disadvantages.


How to choose the right marketing channels for your small business

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Perhaps you have engaged a small business marketing consultant to help you refine your strategy. If so, you’ll be better able to collaborate with them if you’ve familiarised yourself with how the main marketing channels work.


Alternatively, you might be designing or updating your marketing strategy yourself. If so, you will need to dive into the details of each channel. This article should help you narrow down the channels on your shortlist and eliminate the less ideal options.


As you work through the selection process, remember not to take channel decisions in isolation. It’s vital you ensure all the individual channels you choose will work well together as part of an integrated marketing strategy:

  • Your strategy needs at least one channel to tackle each stage of the marketing funnel. You must capture the awareness of the visitor; nurture their interest; close the sale; and maintain loyalty so they become loyal repeat buyers.

  • Each marketing channel works more effectively at some stages of the marketing funnel than others and is better suited to some types of products or services than others.

Looking beyond general principles, the channels you choose should depend on the unique characteristics of your business. They must work well for the specific products or services you sell and the customers you sell to.


So as you evaluate different channel options, ask yourself: where will I find the potential buyers of my product? Which channels will enable me to reach them? If I can reach them through this channel, will it be a good venue for persuading them to do what I want (e.g. sign up to my e-mail marketing list, buy my product or recommend me to their friends)?

By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge to decide which channels to use in your business and for what purpose.


Before I dive into the details, here is a table that summarises how businesses usually use each of the main marketing channels based on the framework of the marketing funnel.

How to choose the right marketing channels for your small business

Organic search


Organic search is the industry term for unpaid traffic that comes to your site via search engines (e.g. Google).


This doesn’t happen by accident — you need to invest in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques that prompt search engine algorithms to display your site high up on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more clicks and visitors you will get to your website.


SEO techniques include the correct use of ‘keywords’ (search terms that your target customers use to search for your products or services), optimum technical operation of your site (e.g. fast page load speed, mobile compatibility, etc) and many other factors besides.


Organic search is mainly a channel for generating sales prospects. By attracting prospects to pages on your site that correspond to their interest and capture their attention, you can persuade them to provide their contact details and begin to nurture a relationship.


Organic search may be relevant to your marketing strategy whether your business is B2B or B2C, whether your site has an e-commerce capability or not and whether you sell physical or digital goods or services.


Advantages. You own your site. Your site (with analytics tools) can very effectively gather data on prospects which you can feed into personalised follow-on marketing. Modern template websites are flexible and capable, enabling many startups and small businesses to create a professional online presence at low cost.


Disadvantages. If you need a bespoke website, it can be expensive to create and maintain. If you don’t have the time or skills to do your own SEO, outsourcing this can be expensive and frustrating. Depending on your industry, it can be hard to rank highly in organic search. Even if your SEO is effective, it takes effect with a time lag of a few months.


Website product pages


Once a prospect has found your site, they will hopefully return to it to familiarise themselves further with what you offer. Your site should contain pages that provide increasing levels of detail about the products and services you sell. These pages should move prospects closer to making a purchase.


For example, the websites of car brands contain pages that set out the technical specifications of each of their models and enable prospects to ‘build’ their own car by selecting the options they like and checking the price they would pay.


The advantages and disadvantages of website product pages are broadly the same as those for organic search, with the partial exception of issues related to SEO.


Social media — content marketing and reposts/ sharing (aka viral marketing)


Most businesses nowadays have a social media presence:

  • B2B businesses often just have company pages on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that they use to recruit new staff or promote news about their business.

  • Many B2B businesses should, but often don’t, leverage the potential for their staff to generate new sales prospects using social media platforms such as LinkedIn.

  • B2C businesses tend to be active on all the major platforms, including Instagram and TikTok. They are more likely to use social media as an integrated part of their marketing strategy.


Social media channels offer rich potential for marketing strategies.


Brands use social media to post content that may enhance the loyalty of existing customers who have already bought and/or to build stronger connections with prospects who follow the brand but have not yet bought. The content might include:

  • Information or advice relevant to the brand’s products (e.g. top lip gloss trends for this summer or how to make the best coffee with your new espresso machine).

  • Special offers and promotions.

  • Positive stories about the brand that should chime with the values of the target customer demographic (e.g. company initiatives in support of good causes).


On top of that, brands seek to leverage the propensity of social media users to share content with their network in order to capture new sales prospects. This technique is known as ‘viral marketing’.


To achieve this, brands need to get around the aversion of social media users to overt sales pitches. They usually seek to create content (e.g. articles, images or short videos) that embed a positive message about their brand within a package that is not overtly commercial.


That said, some social media content (particularly on Instagram and TikTok) can drive conversion. This is often achieved through influencer advertising which tap into psychological buying triggers and/or use limited discount promotions.


Many B2B businesses should, but often don’t, encourage their staff to use social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn) to identify and engage with new sales prospects. When engaging with new prospects, sales staff must avoid hard selling tactics and instead follow good marketing principles (i.e. share value to build credibility and trust and wait for prospects to be ready to buy).


Advantages. Creating a social media page is free, apart from the cost of content creation. Social media are ‘social’ — it’s a great medium for getting people emotionally invested in your brand by engaging in two-way dialogue with them. A successful viral marketing campaign can have a big payback for a modest outlay.


Disadvantages. You don’t own your social media pages, so you can be vulnerable to any adverse changes in platform rules and/or algorithms (as has happened before). Many social media users don’t like overt sales pitches so you need to tread carefully (and tactfully encourage them towards your website). Viral marketing is a hard trick to pull off successfully.


E-mail and SMS marketing for small business


Once you have obtained the e-mail address of a prospect, you can (with their consent) use e-mail to keep up a regular dialogue with them. You can send them valuable information and advice, notify them about any special offers you are running and so on. This is similarly the case for SMS or text message marketing where companies have collected mobile phone numbers.


The aim is to develop unqualified prospects into interested prospects and eventually into customers. If someone is already a customer, the aim is to maintain their loyalty so that they will buy again.


E-mail and SMS marketing are equally relevant for B2B and B2C businesses and applies whether you sell online or offline, although the content of your e-mails will vary accordingly.


Much of your e-mail and SMS marketing can be automated according to the stage that a prospect has reached in your marketing funnel and other data you have collected about them. This is known as marketing automation.


Advantages. E-mails and text messages are very cheap to send. You have complete control over the content. You can personalise the content according to each recipient’s profile. Text messages are also considered to be more psychologically appealing to receive than emails which may make them more likely to be read.


Disadvantages. Recipient spam filters can block your e-mails — you need a good outbound e-mail provider with the right tools to maximise your delivery rate. Similarly, enabled spam filters on mobile phones can block text messages.


One-to-one live interaction (web chat, sales calls, in-person meetings)


For businesses whose main marketing channel is online, the most common forms of live interaction with prospects are sales calls and web chats (which can be handled using artificial intelligence software). For businesses that mainly sell offline, it’s sales calls and in-person meetings.


Businesses usually use live interactions to complete the late stages of the marketing process and get a sale over the line. For example, by helping a prospect who has decided in principle to purchase to select between different model options or credit packages.


Companies also use live interaction after a sale has been completed to deal with warranty issues, to provide ongoing customer support if a service is subscription-based and so on.


Advantages. Live interaction is the most direct way for a brand to impress a prospect with its personality and values, making it a powerful tool for building engagement and loyalty.


Disadvantages. Live interaction is expensive, so it is mainly reserved for marketing to late-stage prospects who are likely to buy or for customers who have already purchased.


Paid search (aka Search Engine Marketing)


Paid search is almost synonymous with Google Ads and so this will be the focus here. However, do bear in mind that you can also do paid ads on Bing and other search engines. Additionally, Amazon generates an increasing amount of revenue from paid search on its platform — an important issue for Amazon sellers to consider (it’s a specialised topic and I’m not going to go into it in detail here).


Paid search is structured as a continuous live auction between sellers who want their ads to appear in response to Google searches. As a seller, you select one or more search terms (‘keywords’) that prospects use to search for the product or service that you sell (e.g. ‘ladies red cashmere sweater’). You submit a bid to Google’s ad sales platform for each keyword, reflecting the maximum ‘price per click’ (PPC) you would be willing to pay for each click-through to your website.


When prospects search for your keyword, Google displays up to four ads at the top and bottom of each results page. Google’s algorithm chooses which ads to display based on a number of factors including how high sellers have bid. If your ad is displayed and the searcher clicks on it, they are taken to your chosen webpage and Google charges you for the click.


The main use of paid search is to capture new sales prospects.


Advantages. You can capture traffic from keywords that would be too competitive for you to rank for in organic search. You can finely target your ads thanks to Google’s technology and the data Google has accumulated on searchers (e.g. by geography, searcher demographic, day of the week and time of day, user device etc.). You can track the behaviour of prospects who land on your site, enabling you to calculate the customer acquisition cost of your ads.


Disadvantages. Creating and running Google Ads is technically complicated — you may need to hire a specialist to run your campaigns in order to get value for money from your spending. Google Ads is a dynamic environment, so you need to monitor results and split test your ads constantly. Remember that you pay for clicks not sales, so your site must be effective at converting visitors to customers.


Digital display ads (excluding social media ads and remarketing)


You can place digital display ads across a wide range of web portals. Much of this activity is managed by Google. While Google has the technology and data to target your ads, you may not control which portals your ads appear on.


By clicking on your display ad, prospects are taken to your chosen landing page on your website. Pricing models include pay per click (i.e. per visitor to your site) and pay per impression (i.e. how many people see your ad even if they don’t click on it).


Standard digital display ads are mainly used to generate new sales prospects.


Advantages. Display ads can be targeted and the results are measurable via click throughs, so your spending should be more efficient than conventional print ads.


Disadvantages. You may not control where your display ads appear.


Remarketing


Remarketing is a particular type of display advertising.


The technique targets prospects who have previously visited a seller’s website and taken actions that suggest strong interest (e.g. they put an item into their basket but didn’t complete the purchase). Those prospects are shown display ads of the product they have abandoned, perhaps accompanied by an incentive (e.g. a time limited price discount).


The main purpose of remarketing is to prompt the viewer to make the purchase.

(Note that remarketing has traditionally depended on so-called ‘third party’ cookies, which Google plans to phase out from its dominant Chrome browser during 2024. Alternative technologies may continue to support effective remarketing, but this will become clearer as the phase out takes effect).


The advantages and disadvantages of remarketing ads are broadly similar to those of display ads in general.


Social media ads


Social media ads are display ads that appear on social media sites. The biggest platform by far is Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.


In a similar way to remarketing, the ads displayed will resonate with the user’s recorded interests and activity on the platforms. For example, a person with a tendency to follow fitness-related accounts will likely be shown ads that relate to health, fitness and sports apparel.


These promotional ads can be information driven (so they relate to the top of the sales funnel) or can be designed to apply to latter stages of the funnel by encouraging conversion (without a hard sell), e.g. by promoting time-limited discount codes, free shipping, etc.


Social media sites have incredibly detailed profiles of their users and can therefore offer an unmatched level of targeting.


Advantages. Social media ads offer particularly fine-grained targeting.


Disadvantages. Because of this specialised level of targeting, social media ads are particularly expensive. Many users also regard social media as a venue for social activity only and dislike being sold to.


Affiliate marketing


Affiliate marketing involves placing your product or service with third parties who promote it, usually by trying it out or testing it. Affiliates include both dedicated review websites (e.g. electronics magazines) and generalist publishers (e.g. hotel reviews in online newspapers).


Affiliate reviews promote clickthrough links to the websites of the reviewed products. The affiliate earns a commission linked to any resulting product sales within a specified time period (e.g. 90 days).


Affiliate marketing is mainly used to generate new sales prospects.


Advantages. You can measure the effectiveness of the promotion. The right affiliate can be an effective marketing channel because their recommendations may carry more credibility with readers than conventional paid ads. (Key factors in selecting the right affiliate include the affiliate’s reputation and expertise and the match between their readers and your target customer).


Disadvantages: If you pick the wrong affiliate, it can be expensive and ineffective. Make sure your product is genuinely a great buy, or you may end up with a dud review.


Influencer marketing


Influencer marketing is similar to affiliate marketing. It involves placing your product or service with a social media influencer, who promotes it to their followers and directs them to your website or social media page. They might promote your product by creating and posting an image, a video or an article, by organising an event at which they use your product and so on.


Influencers commonly earn a fixed fee and/or a payment linked to resulting product sales, depending on the nature of the promotion they have provided. They will likely also expect to keep any products used in a promotion which are considered part of a ‘gifting’ package.


Influencer marketing is mainly used to generate new sales prospects. Depending on the celebrity of the particular influencer, it may also generate direct sales, particularly if it is paired with a promotional and/or time-limited offer.


Companies often issue the influencers they use with their own specific discount. This can make engagement and sales tracking easy to record. In this instance, influencers will also receive a commission on each sale.


The advantages and disadvantages of influencer marketing are mostly similar to affiliate marketing, notably regarding the measurability of results and the influencer’s credibility with their followers. It’s important to select an influencer whose followers demonstrate strong engagement with the influencer and are a good match for your target customer. This may not always correlate with follower size and so it’s important to make the distinction and influencers should be able to provide verifiable data.


Obviously, the more famous the influencer (as measured by followers and engagement levels), the more expensive they will be.


In-person events


In this digital world, don’t forget in-person events — especially if you are a B2B business with a complex product or service that requires technical marketing and selling.

In-person events are mainly a channel for generating new sales prospects.


Advantages: Paying to attend an industry event puts you face to face with people who – by self-selection — are interested in what you sell. This can be a great opportunity.


Disadvantages. Tickets can be expensive and events absorb a lot of time, so it’s important to prepare well in advance and follow up effectively. Make sure you have a plan to meet as many of the right contacts as you can and then execute a prepared game plan to convert them into customers.


Offline advertising


You can place ads in many physical locations including print media and billboards as well as on radio and TV. These channels are generally not for small businesses — they are expensive and are used for brand marketing rather than for direct response marketing.


At the other end of the scale, very local businesses (e.g. pub, window cleaner) often use door-to-door flyers to market their business. The aim is primarily to generate awareness. This can be a perfectly legitimate strategy if it is executed correctly (e.g. strong message, appropriate print quality, etc). Costs are low and few leaflets are wasted if everyone in the local area is a potential customer.


Similarly, postal marketing can also be effective. This is especially the case now given the transition to electronic post — so few of us now receive letters through the post. This can provide an opportunity provided it is executed well, i.e. that targets are well chosen, the message is packaged in an appealing way and costs are managed.


Advantages. If applicable and properly targeted, leaflet and postal marketing can prove effective.


Disadvantages. The production of materials, printing and postal costs can make postal marketing expensive when compared with electronic marketing.


Public Relations (PR)


PR is the practice of earning positive coverage for your business in print and digital media.


There are many ways to secure coverage for your business. For example:

  • Your business might itself generate a newsworthy story by launching a remarkable new product or service. In this case, positive media coverage will shine directly onto your business.

  • You might create value for media consumers by providing expert comment or advice on a topical issue. In this case, by giving you a platform to display your expertise, media coverage creates a halo effect around your business.

PR is generally used by small businesses to generate new sales prospects. More broadly, it can also reinforce brand equity.


Advantages. The cost/benefit can be strong — securing coverage in a national broadsheet newspaper or on a major TV channel about a highly topical issue can transform your business.


Disadvantages. You don’t control the message — the journalist decides what they print or broadcast. It can be a frustrating channel (it’s hard to find a good PR agency and there is risk of lots of effort for sometimes no reward). PR agencies are also often expensive.


Writing guest articles and public speaking at industry events


This is the practice of writing a guest column for a website or newspaper or giving a speech at an industry event. This indirectly promotes your business by demonstrating your expertise in your specialist field. Your time is usually unpaid.


Ideally any article you write would contain a live link to your website but as a minimum it would include the name of your business and your contact details. Any event you address would promote your business and your role.


The main aim is to generate new sales prospects. That can occur directly via click throughs from online articles or by making new personal contacts at events. Alternatively it can occur indirectly via the spin-off PR benefits — you can publicise your activity through your social media channels.


Advantages. You control the message. You enhance your public profile and industry credibility by titling yourself as a public speaker or guest columnist.


Disadvantages. Writing a regular guest column can be time consuming so only take it on if the site is likely to bring you an acceptable amount of traffic.






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