It’s very easy to start marketing by choosing a channel.
“We need to do more social media.”
“We should be running Google Ads.”
“We need SEO.”
“We should start emailing people.”
But where do those channels fit into your strategy? Truth is, most businesses don’t even have one. They just swing from channel to channel then say then none of them worked.
Before deciding where to spend your time and money, start with the business, the audience and the objective. Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to understand? What action do you eventually want them to take? Then you’ll know what your marketing needs to do and you can decide which channels are going to help you build the strongest strategy.
Strategy First. Medium Second.
Start With What You’re Trying To Achieve
Most of us wouldn’t choose a tool before knowing what job we were trying to do, but businesses do it with marketing all the time.
A company decides it needs social media because its competitors are posting every day. Another starts Google Ads because somebody told them paid search generates leads. Another pays an SEO agency because being number one on Google sounds like the obvious goal.
Each of those channels can be valuable, but their value depends on what the business is trying to achieve.
A B2B company targeting 500 specific businesses needs a very different strategy from a local plumber trying to generate emergency call-outs. An ecommerce brand launching a new product has a different challenge again.
The business comes first.
Who do you want more of as customers? Where can you reach them? How do they normally buy? What do they need to know before they’ll trust you? What needs to happen between first becoming aware of you and eventually becoming a customer?
Once those questions are answered, choosing the channels becomes much easier.
That’s why the strategy decides the medium. Not the other way around.
Every Channel Needs A Job
A good strategy doesn’t simply collect marketing channels.
Each one should have a clear job.
SEO might help people find you when they’re actively searching for what you sell. Social media might keep your business visible and passively give people regular information about what you do. Paid advertising might put specific messages in front of the people you want to reach and offer really easy pipeline entry points. Email might help to top of mind for a prospect who’s interested but not taken action yet.
The website can then bring those different routes together, explain the business properly and give people a clear way to take the next step.
None of those channels needs to do everything.
In fact, expecting one of them to carry the whole strategy can limit what your marketing achieves. EMS has always viewed marketing channels as parts of a whole rather than standalone options. The strategy should decide which channels are needed and how they support one another.
Once every channel has a job, it also becomes much easier to judge whether it’s doing that job properly.
Don’t Confuse Activity With Strategy
Being busy with marketing can feel productive.
We can post five times a week, send thousands of emails, run several ad campaigns and spend hours improving a website. But if those activities aren’t connected to a clear objective, we can end up doing a lot without moving the business very far.
Random actions yield random results.
That doesn’t mean every campaign will work perfectly or that every decision has to produce an immediate sale. It means there should be a reason behind what you’re doing.
If you’re publishing content, what do you want the audience to understand?
If you’re running an advert, who specifically needs to see it and what should happen afterwards?
If you’re investing in SEO, which searches would actually put your business in front of people who could become customers?
If you’re sending emails, what happens to the people who don’t respond today?
Those questions turn marketing activity into a strategy.
The Best Strategies Use Channels Together
We don’t experience businesses through one channel anymore.
We might first see a company on social media, search its name later, visit the website, read a review, notice an advert a week later and eventually respond to an email.
From the customer’s point of view, that’s one business.
We don’t separate the experience into “SEO”, “social media”, “paid advertising” and “email marketing”. We simply keep seeing the company, learning more about it and gradually deciding what we think of it.
Your marketing should work the same way.
The individual channels may be different, but the audience, message and commercial objective should connect them.
That’s where multi-channel marketing becomes valuable. It isn’t about being on as many platforms as possible. It’s about using different channels to create more useful opportunities for the same right people to see, understand and trust your business.