How to decide what marketing channels to focus on and why depending on your  business type

Marketing can be a black box for a lot of people. Where to market, how to market, where to start, how to focus, what my objectives are, I’d say these are the questions I see every generation that was born after baby boomers asking except Gen Z . I’d say Gen Z is doing a much better job at figuring out marketing than its predecessors (something I will try to talk about in upcoming essays)

You’d be surprised how sometimes such simple questions can sometimes be quite complex when you start answering them.  Deciding which channels are the right for the distribution of your products,  its more of an internal exercise than an external one

To make sure that your investment in marketing both time and money are setting you up for a strong foundation, easiest way to make sense of this, is to define super rules that act as your guiding compass

3 simple rules

• Always be very clear and explicit with your goals.
  1. What do you want to actually achieve
  2. What number am i trying to hit 
  3. Why am i trying to hit it
• Always be very clear with your limitations
  1. What resources you have at your disposal
  2. How precious are these resources
  3. Can you survive without these resources
• Always be organized in a way that allows you to adapt
  1. Am i ready to adjust if my goals are not met
  2. Can i adapt even if I’m ready to

Now that we have established these rules, we must remember to keep these in mind as we work through various factors that will help us determine what channels to invest, why and how.

Deciding What Channels to Focus

Stage of the Business.

To make this more useful, I’m focusing more on writing down ways of thinking about these more for new business owners and or people who are just starting out their journey. In reality, a lot of these decisions depend on the actual situation. For someone starting their business, they need to think totally differently about marketing than someone who is already running a successful business.

For someone starting their business,  this may sound odd but your number one marketing channel is your product. By that we mean, the customer that's using your product. Assuming you have found a product market fit and are now working through product marketing channel fit, your customer is your number one asset that you can’t underestimate. 

When starting out, you have to chase your customer. You have to prioritize channels that have a medium to high impact on your numbers without having to leave your resources burned through one tackle on that channel. This is why you find 

Knowing what your customers consume

This is pretty much a media consumption exercise, you have to chase your customer to understand how your customer makes a decision, in what instances he makes a decision, and then overall you get a better sense of what means you have to effectively reach them. Each channel has its own dynamics but avoid going after channels where you do not have 1-1 relationship with your customers.

Being authentic is more important here than being invasive 

Deciding investment in channels: Turn this into an experiment exercise

You have to think of marketing investment as a pure luxury expenditure. Not everybody can afford it and not everybody knows how to make the most of it either. Therefore its imperative that you implement a certain system where it allows you to keep and or discard a channel.

An easier way of thinking about this is thinking about channels based on the following criteria and scoring them out as experiments

1. Effort - What effort it will take to do this
2. Impact  - What impact it will make. Is that up to my expectations
3. Probability of success - Do i have chances of success.
4. Target Variable - What metric am i moving here.
5. Prediction of success - What's my prediction for success?

Scoring your channels against the criterion above will allow you to better refine your thinking between your expectations and reality when you are deciding on channels.

You can assign scores and or develop higher scores to fit your scoring system which will get you closer to your goals.

Here’s a scoring template, feel free 

What to watch out when rolling out your experiments

• Know your hypothesis Spell out the specific belief you are testing. Example: “If we spend $1,000 on Facebook ads to a lookalike of our purchasers, we will get customers at ≤ $30 CAC.”
• Know your data Decide before you start which metrics you will track. Have the tracking in place (UTMs, pixel, CRM events). If you can’t measure it, don’t run it.
• Know the variables, what data to believe and what not to believe Identify confounding variables: seasonality, promotions, creative changes. Treat outliers cautiously—don’t throw away the whole experiment because of one strange week, but also don’t blindly average wildly divergent runs.
• Define success and kill criteria up front Success might be “break-even CAC within 30 days.” Kill criteria might be “after $2,500 spent, CAC > 2x target and conversion rate < 0.5%.” Having thresholds prevents emotional doubling-down.
• Use short, controlled tests Start small and learn fast. A 2–4 week window with clear budget caps and a single variable changed is better than launching a full-scale, multi-variable campaign you can’t interpret.
• Iterate on creative and audience, not everything at once If an experiment fails, tweak one thing (creative, targeting, landing page) and retest. That tells you what actually mattered.
• Protect core resources Don’t burn your only cash runway on a channel experiment. If you have limited resources, allocate a fixed percentage of time/money to testing and keep a reserve.
• Capture qualitative feedback Numbers tell you what; customers tell you why. Use short surveys, user interviews, or on-site feedback to understand friction.
• Document learning Keep a shared experiment log: hypothesis, setup, spend, results, learnings, next steps. This turns one-off experiments into organizational memory.

How should that work for you

1. Pick 3 channels to test based on your scoring template (one low-effort/high-probability, one medium, one moonshot).
2. Define a single metric and a clear hypothesis per channel.
3. Set budget and timebox for each test (e.g., $500 / 4 weeks).
4. Implement tracking and confirm data quality before launch.
5. Run tests, monitor daily but judge results on pre-defined cadence (weekly/biweekly).
6. Compare outcomes to your predictions. Keep the channel if it meets success criteria, iterate if marginal, kill if it misses kill criteria.
7. Repeat: take learnings and re-score channels quarterly.

Quick checklist before you launch a marketing channel

• Goals explicit and numeric? ✔
• Limitations documented? ✔
• Adaptation plan ready? ✔
• Hypotheses written down? ✔
• Tracking in place? ✔
• Budget & kill criteria set? ✔
• Documentation path established? ✔