218. Channel Surfing 🏄‍♂️

Looking for a new marketing channel to try? Here are 46 of 'em

May 10, 2021

Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. You can click the heart button 💙 above or below to share some love. And you can reach out to me anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Links that are worth your time:

I was a guest on Corey Haines’ Everything Is Marketing podcast, and we spoke about Buffer history and life at Polly
Highly recommended: Joanna Wiebe’s conversion copywriting course from LinkedIn

Hi there 👋

This weekend was Mother’s Day weekend in the U.S., and I am very lucky to have a wonderful mom who has been a huge encouragement to me. She’s inspiring, caring, supportive … and she’s a regular reader of this newsletter! Hi Mom! ❤️ I hope that you all have someone in your life (maybe a mom, maybe someone else) who champions you and believes in you. Thank you to all the many people who have believed in me over the years!

Wishing everyone a great week ahead,
Kevan

Channel surfing

Remember the days when there were only, like, five TV channels to choose from?

Now there are hundreds.

Same goes for marketing channels: There used to be a few, now there are dozens.

There has never been more choice for getting out the good word about your product. Because of this, you see marketing leaders developing multichannel marketing strategies in order to bring structure and priority on exactly where, when, and how you market your products.

Structure and priority are key aspects to a good strategy — and probably worth a newsletter entry all their own. I’ll touch on it briefly below, but for the most part I wanted to share my inventories for keeping track of all the many channels that are available to us marketers.

Here goes!

Marketing channels: The List(s)

I began my multichannel journey by studying the book Traction, which was written by entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckgo) and Justin Mares (Perfect Keto). We read this book in the early days at Buffer and used its list of channels to spark some of our most successful experiments.

More recently, I’ve found a lot of value in the marketing landscape map from Against, a creative agency here in Boise, Idaho (where I live). Along with this, the team at Reforge put together a comprehensive channel list, too.

Here is a look at the channel list from Traction:

And here is the list from Against:

(You can click to download the Against guide as a PDF. The way it works: Move from left to right to understand your objective, pick the optimal channels, and understand how you can target your customers.)

All told, when I combine the lists from Traction, Against, and Reforge, I end up with a list like this:

Affiliate + partnerships
App store optimization
Audiobooks
Billboards
Business development
Catalog
Chatbot
Community
Content marketing
Content syndication
Digital Video (YouTube)
Direct Mail
Display/banner ads
Email
Engineering-as-marketing
Events
Experiential
Influencers
Linear TV
Messaging apps (What's App)
Music streaming
Native Ads/Native Content/Content discovery
Offline events
Organic Social
OTT/Over-the-top (Hulu, Roku, etc.)
Out of Home (OOH)
Paid Search
Paid Social (FB/IG, TikTok, Twitter, Snap)
Podcasts
PPC
PR
Print (newspaper, magazine)
Product ads, PLA, Shopping Ads (e.g. Amazon)
Push notifications
Radio
Referral
Sales
SEO
SMS
Speaking engagements
Sponsorships
Tradeshows
Unconventional PR
Viral marketing
Webinars
Word of Mouth

And I’m sure there are some I’m missing. (Please do drop me a note if you think of something.)

Now, when it comes to strategizing around these channels and prioritizing the what, when, and how, there are a few different ways go about it. I’ll write more about it in a future email (here’s an article to tide you over). My tl;dr is this:

Assess channels according to product/channel fit, CAC payback, and the behavior of the channel — things like how mature it is, how competitive, how long it takes to see results
Prioritize with a framework like ICE - Impact, Confidence, Ease
Take a test-and-learn approach, and go into new channels with a Lean Viable Test
Once you find stuff that works, hooray! Keep those channels always turned on and then go test out some more

We were fortunate to find a few channels that worked at Buffer. Our most well-known growth channels were content marketing, SEO, community, and word of mouth. We also had some early traction with unconventional PR (transparent salaries) and with engineering-as-marketing (launching Pablo, a free image creator).

What have been your best marketing channels to date?

See anything in this list you’re excited to try?

Let me know any thoughts by replying to this email. It’s always great to hear from you.

About this newsletter …

Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙

About Kevan

I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.

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