Choosing Marketing Channels is NOT the First Step

Most entrepreneurs start thinking about their marketing in terms of choosing the marketing channels – “How do I start using Instagram to market my business?” or “Should I start marketing my business on Facebook?” or “Where is the best place to market my business?”

But the truth is, that’s really not the first place to start – and if you start with that first, you’ll end up muddling through some marketing work that gets maybe some results, but quickly becomes more work than you’re able to manage.

Here’s a quick explanation that’ll help you understand why starting at step 3 makes no sense…

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Choosing where to start your marketing is not the first place that you need to start when building your marketing strategy.

In this video, I’m going to explain to you why Step Three: Choosing Your Channels is really not the first place you’re meant to start when you’re building your marketing strategy.

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Do You Really Need to Be Marketing on Facebook?

I think it’s really important that I do this video because a lot of entrepreneurs when they start out thinking about their marketing they think, “Oh I need to be on Facebook, I need to be on Instagram. But these are places I don’t understand, and I kind of don’t want to but I know that I need to be on it.”

But they don’t actually know that they need to be on it yet.

Start With Step 1 and 2 of the Content-Led Marketing Strategy

The reason is that they haven’t really thought about who their target person is and what they’re selling to them – what their Unique Selling Point is. Those are Steps One and Two of the content-led marketing strategy.

If you don’t do those first two steps choosing the marketing channels becomes insane.

There’s loads of them there’s there’s like 80+ I think!

There’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn Email, Display Advertising, Google Ads, SEO you know it goes on and on and on.

You can’t do all of it you definitely can’t.

How Do You Choose The Marketing Channels Then?

Once you’ve done Step One and Two and you really know who you’re targeting and that message that you need to communicate to them, then choosing the marketing channels becomes a process of asking yourself:

• Are those people on that channel?
• Can I send this message to them through that channel?

Then you can start shedding marketing channels away. You can start removing them off your list because they’re not important because that’s not where your target person is.

An Example of Choosing The Right Channels: Teachers

A really good example of this was when I was doing a content marketing workshop once and there were multiple people on that workshop that did services to schools.

They either went in and helped them take the kids outside that’s Grow to School or they went in and they provided like pastoral care sports and drama and stuff for the kids, that was Kick.

A bit of a light bulb moment for them was that the beneficiaries are the kids – so they often are talking about the kids and the benefits to the kids. But their target person, their ideal target person, is not the children.

Their ideal target person is the teachers or the head teachers – the person who’s making the decision.

So when they then started thinking about the marketing channels that they need to choose, something like Facebook didn’t really make sense anymore.

Because with teachers, they either won’t be on Facebook (because they don’t want to be where their students are) or if they are on Facebook, they’re very careful not to indicate that they’re a teacher on Facebook, or they don’t have their real names and so on.

It then made sense that they need to use other channels to reach these teachers. Not something like Facebook.

That is why this this whole thing makes sense – why the order of these first three steps makes a whole lot of sense.

Once you’ve got your channels sorted, once you’ve chosen your channels – the ones that are best for your target person and the message you’re trying to send to them – then we flow on to understanding what content you need to create, which will be in another video.

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