From the course: Small Business Marketing

Picking your marketing channels

From the course: Small Business Marketing

Picking your marketing channels

- Face it. There's so many marketing channels to choose from, it can be overwhelming to know where to start and how to narrow down the list. Between email, print, online ads and social media, just to name a handful, you're options are nearly infinite. Now marketing channels are how you distribute your message, and your goal, especially in small business marketing, is to identify which marketing channels should belong on your list and which ones you just can't accommodate. So to decide which channels are worth your time, start by asking yourself this question: What do you want your marketing effort to accomplish? If you want to develop brand awareness, well use mass media channels. If you want a specific action to happen with a targeted set of prospective customers, well go with the personalized approach. Now I can't speak for every small business, but if you're just getting started with marketing, I'm going to encourage you to invest in personalized marketing first. This isn't to say a huge publicity stunt or a mass marketing approach is going to be a failure, it's just that you might find more immediate success in sticking with the personalized approach for now. Now after you identify what you want to accomplish, ask yourself where does your target market turn for information? From here, identify what information you need to convey and how quickly you need to convey it. If you have a weekly special that you're promoting, you don't want to advertise in a monthly magazine. If you want to show your product in action, well then you might want to turn to a YouTube ad. From there you need to figure out where you're going to start, and to do that I like to evaluate each idea based on the effort required to build out the channel and the value in doing so. And from there we can plot this out. To show you what I mean, let's pretend that we're going to do some marketing for our small business, and we've come up with some great ideas. We want to run ads online using Google Ads. We want to use some micro-influencers on Instagram, put up a table at our local farmer's market and sponsor an upcoming parade. Now this sounds like a reasonable list, but we could go on and on if we wanted to, but remember you're working with limited resources so you've got to be honest with yourself. The approach that I like to use to decide where to start is called "ICE," and it stands for impact, confidence and ease. Here's how it works: You set up a simple table with five rows. For each idea, you'll estimate the impact, the confidence and ease on a scale of one to 10. You total up the numbers, and sort the ideas from highest to lowest, and this way you can quickly determine which of the objectives are a priority. Now when it comes to the score, I have a rule of thumb scale. Zero means this is strictly a hunch. One to two is anecdotal. Three to four means you have market data to support this decision. Five to six means you have hard evidence, and seven plus is going to be a near guarantee. For impact your asking yourself, how much of an improvement will this have? How significantly will it contribute to your marketing goals? So score it one if it's very little, and 10 if it's going to be a game-changer. Next you'll need to indicate your confidence that this impact metric is as you guessed, so how confident are you that this is going to have very little impact or be a game-changer? From here, you'll indicate the ease. How much time and effort will it take? Zero is incredibly difficult, and 10 is effortless, it's very easy. Then just add the values across the row to get your score. This process will help you get out of choice paralysis and have a formulaic way to be decisive.

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