Finding the Best Marketing Channels for Your Small Business: A Strategic Guide to Increasing ROI

Several months ago, I met with the founders of a medical software startup. The company had spent more than a million dollars developing a new mobile app, working through every kink and bug imaginable on a yearslong path to launch. There was just one thing they hadn’t done or set aside a budget for—marketing. The founders had a few ideas for getting the word out, like advertising in medical journals or partnering with a major health system to drive adoption. They also seemed open to testing a number of digital channels, though not necessarily spending much on any of them.

From my perspective, spending so much time and capital on a product without planning how to take it to market was worrisome. The founders were effectively following the memorable Field of Dreams mantra, believing that if they built it, the customers would come. This instinct is understandable and all too common. Founders and startup execs believe so strongly in their products that they expect thousands of users to discover their brand, become customers, and tell all their friends about it.

Lacking a clear marketing channel strategy can lead founders in several directions. Sometimes they will “go small” across a variety of channels, essentially making a half dozen small bets on Facebook ads, display ads, Google Ads, content syndication, affiliate marketing, and physical mailers, for instance. The big problem? Spreading a limited budget too thinly across channels nearly guarantees subpar results for all of them. It’s better to find two channels that convert than to test five or six channels that don’t.

In reality, small businesses must be able to say no to some channels, at least until they can make a substantial enough investment in them to generate real results. Driving growth doesn’t require your brand to engage every traditional and emerging marketing channel. Decision-makers at small businesses and startups are often tempted to dabble with marketing experiments, but these run the risk of delivering negative returns.

As the leader of Toptal’s Growth Marketing and Digital Marketing practices, I find the most important thing for founders and executives of small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to know is that while there is no one-size-fits-all solution for which channels to prioritize, there is a clear path for taking a product to market. Here, I walk through a five-step process that will help you select the best marketing channels at the right time and conduct careful testing to ensure sustained success.

Step 1: Document Your Go-to-Market Strategy

Launching a successful product doesn’t happen overnight—it can take time to find product-market fit. This is why so many founders get overwhelmed with marketing; they build a great product and jump straight to a discussion about channels and traction without doing the real go-to-market analysis required to assess the most effective marketing channels for their business.

Before deciding which marketing and promotional channels to prioritize, it’s critical to map out the journey with a robust go-to-market strategy. This strategy is your North Star. It doesn’t need to follow a standardized format, but at a minimum, it should answer a series of fundamental questions about your market, customers, and product:

Market Considerations

• Where will your product be sold, and who are your direct competitors?
• What products or services can potentially replace your offering?
• How are those alternatives priced?

Customer Considerations

• Who is your ideal customer, and what are their values?
• How do they make decisions?
• Where and how do they spend their time, both in real life and online?

Product Considerations

• What is your product, and how does it serve your ideal customers better than the competition?
• How will you price your product, and with what revenue model?

Asking these questions will enable you to step away from your product and assess the market from a big-picture point of view. The valuable insights they reveal will prepare you to build credible customer personas and guide you in creating content and marketing programs that resonate with potential customers.

Step 2: Create a Content Strategy

With your go-to-market analysis in hand, you should complete one more very important step before making your marketing channel selections—developing a content strategy. This step is often overlooked or, worse yet, done on the fly.

The building blocks of your content strategy will begin to take shape after you answer questions about your market, customers, and product during go-to-market planning. An initial content strategy can be a simple and clear service-oriented exercise: How and when will you give your target audience the information they need?

The who, what, and where of your go-to-market strategy will point to how and when you should engage your audience with content, and inform content types and formats. If your target buyers are rushed for time, they may want snackable, short-form video content. If they are highly technical, they may be looking for user guides, white papers, and in-depth blog posts. Or if they turn to influencers on social media for trustworthy information about your product type, you’ll want to consider those channels.

In the Toptal Marketing Services practice, we hear about three common challenges that company leaders face with their how and when:

1. Right channel, wrong time: B2B SaaS company leaders know that LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice for engaging potential customers, so when their product launches, they begin running ads and expect a big return. Here’s their mistake: They disregarded the adage that buyers need to be exposed to a brand at least seven times before they even recognize its name. The company leaders should have initiated brand awareness campaigns much sooner.
2. Right channel, wrong message: A B2B company with some level of brand recognition places an ad or a piece of content on LinkedIn without a clear call to action. Despite choosing the right promotional channel, they still won’t get the return they planned for.
3. Wrong channel, right message: In other cases, leaders may choose the wrong channel altogether. Imagine, for instance, that one of these B2B SaaS companies ran Facebook ads instead of LinkedIn ads. Even with the best message and a clear call to action, its leaders are almost certainly investing in the wrong channel–they’re essentially advertising Bibles in a bar, as I like to say.

These are the kinds of issues a content strategy—as a precursor to channel selection—should anticipate and address. In general, the promotional channels your target customers already use to consume information and content will be the first ones to prioritize.

Step 3: Make Measured Investments

The main marketing channels to consider can be grouped into two main categories: organic and paid.

Organic Channels

• Search engine optimization
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube
• Word-of-mouth marketing

Paid Channels

• Influencer marketing
• Offline advertising
• Online advertising, such as paid social media, social media shopping platforms, and pay-per-click search advertising
• Partnership marketing
• Community building

Of course, sometimes influencer marketing, community building, and partner marketing may not be paid, and barter or other types of mutually beneficial arrangements can be negotiated, depending on where you are in your company life cycle. (If you’re pre-cash flow, you may favor barter, but it’s quite common to get bogged down in unhelpful partnerships, so validate them first.)

Even if you start by prioritizing the channels you know your customers are using to consume and find information, you must be thoughtful about not overcommitting. It’s critical to invest enough to gather data, but spending too much without a return on that investment is a clear predictor of waste and failure.

While your optimal channel mix will depend on your brand’s unique go-to-market considerations, HubSpot’s The State of Marketing report for 2024 shows general trends across all industries. Companies report that a search-optimized website is the most important channel for driving ROI. Email marketing and content marketing are also among the top five options. In terms of paid channels, companies report the best results with social media shopping tools (for e-commerce companies) and paid social media.

Truth be told, there are many ways to acquire users and customers, and still other techniques for showing the all-important “traction” that investors demand before handing out funding. That’s why it’s nearly always worth experimenting with a blend of paid and organic marketing channels to find the ideal alignment for your product. The Holy Grail in marketing is identifying a channel that drives full-funnel engagement—from awareness and lead acquisition at the top all the way to conversion and purchase behavior at the bottom.

Step 4: Scale Your Marketing Team to Accommodate Channel Growth

In the early days of a company, founders often double as the company’s chief marketing officer (CMO). Or they may expect another team member to carry the marketing load in their free time (as if they have free time when working 80-hour weeks). Indeed, the first three steps I’ve discussed can be accomplished to some degree with sheer startup enthusiasm, yet underinvesting in marketing talent is never a formula for long-term success.

Your first marketing hire, whether full-time or part-time, should almost always be someone who blends strategy and data analysis skills. They should be eager to get their hands dirty, experimenting to find the most effective marketing channels and creating some of the content required to engage target customers. I typically recommend companies hire a marketer before the formal product launch, but that also depends on the existing team structure and how many of the first three steps you’ve already taken.

As you start to grow, your marketing team should evolve, especially as the number of effective marketing channels increases. For example, you may find that community management on Facebook is extremely effective at building brand engagement, and paid content syndication is a top channel for converting prospects into paying customers. This means specialists in these marketing domains would be vital for sustained success. You may also need a content marketer with knowledge of SEO and social media, a part-time performance marketer who can execute and optimize paid campaigns across online marketing channels, and a fractional CMO or marketing leader to guide the overarching strategy.

Step 5: Establish a Measurement Framework to Evaluate Performance

Long-term success in marketing requires ongoing testing—and lots of it. Too often, small companies invest in one or two channels and then abandon them when the campaigns don’t deliver the results they expect. The decision to deprioritize a channel should always be made with data, and more times than not, careful analysis of the same data would actually reveal optimization opportunities. To do this, however, the company needs to establish an appropriate measurement framework that sets clear performance benchmarks.

Here are five steps for developing a marketing measurement framework:

1. Establish marketing goals: The first step for creating a measurement framework involves setting specific goals for your marketing program. Are you looking for awareness, conversion, or both?
2. Set key performance indicators (KPIs): Next, you should identify more granular KPIs that tie directly to your top-level objectives. Metrics such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on ad spend (ROAS), and ROI are common marketing KPIs.
3. Identify benchmarks: Once you’ve identified what to measure, it’s time to put the pieces in place to enable that measurement. Set realistic benchmarks for your industry and company life-cycle stage.
4. Consolidate marketing data: Next, invest in multichannel tracking tools to gather data and measure funnel performance from awareness to conversion. Wherever possible, consolidate data sources from channels using a marketing tool like Adobe Analytics, KissMetrics, Google Analytics, or an alternative. This will enable apples-to-apples comparisons and provide a holistic view of performance.
5. Assign attribution: Lastly, it’s important to adopt an attribution model that establishes how much credit you assign to various touch points in the customer journey. A first-time website visit may not seem as important as a paid advertising campaign that serves as the final touch point before the same person makes a purchase, but could the conversion have happened without the initial awareness? This is the kind of question an attribution model will help you answer.

Your measures of success may change over time. Getting 5,000 visitors to your website in the startup phase can be a sign of increasing brand awareness, but as a company matures, bottom-of-funnel metrics like conversion rate become more important for your growth strategy. At that point, a channel audit can be a great way to assess performance and identify optimization opportunities.

Overall, having a clear measurement framework removes some of the guesswork from selecting and investing in marketing channels. For instance, the idea of pursuing influencers for a B2B brand may be met with eye rolls in a stakeholder meeting, yet a 2023 survey by TopRank Marketing found that 85% of B2B marketers used influencer marketing, and 39% cited it as contributing significantly to the success of their marketing programs. By testing new promotion channels and evaluating their success according to your measurement framework, your company may be able to unlock unexpected marketing wins.

Marketing Channels for Business Success

Channel selection and sufficient testing are critical for anyone launching a new brand or product. Yet it’s even more important to create a holistic marketing strategy that addresses go-to-market considerations and establishes a measurement framework that sets you up for ongoing success.

As exemplars of this strategic process, the medical startup founders who were hesitant about their first foray into marketing have taken the time to start this step-by-step process. With Toptal’s support, they have conducted formal customer research and developed a solid go-to-market strategy. They now stand ready to take their product to market through two or three preferred channels, clear in their definition of success and with reasonable expectations of how each individual channel will perform. Not only that, they now have a process for testing and measuring performance. They have built the product and the data-informed marketing plan and can now launch with full confidence, knowing the customers will certainly come.

Have a question for Jeff or his team? Get in touch.