B2C Marketing Tier List (Part II)

Yesterday I wrote about the various channels you can use to promote a business-to-consumer startup product. There are 10 or 12 important channels to think about:

I went deeper into the top 5 channels that are most imperative for building a consumer business: 1) Short-form video, 2) influencer/creator marketing, 3) social media content marketing, 4) SEO, and 5) newsletter/email marketing.

If I were to start over, I’d only worry about for the first 6 months. They are the most cost-effective, with the greatest viral potential; the ideal theoretical ROI.

But now you’re wondering — what about the other channels?

Today, I want to cover the other 6… the marketing channels you shouldn’t prioritize when you first launch a new B2C product. Here’s my take

Marketing Channels to AVOID When First Launching B2C

When you first launch a product, it’s easy to feel like you should be doing EVERYTHING you can to grow it. In theory you should be.

But this is reality — time and budget are both real constraints, and you simply can’t do everything. And if you can only do a few things, at the start I would avoid worrying about the following marketing channels:

• Paid Advertising

• Channel Partnerships

• Affiliate Programs

• Cold Email

• Podcasts

Each of these are perfectly good ways to grow a business, but in my opinion and experience, they each have their flaws relative to other marketing channels. Let’s break each of them down.

Paid Advertising: we’ve rode the whole rollercoaster of paid ads — Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Newsletter Ads, Banner Ads, you name it. We’ve the majority of our lifetime marketing budget on paid ads. We’ve hired expensive contractors and consulted experienced friends. Here’s the secret — Paid ads are one of the best tools for growing a business, but they are expensive. Before you spend a dime on paid ads, you should already be knuckle deep into the top 5, because they give you nonlinear growth potential at a fraction of the cost. The best part about ads is that it may be the most finely tuned system of all time for analyzing and scoring the attention of a given audience. But early on their number one flaw is that they lack the viral potential. Prioritize channels that are either free or offer viral poetnail early on (ideally both)

Channel Partnerships: this is another channel that sounds great on paper, and I’ve seen it result in major success for a lot of businesses. Channel partnerships is essentially partnering with another business (usually more established than you are with more distribution) to get in front of their customers. A great example of this is integration of features into existing tools. Fidelity recently added sentiment tracking into their app from a company called Context Analytics — Fidelity brings the audience, Context Analytics brings the engaging new feature. The problem with this channel is simply the amount of heavy lifting up front it takes to establish a partnership that’s worthwhile. That’s time you could more easily spend on other things up front. Second, most bonafide partners won’t take you seriously until you’ve established some traction with other channels anyways.

Affiliates: this one is probably my most controversial take. Affiliate programs (when your users share your product with their friends to earn a small comission/reward) check a lot of good boxes. They are relatively cheap to run and easy to set up, and they are a great litmus test for whether your product is good enough to be worth sharing. The problem with affiliate programs is generally the maintenance. It ends up becoming an extreme customer support exercise because most affiliates are reaching out asking questions. Second, many people nowadays will turn being an affiliate into their entire business — they just create large directories of apps that offer affiliate programs and list them on their site. It’s a scam, and tbh that’s most of the people who will sign up for the program anyways. Unless you have a world bending product that is the most delightful thing people have ever scene (like Superhuman), then don’t worry about it

Cold Email: I have mixed feelings here. I suppose most people do. Cold email is simply emailing people about your product who you’ve never talked to before. There are flaws with this model — for one, sending unsolicited emails is an easy way to end up in Spam folders, never to be seen again. There are now sophisticated ways to get around this using tools like Instantly and Apollo, and we’ve done it and gotten great open rates and click through rates, but to limited avail. The general truth is that most people are extremely weary to responding to cold emails. Unless they’ve heard of you elsewhere already, you generally will have a hard time — generally better to only solicit people who have opted-in to solicitation, those are the ones who want to hear from you anyways.

Podcasts: Last but not least podcasts. This is another one with outsized potential — if you have a popular podcast within your niche, it probably brings the highest brand affinity of any channel. I love Tim Ferriss and the guys at Pardon My Take because I listen to their podcasts religiously; they are part of my life. BUT, for most startups, this simply wont be true because the competition is so stiff. Creating your own podcast is just a lot of work for relatively limited upside. A better idea is to just get on other people’s podcast and let them do the heavy lifting, but even then the upside is marginal. I got on one of the biggest startup podcasts in the world a few months ago; listened to by millions. We got maybe a few hundred clicks to our website; less than a good TikTok.

So there it is, my definitive opinion on the current state of B2C marketing channels. Of course there are exceptions to some of these rules, and I am speaking mainly from my own personal experience.

The funny part about marketing is that your odds of getting through to your target customer generally increase when you go where no one else will go. Which means that over the next few years the ‘next best’ channel will emerge and shift and fall.

It will certainly be interesting. Maybe I will write another one of these posts in a year to update my opinions as the marketing world shifts.

For now,

Peace!!