Why you should be grouping your channels before testing

Don't just test whatever comes to mind

Hi there,

When it comes to finding a growth channel it’s easy to just think about the basics:

• Is your audience there?

• Do you have the resources to approach it?

• What’s the potential reach?

• How competitive is this channel?

You might even think about balancing short / mid / long term channels as well as looking for potential growth loops (e.g. referral, email, SEO) vs linear channels.

But, what I rarely see DTC startups do is think about channel synergy. Really looking at which channels play well together, especially from a growth and brand perspective.

Brands vary in terms of what works well to grow, there are many different ways to group them, but here are the top 6 for DTC brands:

• Search-led brands - There is high search volume making it natural to lean on Google ads (especially shopping / PMax), Bing ads, Organic search and affiliate marketing (being featured in articles)

• Content-led / influencer-led brands - Brands that are extremely strong on creative content, they are often challenger brands with an in-house creator team / creative founder, think Surreal with their unusual campaigns. The channels that work well for such a brand is TikTok (organic and ads), Instagram (organic and ads), influencers, PR and having a strong founder brand so may also be on podcasts as well. 

One of Surreal’s brilliant billboard ads

• Community-led brands - When there is a natural form of community to support, engage with each other. Relevant channels here are social (also think of a WhatsApp or Instagram group, online forums (e.g. Reddit) and ambassador programs. For community-led brands it’s common to also use some type of loyalty program, given that these users tend to have high brand loyalty.

• Referral-led brands: Focus heavily on word of mouth by having easy intro-level offerings, building out reviews and a referral program to support it, it is quite hard to start out as a referral brand given you need a decent size initial audience to gain momentum 

• Performance marketing-led brands: Rely heavily on paid ads (both social and display networks like Google Ads / Taboola), and they may also rely on affiliates / pay per click. For performance marketing-led brands email is a key component as if often a subscription model, if relevant, to make it scalable.

• PR / Partner-led brands: Rely on partnerships / other brands to increase reach (e.g. being featured, partnering on bundles on site / giveaways, providing offers as part of checkout). Affiliates could also fit under this as well. A variation on this is working with resellers. 

Yet so many brands are like: Meta ads, Google ads, organic social, email, loyalty, referral, PR, affiliates, direct mail, etc. A mess of different channels rather than thinking about what works well together.

Many brands will not be just one or the other, but a mix. Performance can really vary so to reduce the reliability / supplement it you might lean into content too. 

The key point is not just to do a random mix of channels that don’t fit together, e.g. SEO, referral and partners, but rather see how you can create channel synergy.

Recommendation

Being a startup, finding the bandwidth in terms of funding, stakeholder buy-in and manpower to be testing new channels can be tough. That’s why I’ve written a Medium article explaining 8 ways to grow faster and test new channels while bootstrapping.

Medium is usually behind a paywall, but I’ve added a friends link so you can view it for free without a Medium subscription here.

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This newsletter was a bit more marketing-focused than my usual, but one of the biggest challenges in growth is a lack of focus. 

Thinking more in-terms of groupings helps you be more efficient with your resources and get more out of your growth efforts. But remember, all this work only makes sense once you have that initial product-market fit,

Daphne