Making Internet Marketing Work for Your Actual Situation

The question I spent too long trying to answer was which marketing channel is the best one. The actual question worth asking is which marketing channels are realistic given my time, my skills, and my budget. Those questions have different answers, and the gap between them is where a lot of wasted effort lives.

Figure out your goals and your constraints before you choose tactics

A clear goal with a clear constraint produces a clear plan. "Get 500 email subscribers in six months with zero budget" points directly at content marketing and organic social. "Generate ten sales leads per week with a $500 monthly budget" points somewhere completely different. Without those constraints, you end up chasing tactics that look impressive without asking whether they fit your situation.

Write the goals down before you start, including what success would actually look like at the end of ninety days. The exercise of writing them often reveals that they're vague or internally inconsistent, which is useful information to have before you've committed time and money. A basic project management tool keeps your marketing goals visible without requiring a complicated system — a simple document you check weekly is enough.

Know the product you're marketing before you talk about it

This sounds so obvious it barely warrants saying, but the marketing copy that misses the mark is usually marketing copy written by someone who hasn't used the product deeply enough to understand what customers actually experience with it. The specific features that matter, the use cases that come up unexpectedly, the ways it falls short of what it promises — you need all of that before you can write honest, compelling marketing. Ask people you know to try it. Watch what questions they ask. Those questions are the ones your future customers will have.

Identify who your audience is and where they are

Your audience is probably on some combination of platforms and not others. They're probably looking for certain types of content and not others. Knowing this before you build out a channel makes the channel more efficient. If your audience skews toward visual content, investing in a video camera and short-form video is more efficient than investing in long-form writing. If they're primarily decision-makers reading industry content, a newsletter or a LinkedIn presence is more efficient than Instagram.

Looking at where similar brands find their audience is a shortcut that works. Your competitors have already run the experiment of which channels work in your market. Reading their most-engaged posts, their highest-commented emails, their most-shared content teaches you what resonates with the audience you're trying to reach before you've produced a single piece.

Use the channels that match your skills

A writer who hates being on camera should not build their primary marketing presence around video, even if video is growing faster than text. The marketing channel you maintain consistently over eighteen months will outperform the one you start with maximum energy and abandon after six weeks. Match the channel to what you'll actually keep doing. A podcast microphone is the right investment if you think clearly out loud; a writing setup is the right investment if you think clearly on the page.

Interactivity helps across every channel — allowing comments, asking questions, inviting feedback, running polls. The two-way version of any channel builds audience loyalty that the broadcast version doesn't. People become invested in things they've contributed to.

What I'd skip

I'd skip the email newsletter that goes out because the calendar says it's time rather than because you have something worth saying. Subscribers notice the difference between a newsletter that's trying to be useful and one that exists primarily to stay in the inbox. The first builds the relationship; the second erodes it slowly. I'd also skip any marketing initiative you're doing primarily because a competitor is doing it. Copying channels without understanding why they work for the other business is how you end up doing a lot of work for uncertain results.

The most important constraint to accept is that no one has unlimited time for marketing alongside running a business. Choosing two or three channels to do well is almost always better than attempting six channels with whatever time is left over. Less surface area, more consistent execution, clearer feedback on what's working.

Internet marketing that works for your actual situation is less about the best tactics and more about the tactics you'll actually execute week after week. That's a different kind of strategy question, and it's worth answering honestly before you commit.