Marketing channels: the one everyone uses is the most expensive
Ask a founder why they chose their first channel and the answer will almost always be one of three. Because the competitor is there. Because it's the one they already knew how to use. Or because somebody on a podcast said it worked for him.
None of the three is a reason. They are three ways of not choosing. Most startup marketing begins exactly here, and that is why so much of it looks the same.
Where everybody is, attention costs more
Most channels are, deep down, auctions. In the paid ones the auction is literal: you bid for the same click as ten others. In the organic ones it's more discreet, but it exists all the same: you compete for the same slot in search, in the feed, in the inbox.
And in an auction the price is set by the one with the deepest pockets, not by the one with the best product. If you enter the channel where your competitor has been spending for three years, you are not learning the channel: you are paying their tuition with your money. That is how user acquisition quietly turns into a bidding war you never chose.
On top of that, the audience of a saturated channel has already seen the same promise ten times this week. Your ad isn't competing with silence, it's competing with tiredness.
Your customer isn't where your competitor is
The useful question is not "where are the others?", but two different questions: where does your customer really spend their attention, and who else is talking to them there.
The good spot is at the crossing: the audience is present and the competitors are absent, or doing it badly. There attention is still cheap, and not because the channel is bad, but because nobody has raised the price.
Sometimes that crossing is a boring channel nobody wants to do: a niche forum, a closed community, partners, email. Precisely because of that it works.
What you already know how to do is a bias, not a strategy
The one who comes from performance starts with paid ads. The one who comes from content starts with SEO. The one who has an account with a lot of followers starts with social. Nobody chooses it by looking at the market: they choose it by looking at themselves.
The channel you master seems better to you than it is, because there you feel competent. That is comfortable, but it's not an argument.
How it's really chosen
A channel strategy that survives contact with the market usually looks like this:
- Make the whole list. Not three channels, all the marketing channels: search, paid social, communities, partners, email, marketplaces, press, influencers, events. The short list is where the biases hide.
- Cross out by the customer. Where your audience isn't, there's nothing to test. Search volumes, the size of communities and the place your competitors' reviews come from tell you where it is.
- Look at who is already there. For each channel that's left: how many competitors, since when, how much they seem to spend. Ad libraries and the lifespan of creatives tell it quite well.
- Give it a rough price. What a contact costs there: the range for a click, the range for a thousand impressions, what a piece of content that manages to rank costs.
- Test three at once, and cheaply. A fixed budget, a fixed deadline and, written down in advance, the number at which the channel is discarded.
- Keep one and do it seriously. More projects die from doing six channels halfway than from choosing the wrong channel.
That is a customer acquisition strategy. Everything else is a list of channels.
The media plan is not the strategy
The media plan is a table: where the money goes and when. Useful, but it goes after the choice, not in its place. Without the steps above it's a wish list with dates. Media planning is the last step of this work, not the first.
Channels expire
A channel that worked two years ago can be saturated today, and right next to it another one opens that almost nobody uses yet. The answers of AI assistants are the most recent example: a new channel between you and your customer, with other rules. And the same channel behaves differently in each country.
So the choice isn't made once. It gets reviewed, like any other bet. The growth channels of this year are rarely the growth channels of the next.
How to do it in hours and not weeks
That's why the report dedicates a whole chapter to acquisition channels: where the audience is, who is already there and how much it costs to get in, with the sources. If the market is a specific country, geo research looks at the channels and media that work there. And when the chosen channel is search or social, that is no longer research, it's traffic: SEO Traffic Growth and Social Traffic Growth.
Conclusion
The best channel is not the biggest one or the one that's in fashion. It's the one where your customer is and your competitor hasn't yet raised the price of attention. Finding it is data work, not intuition.
