SEO, SEM, Facebook Ads, content marketing, affiliates, partnerships, email marketing, app stores…the list goes on.

There are a lot of distribution channels to choose from. New ones are emerging. Existing ones are always changing. The questions, "Where do I start?" and "What do I do next" are common ones. The information can be overwhelming.

Here is a step by step guide that should help you go through the exercise of comparing, contrasting, and choosing the right marketing channel for your company. I have used my last company, Boundless, as an example to help illustrate some of the steps. For context, Boundless provides a free digital alternative to college students’ crazy expensive textbooks.

Step 1: What Are You Optimizing For?

The first question to ask within your user acquisition efforts is “What am I optimizing for?” In addition, why? This question will help set the broader context for your acquisition efforts.

Different times call for optimizing different things. But here are the most common possibilities you might be choosing between:

Learning - You might be trying to learn something specific about engagement, interest among a certain target audience, monetization ,etc. Learning is typically the priority when your startup is pre product-market fit or when you are expanding to a new target audience.

Volume - There will be a time in your business when you will want to prove that you can go from a certain base amount of customers, to moving the needle in a meaningful way. Volume may also be the priority if you need a minimum amount of users/data to reach some broader goal.

Cost - Optimizing your CPA to get more out of your budget.

Want to optimize for all of them at once? When you focus on everything, you have no focus. Not having a focus will lead to mediocre results. Make the tough decision about what is most important.

At the beginning of Boundless, we had a lot more questions than we had answers. Would students ditch their assigned textbook and use a digital alternative? How often did they use their textbook?

These questions challenged the fundamental assumptions about the business. Those questions could be translated to questions about engagement, retention, referral….things deep in the user funnel.

It was clear to us that the most important thing to optimize for was learning. Knowing that we were able to work back how much volume we needed to get data around our questions, and what we were willing to spend to get those answers. If we were trying to choose what initiatives we were going to spend our time and resources on, would could easily decide by asking ourselves “What is going to help us learn the most?”

Step 2: What are your constraints?

The second question to ask is, “What are my constraints?” Your constraints will differ depending on the product, stage, funding, industry, etc. The most common constraints will be:

Time - Do you have a specific optimal window to reach your audience? Do you only have 3 months of cash left?

Money - Are you well funded, or bootstrapping? Do you need to extend your runway?

Target Audience - Do you need to reach someone really specific?

Legal - Are you taking on an old industry with litigious stalwarts? (i.e. Uber, Music Industry, etc)

At Boundless we were well funded (yet diligent with our money) and as a result money was not our largest constraint. Our constraints came in target audience and timing. We were trying to reach college students in very specific classes (Intro courses for Biology, Economics, and Psychology) within a two week optimal window (the beginning of the semester).

Step 3: Setup Your Channel Matrix

With so many different marketing channels it can be hard to weigh the pros and the cons of each. My solution to this is to to build a channel matrix. Building a channel matrix helps give you three things:

1. A methodical process to evaluate each channel

2. A way to compare each channel on the same attributes

3. A visual organization of the information for each channel

Here are three sub-steps to setup your channel matrix:

Step 3.1 - Open your favorite spreadsheet tool (google docs, excel, numbers)

Step 3.2 - List Out All Potential Channels In The Header Column

SEO, SEM, viral, display, social, Facebook ads, mobile ads, affiliates, content Marketing, sales, etc. List all of the possibilities in the header column. (for simplification I have only listed a few below). Don’t forget about all of the alternative channels out there. StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter Ads, email sponsorships, podcast sponsorships, blog sponsorships, PR, app stores, etc. While these channels don’t provide scale, they may provide opportunity to help you get traction.