Which marketing channel should I focus on first?

I had the most experience with LinkedIn, as a brand layer. There are lead forms native in the platform on LinkedIn. Surprisingly, some of my manufacturing clients were getting demos for industrial pumps, sealing solutions and stuff like that. So it can work as lead gen.

But it's really there for very specific audience targeting: title, region, size of company, you name it. Your ads get put in front of the right people and you know it.

Of all of them, Google Ads and Meta included, LinkedIn is more expensive, generally speaking. You probably wouldn't see a lot of immediate lead activity. But I like it as a channel.

I'd suggest you start posting thought leadership content relating to your industry, you being the personal brand. You're well positioned to do LinkedIn content because your customers hang out there. If you post regularly and it's meaningful to them, after a point of time it will have a very compounding effect, like SEO.

One good example is a software company with a very lean team, 4 to 5 members, doing millions of dollars in ARR. Their primary channel for lead acquisition is the founder-led content they do on LinkedIn.

If you're not able to do it yourself, maybe hire a ghostwriter who understands your product, and you review and publish.

Now that I know who my target audience is, I know which events I should go to. I know what kind of communities I could go to and what I need to post. For me, Instagram doesn't make sense. At first it's LinkedIn. You already rule out something.

It's helpful to have your target audience. You don't need to go super niche. For me, big businesses don't make sense. The ones who need me are smaller businesses, because they don't have the money for the agencies.

I think it's very important to start speaking with people. Then you start connecting the dots.

I feel like for you specifically, Meta and Instagram would be huge. YouTube would be huge as well.

I don't do organic yet, but I will eventually. I just don't have the bandwidth for that. Since we're on Amazon, I run the Amazon ads. They're kind of more high intent.

For my product specifically, people really enjoy Amazon because it's next day delivery. They want it fast. I'm still collecting the data, but for now I kind of break even on the first order. That's OK for me because my goal is a long term strategy and reorders.

I'll caveat that the market is changing so much that organic social might be a better early stage play.

You would create content that ranks you and all of your competitors, and put yourself at number one. That still works. We call it bottom of funnel comparison content and alternative content. The company I work at still gets most of its leads from it.

You can post four types of articles: the best XYZ, XYZ alternatives, X versus Y, and X versus Y versus your product. There's already search demand, and you're tapping into that. A keyword research tool shows you the keywords people are searching for right now.

Search is instant response on the phrasing, the terms, the keywords, the themes your audience cares about.

You spread a list of 50 keywords, even things on the fringes. Put it all into one big broad Google campaign and follow that data. The audience at large is going to tell you. They're going to click, they're going to validate, and all of a sudden your 50 keywords become five to 10.

All your content and ad creative are within that container of keywords the market has validated, rather than spraying and praying. In a week, for a couple hundred bucks, you can know what to talk about with your market.

If you have good SEO, it's very easy to have good results elsewhere. It improves the volume for everything else.

Then the other thing is email marketing. Email, WhatsApp, etc. convert at 33% from a broadcast, whereas with paid ads it's 3%. It's easier to convert somebody that you have an existing relationship with. If your product has repeat purchases, you can use these platforms to try and drive them and get people to stay engaged with the brand.

For paid ads, you have to have money to make money. It's difficult to make work if you don't have a certain budget to start testing with.

I don't know if SEO should be your first channel. I think it'll be way easier to reach out to a bunch of content creators on Instagram, TikTok, social media managers, anybody. Reach out to them on LinkedIn, on social, whatever, and offer them the tool.

Get free users, get reviews, add the reviews to the homepage and get them to promote it. Do an affiliate program. I think that would be the easiest way, the quickest way to get it in the right hands.

You could try SEO pages at scale. Obviously the strategy would take a few months. You should definitely talk about yourself on LinkedIn, for sure.

There's a lot more context I'm not aware of in your situation. I think you need to learn from the market who your ideal customer is and what the ideal offer will be. The first phase is the learning phase, then the scale phase.

In the learning phase you need to have as many conversations as possible with different audiences. To produce the most insights, I would do cold calling, because that gets you the most conversations possible. After literally every conversation you learn something and you understand, here I need to fix my offer for this audience.

Then you can scale what works with email, LinkedIn, ads, whatever.

I'm not going to tell you to find some new channel. Once you've narrowed down your ICP and perfected your messaging, go back to the right people on the same channel with the new message.

You should be able to start seeing some traction. From there you can refine your targeting and positioning further, then look at other channels. I'd say don't do more than one or two channels right now. If you've tried email and LinkedIn messaging, just do that.

Start with email, I'd say. Email is the easiest. You can always email more and more people. With LinkedIn you have that blocker of people accepting your request first.