Channel Strategy: Definition And Types

Some of the best marketing strategies use multiple channels. By marketing through channels like social media, email, print advertising, and more, you can reach your target audiences on the platforms they use most and maximize the effectiveness of your marketing.

What Is A Marketing Channel Strategy?

A marketing channel strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a company will reach its target audience and deliver value through various marketing channels, both online and offline. It involves selecting, managing, and optimizing the most effective pathways to communicate with potential and existing customers, promote products or services, and ultimately drive sales and build brand loyalty.

Why Is a Marketing Channel Strategy Important?

Your marketing channel strategy guides your marketing efforts and can contribute to the success of your marketing in several ways:

Establishing and Meeting Goals

Developing a marketing channel strategy involves setting a goal for your marketing. By defining what you want your marketing efforts to achieve, you can create a plan to generate those results. You can also use your goal to evaluate marketing success.

Having a set goal and steps to help you meet it can focus your marketing efforts, which is particularly important if you’re in the early stages of marketing a new business. Often, it’s tempting to try a little bit of everything: You might pay for a sponsored Facebook post here, create a thought leadership LinkedIn post there, and work on your website’s SEO. These efforts can all be part of a marketing strategy, but if you perform them randomly because you’re not guided by an overall strategy, they’re unlikely to generate results.

Making Multiple Marketing Impressions

Your channel strategy can help you make multiple impressions on your audience, which can drive conversions and sales. Per the Marketing Rule of 7, a popular marketing principle, a potential customer needs to encounter your marketing messages at least seven times before they will decide to make a purchase.

You can accomplish those seven impressions by using your channel strategy to market across multiple platforms. For example, a potential customer might see an ad on Facebook, receive an email newsletter, see a post on Instagram, then see an ad in their favorite magazine, and more. These layered impressions help boost brand recognition and can contribute to a potential customer’s ultimate decision to buy your product or subscribe to your service.

Increasing Engagement

Your channel strategy can also increase engagement. By tailoring your marketing messages and efforts to each platform, you can create content and messaging that your target audience is more likely to engage with. If you have a solid strategy in place to monitor and reply to comments on platforms like social media, you can demonstrate your brand’s responsiveness, build connections, and create trust among your audience.

Focusing Your Marketing Efforts

As you first start marketing, you might focus on several different platforms to test out how your marketing performs. But, with time, your marketing channel strategy can help you identify the platforms that give you the best results. By focusing on those top-performing platforms, you can maximize the impact of your marketing.

Types of Marketing Channels

There are many potential marketing channels to explore. Remember that as you build your marketing channel strategy, the goal isn’t to market on every available platform, but to choose several different platforms where you are most likely to be able to reach your target audience.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is highly versatile. There are plenty of ways to leverage social media without paying, including building a business page and growing the page’s following organically. Paid tools, like social media ads and boosted posts, can help you build your social media presence more quickly.

Content Marketing

Content marketing, or the creation of materials like blogs and videos that are relevant to your intended audience, can help your business attract and retain customers. The content you produce can also support other types of marketing, like organic search and social media marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing, such as sending email newsletters or email campaigns, can help build relationships with leads and drive sales. Email marketing tends to be cost effective, and by segmenting your email marketing lists, you can send highly targeted and personalized content to maximize its results.

Organic Search

Leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) techniques can also help your business increase its organic search results. By optimizing your website for search engines, it ranks higher in the results when users search for relevant terms.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click is a type of paid advertising where you pay a publisher, such as another website, each time one of their viewers clicks on an ad for your business. It can drive new traffic to your website, plus you can A/B test ads for maximum results, precisely target the demographics of your target audience, and set daily budgets to control your spending.

Partnership Marketing

Partnership marketing refers to a collaboration between two or more businesses or entities, and it can be an affordable way to increase your reach and build your audience. In a partnership marketing agreement, both businesses promote each other’s products or services, so that each business reaches a new audience.

Print Advertising

Print advertising consists of paid ads printed in media like magazines and newspapers. Costs for advertising can vary depending on the publication and its reach, but choosing niche publications can help you reach a very specific audience.

Radio, Television, and Podcast Commercials

Radio and television commercials can help you reach large audiences — 127 million people watched the 2025 Super Bowl! While radio and television commercials can be valuable marketing channels, they can be cost-prohibitive to smaller businesses.

Podcasts are also becoming a major media form. According to a 2024 study by Edison Research, 47% of respondents aged 12 and up — an estimated 135 million individuals — listened to podcasts in the last month. Given the popularity of podcasts, podcast commercials are becoming a solid marketing channel, too.

Direct Mail

Direct mail refers to the process of sending physical mail pieces, like flyers, catalogs, or postcards, to consumers. This can be a useful marketing technique if you’re trying to reach individuals in a specific location, or if you have an established list of individuals who are in your target demographic.

What Are the Elements of a Good Marketing Channel Strategy?

A good marketing channel strategy will incorporate four key elements:

Target Audience

Your channel strategy needs to clearly define your target audience. It should also include some analysis of which marketing channels your audience is most likely to use.

Target Channels

With this information about where your audience is most likely to be, your marketing channel strategy should focus on these specific channels.

Budget Details

The budgeting section of your strategy is essential. The strategy should outline your marketing budget and ensure the channels that will require more spend are accounted for.

Analysis

A good marketing channel strategy will also measure the performance of your marketing efforts. The strategy should track metrics such as engagement rates and sales across each platform, so you can measure the platform’s effectiveness, improve your marketing strategy, and test out other platforms, if needed.

What Is an Example of a Channel Strategy?

Let’s look at an example marketing channel strategy for an athletic footwear brand. The brand’s target audience is men and women from ages 30 through 49 who play pickleball. This target audience is most likely to use Instagram and Facebook, listen to sports podcasts, and read Men’s Journal and Women’s Health. The brand has a monthly marketing budget of $17,000.

The channel strategy might include:

• Instagram reels, posts, paid ads, and other content, posted four times a day, with an ad spend budget of $3,000 per month.
• Facebook posts, Live videos, and paid ads, posted four times a day with an ad budget spend of $3,000 per month.
• Print ads in Men’s Journal and Women’s Health issues, with a monthly ad spend of $6,000 per month.
• Ads in popular pickleball podcasts with a monthly ad spend of $3,000 per month.
• Collaboration agreements with brands such as Spin It Apparel, a pickleball apparel manufacturer.
• A weekly e-newsletter to subscribers highlighting interviews with pickleball professionals, along with sales and discounts, with a budget of $2,000 per month.

How to Create a Marketing Channel Strategy in 6 Steps

1. Determine Your Target Audience

Start by determining your target audience so you can focus your marketing efforts on reaching the right people. If you’re launching a new business, creating buyer personas can give you a detailed understanding of your ideal buyers, including their pain points and the types of media they consume.

If you have an existing brand, you can review your analytics to better understand who is visiting your site and making purchases. Additionally, surveying your social media followers and email subscribers can provide you with valuable information about your target demographic.

2. Set Your Budget

Determine your marketing budget, since this will guide your selection of channels and the marketing activities you can do on each one. Create a monthly budget to start — you can divide that among your platforms and then allocate funds to daily or weekly ad spend as needed.

When you allocate your budget to different channels, try to put the bulk of your funds into proven marketing efforts, like organic search. Reserve smaller amounts of your budget for high-risk platforms and efforts that you’re trying for the first time. Based on the results, you can invest more of your budget into those platforms in the future.

3. Choose Appropriate Channels

Once you understand your target market, choose the marketing channels that they are most likely to use. You may be able to survey current customers to find out about the platforms they use most often, but you can also use platform characteristics to make a well-informed guess, since certain platforms reach particular types of audiences. If you’re a business marketing to other businesses, e.g., LinkedIn is known for its B2B content. If you’re in B2C marketing, then a platform like Instagram or TikTok is more likely to help you connect directly with potential customers.

Look to see what your competitors are doing, too. If you see several competitors advertising in a trade print magazine or producing content on a certain social media platform, chances are that it’s because your target audience is present on those platforms.

Be sure to consider your budget as you choose your platforms. Budget constraints might mean you need to start off with fewer platforms or avoid particularly expensive channels at first. As you refine your marketing strategy and increase sales, you might be able to grow your budget and expand your platforms.

On the other hand, alongside traditional Search and Social platforms, marketers should also explore the potential of the open web through performance advertising platforms, which offer access to first-party data and AI-powered audience targeting to potentially lower customer acquisition costs and optimize ad creatives. This is especially recommended once performance has plateaued due to channel fatigue, resulting in high CPM costs and diminishing returns.

4. Set Goals for Each Channel

Determine what success looks like for each channel. Set goals for number of impressions, engagement, sales, and other milestones for each platform, and identify the steps you will need to take to reach those goals. Be sure to plan how you’ll measure metrics on each platform, too.

5. Consider Best Practices for Each Channel

Thoroughly research each channel and its marketing best practices. As mentioned, certain types of content perform better on different channels than on others: Thought leadership posts perform well on LinkedIn, while if you’re using TikTok, you’ll need engaging, catchy, entertaining video content. Using this information, determine the types of content that you will need to create for each platform. Some content can cross over, such as if you share a blog you wrote on social media, but you may have the best engagement results if you craft content specifically for each channel.

6. Measure Results and Improve Your Strategy

After your first month, measure and record your metrics across each platform and then compare them to your goals. Look at how the metrics compare across the different platforms, too. Are certain platforms clearly outperforming others? If so, you may need to change your marketing techniques on the underperforming platforms to see if you can improve the results, or put more focus and budget into the higher-performing platforms.

Measuring your results and improving your strategy is a critical and ongoing part of this process, helping you boost your performance and focus on the platforms that offer the best marketing opportunities and return for your business.

Channel Strategy vs. Marketing Strategy

Your business marketing strategy refers to your overall marketing approach, and includes all of your marketing activities and objectives. Your channel strategy is a component of your larger marketing strategy, providing a more focused and specific strategy for how you will market across different channels to support your overall marketing strategy.

Key Takeaways

A marketing channel strategy is essential for helping you effectively market on multiple platforms, to increase your reach, and engage your target audience on the platforms they use. An effective channel strategy gives you a blueprint to use to focus, review, and improve your marketing efforts. With time, you’ll identify the platforms that offer the best results for your business, and you can improve your marketing efforts to maximize engagement and drive conversions and sales.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is multi-channel?

Multi-channel marketing is the practice of using multiple indirect and direct communication channels to interact with your audience. The channels might be a mix of website marketing, social media, direct mail, physical storefronts, paid advertising, and more.

Business target audience vs. marketing target audience: What are the differences?

A business target audience is the overall group of people that are likely to be interested in your business or brand. Your marketing target audience is a smaller segment of your business target audience, and the intended audience for a marketing campaign. For example, Pepsi’s business target audience might be soda drinkers who are teens, young adults, and middle-aged individuals. Pepsi might develop a marketing campaign with a marketing target audience specifically of young adults.

What is an example of a marketing channel?

A marketing channel is a specific type of platform or marketing that you use to reach your audience. Social media, email newsletters, direct mail, and print advertising are all examples of marketing channels.