In an ideal world, you’d grow your company through channels that:

• Enable you to quickly capture a huge portion of your target market (high scalability)
• Allow you to reach who you want, when you want, with the exact message you want (high targetability)
• Users browse with a buying mentality for your product category (high intent)
• Match your product and brand contextually (high context)
• Require little time and expertise (low effort)
• Are cheap to set up and run (low cost)
• Can be activated and produce meaningful results quickly (short TTR)

But channels likely won’t perfectly fit this mold. There are almost always tradeoffs.

For example, imagine you’ve evaluated two paid channels, Paid Channel A and Paid Channel B. They score very similarly in terms of targetability, effort, cost, and TTR. However, Channel A aligns with your product more in terms of context and intent, while Channel B has greater scale.

• Channel A • Medium scale • High intent • High context
• Channel B • High scale • Medium intent • Poor context

In situations like this, we generally recommend prioritizing channels with stronger contextual fit and intent, or in this case, Channel A.

Why? We’ve explored two frameworks that are useful here:

1. Let’s go back to our Foundational Five: aligning in context and intent is necessary for achieving market-channel and product-channel fit. It’s much harder to succeed on channels with poor context and intent because users aren’t in the right mindset to buy your product.
2. Next, the Bullseye concept. We discussed that for most startups, we want to start close to the bullseye (the highest intent/context channels, even if scale is lower) because these channels have the potential to be our highest-ROI and fastest-payback opportunities. Returning more than we invested, and quickly, is exactly what we’re looking for to get our growth engine humming.

Here’s one more consideration we haven’t touched on yet: avoiding false negatives. Channel B very well could be a significant channel for you. But (and it’s a big but), it will likely require a high level of sophistication to crack it.

We already know the intent and context of the channel are working against us. Throw in the fact that it’s likely to be more competitive (everyone loves high-scale channels, after all), and we’re fighting an uphill battle. If, like most people in this program, you’re early in the growth journey, Channel B is not where you want to dip your toes in. It’s far more preferable to start with Channel A, get some experience under your belt, learn what messaging resonates with your audience, identify your high-converting landing pages and funnel flows, and then consider pursuing Channel B.

Otherwise, as said above, the risk of a false negative is high. And we see it all the time with startup founders in particular. They’ll tell us that channels X and Y “don’t work” and that it’s not worth our time to try them. Nine times out of ten, when we look under the hood, the channel experiment was doomed from the start because they chose a channel that required sophistication when they were still learning the basics.

Evaluating strategies within a single channel

The evaluation framework isn’t only useful for judging and prioritizing different channels. It also helps when prioritizing strategies within a single channel. Once again, context and intent should take precedence over the other criteria.

Here’s an example of how that might look in practice.

Imagine your company has decided to pursue SEO content to acquire customers and is now debating between a few strategies. One strategy is publishing high-level blog posts related to your product and industry to generate brand awareness (top-of-funnel content). Another is creating more specific content, like product comparisons with your competitors, to convert readers into customers (bottom-of-funnel content).

You could apply the evaluation framework like so:

Based on this evaluation, you might conclude that bottom-of-funnel content has greater ROI for your company. Even though it costs more to produce and there are fewer users searching for this type of content, its alignment in both context and intent means users consuming bottom-of-funnel content are more likely to convert into paying customers. So you’d prioritize creating bottom-of-funnel content first, and then move on to top-of-funnel content later.

In short, our evaluation framework is helpful for not only determining which acquisition channels to prioritize, but for channel-level tactics and campaigns as well.

Next Up

Time to put the channel eval framework to work. In the next lesson, we’re going to apply the seven-point framework to real-world channels and channel categories.