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Every product needs a way to reach the people who’d benefit from it. Marketing channels are the paths that get you there - from paid ads to organic search to word of mouth. The challenge isn’t knowing they exist, it’s figuring out which ones are worth building 📣

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The main categories

Organic search (SEO) - content that ranks in search engines and brings in visitors without ongoing cost per click. Slow to build, compounds over time. Suited to products where customers search for solutions to known problems. Paid search and social - ads on Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and others. Fast to test, easy to scale, expensive to sustain. Good for proving demand and finding early customers; harder to justify long-term if CAC doesn’t drop as you scale. Content marketing - blog posts, guides, videos, podcasts that attract and educate your target audience. Works best when the content genuinely helps people, not just when it mentions your product 💡 Email - owned channel, no algorithm between you and your audience. High-intent when done well, easy to ignore when done badly. Works for nurturing, onboarding, retention, and re-engagement. Product-led / viral loops - built into the product itself. Sharing features, referral programmes, network effects, “powered by” attribution. The highest-leverage channel when it works because the product grows itself. See product-led growth. Community - forums, Slack groups, events, user communities. Slow to build and hard to measure but creates durable loyalty and organic advocacy. Partnerships and integrations - co-marketing, marketplace listings, integration partnerships. Access to another product’s audience. Often underexplored by early-stage teams. Sales - outbound and inbound sales motions. High-touch, expensive, but necessary for enterprise and complex B2B.

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How to choose

The honest answer: most channels work for most products at some level. The question is where to concentrate effort. Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares’ Traction framework is useful here - the idea of running small, cheap experiments across multiple channels to find where traction actually comes from, rather than guessing based on what worked for someone else’s product. A few useful filters: where does your target customer actually spend time? Which channels can you test quickly and cheaply? Which align with your positioning? 🙌 Lesson learned: the teams that succeed at channel strategy usually commit deeply to one or two channels rather than spreading thin across six. Breadth feels safer; depth is what actually compounds.