Stop Your Marketing Channels From Fighting
dailyblog.scottdclary.com
Hi All,
Here’s my daily newsletter navigating the crossroads of business, growth, and life.
If you love this content (please share it), but also…
Start here > https://stan.store/scottdclary
Check out my Podcast, connect with me on YouTube / Twitter, and read my Weekly newsletter.
Sponsor: FreshBooks
The numbers speak for themselves - over 30 million people have chosen FreshBooks, processing more than $60 billion in invoices and saving an incredible 192 hours annually on accounting tasks. As an all-in-one accounting solution, FreshBooks helps entrepreneurs and freelancers create professional estimates, track time, automatically bill clients, and capture expenses on the go - all while integrating seamlessly with over 100 business tools and providing award-winning customer service.
Ready to stop drowning in receipts and chasing payments? Start your 30-day free trial at freshbooks.com - no credit card required.
Plus, if you act before January 7th, get an exclusive Success Story listener offer of 75% off your first three months at freshbooks.com/pricing-offer.
Transform Your Business with FreshBooks
A Startup's Guide to Omnichannel
Here's what nobody tells you about marketing channels: adding more often makes things worse, not better.
When you hit $1M in revenue, something strange happens to your marketing. Your once-effective channels start to compete instead of cooperate. Email fights with social media. Content marketing clashes with paid ads. Your website tells one story while your sales team tells another.
The numbers are clear: Companies scaling past $1M spend 54% more on marketing while seeing 23% lower conversion rates. Not because they're doing anything wrong, but because they're playing an entirely different game without realizing it.
Think about your own marketing right now. You're probably running multiple channels because that's what scaling companies do:
Email marketing because you need it
Social media because you can't ignore it
Content marketing because everyone says you should
Paid ads because they worked before
But here's what nobody tells you. More channels often subtract value instead of adding it.
The problem isn't that you're on too many channels. The problem is that your channels are working against each other instead of together.
The Pattern Every Growing Company Faces
This isn't just happening to you. The data shows a clear pattern across growing companies.
In 2023, businesses increased their marketing channel count by an average of 41%. Yet overall marketing effectiveness dropped by 18%. More channels led to worse results.
Let's look at what's really happening:
A $2M company typically runs 7 different marketing channels. Each channel has its own:
Performance metrics
Customer data
Content strategy
Budget allocation
Team or agency
Yet when we analyze the customer journey, we find that 86% of conversions happen across multiple channels. Your customers don't see channels. They see one brand. One experience. One relationship.
This gap – between how we organize marketing and how customers experience it – is costing growing companies millions in wasted spend.
Think about the last time you bought something important. You probably:
Saw a social media post
Clicked through to a website
Got retargeted with ads
Read some reviews
Signed up for an email
Finally made a purchase
Each of those touchpoints should build on the last. Instead, they often ignore or contradict each other.
The result? Marketing that gets more expensive and less effective as you scale. But understanding the pattern is the first step to fixing it.
The Real Problem Isn't What You Think
Here's what most companies get wrong about marketing channels: They mistake presence for performance.
Having a marketing channel is not the same as having an effective one. And having multiple channels doesn't automatically mean better marketing. In fact, the data shows something counterintuitive: Most companies would perform better if they cut their marketing channels in half.
Every time you add a new marketing channel, you create three invisible costs:
Attention Division: Your team's focus splits. What started as clear priorities becomes a juggling act of competing demands. Each new channel divides your most precious resource: attention.
Data Fragmentation: Customer information scatters across platforms. Your email system knows one thing, your CRM another, your ad platforms something else. The full picture of your customer disappears.
Message Dilution: Your brand voice fragments. Each channel develops its own personality, tone, and message. What should be a clear signal becomes noise.
When you run the numbers, the cost of poor channel integration becomes clear:
Marketing teams spend 32% of their time reconciling data between channels. That's not time spent growing your business – it's time spent fixing broken systems.
Customer acquisition costs increase by an average of 27% when channels don't work together. Why? Because you're essentially competing against yourself for the same customer's attention.
But here's the real kicker: Companies with fewer, well-integrated channels consistently outperform those with more fragmented channels. It's not about how many channels you have. It's about how well they work together.
The Breakthrough: Thinking Differently About Channels
Stop thinking about channels. Start thinking about conversations.
Your customers don't see channels. They see one ongoing conversation with your brand. When that conversation is fragmented across channels, it creates cognitive dissonance – a subtle but powerful barrier to trust and conversion.
The New Model for Growth
The old model was simple: More channels = more reach = more growth.
The new model is different: Better integration = better experience = more growth.
Think about how the best brands handle this:
Apple doesn't have an email strategy, a retail strategy, and a social media strategy. They have one customer experience strategy that flows seamlessly across channels.
Stripe doesn't think about developer docs, email marketing, and sales separately. They think about the developer journey and how each channel supports it.
What This Means For You
You don't need Apple's budget or Stripe's team to apply this thinking. You just need to shift your perspective in three key ways:
From Channels to Journeys: Stop organizing by where you reach customers. Start organizing by how customers move toward purchase.
From Metrics to Meaning: Stop measuring channel-specific metrics. Start measuring customer progression across channels.
From Tools to Systems: Stop adding more tools. Start building systems that connect your existing tools.
This shift in thinking changes everything about how you approach marketing.
The Integration Framework: Making Channels Work Together
Here's what actually works for growing companies.
Begin with the Core Channel Audit. Look at your existing channels and ask three questions:
Which channel drives the most valuable customer relationships?
Which channels naturally work together already?
Which channels drain resources without clear returns?
This isn't about cutting channels randomly. It's about finding your power pairs – channels that naturally amplify each other.
Power Pairs in Action
Content + Email: Your content fuels email. Email distributes content. Each makes the other more valuable.
Social + Paid: Your best organic posts inform your ads. Ad insights improve your organic strategy. They share creative and learnings.
Sales + Marketing: Your marketing generates leads. Sales conversations inform marketing messages. They build on each other's success.
The Integration Process
Start Small: Pick your most promising power pair. Focus on making those two channels work together perfectly before adding more.
Connect the Data: Even if it's manual at first, track how customers move between these channels. Which content drives email signups? Which emails drive sales calls?
Align the Message: Make sure your channels tell one coherent story. When a customer moves from social to email to sales, the story should build, not repeat.
What Success Looks Like
You'll know your integration is working when:
Customers flow naturally between channels
Each channel makes others more effective
Your team spends less time managing and more time improving
Your message gets stronger, not diluted, across channels
The goal isn't perfect integration. It's functional integration that drives growth.
The Playbook: Making This Work in Real Life
Let's get tactical. Here's exactly how to implement this in your business, broken down by company stage.
For Companies Under $1M
You have the advantage of starting fresh. Build your foundation right:
Start with one channel and master it completely. That means knowing:
Exactly who you're reaching
What messages resonate
How to measure success
Where to optimize
Don't add a second channel until your first one is consistently performing.
For Companies at $1-5M
You're likely already running multiple channels. Time to optimize:
First, map your current state:
Track revenue by channel
Identify customer overlap
Note resource allocation
Measure true ROI
Then, find your highest-leverage connection points. Where do your best customers naturally move between channels? Strengthen these pathways first.
For Companies at $5M+
Your challenge is fixing systems that already exist. Start here:
Audit your tech stack. Most companies at this stage have:
Tools that don't talk to each other
Duplicate data in multiple places
Manual processes that should be automated
Metrics that don't tell the full story
Fix these foundation issues before adding anything new.
The Tools You Actually Need
Don't overspend on technology. Here's what really matters:
Essential:
A solid CRM that your team actually uses
Basic email marketing software
Analytics that track cross-channel movement
Nice to Have:
Marketing automation for basic tasks
Social media management tools
Advanced attribution tracking
Everything else is optional until you prove you need it.
Your Competitive Advantage
Here's what most don't realize: The companies that master channel integration in the next 12-18 months will build an almost unbeatable advantage.
Why? Because while everyone else is chasing the next hot channel, they'll be building systems that multiply the effectiveness of every channel they add.
You don't need to be everywhere. You don't need every new tool. You don't need to chase every trend.
You just need your marketing channels to work together better than your competition's do.
The companies that win aren't the ones with the most channels or the biggest budgets. They're the ones that turn marketing channels into marketing systems.
Your move.
Scott