Most founder-led businesses do marketing the same way. A bit of LinkedIn. A bit of Google. Maybe a trade show because they did one last year. An agency running ads nobody's really tracking. A newsletter that goes out when someone remembers.
It feels like marketing. It looks busy. But it's a scatter, spread thin across too many channels, none of them done well enough to actually work. And the founder usually can't tell you which ones are pulling their weight, because nobody's really measuring.
I want to make a case for the opposite approach. And I'll start with a decision I made in my own business that cost me money to learn.
Killing the channel that built my business
I ran a lead generation business for years. We started in cold email. That was our entire thing, our heritage, the channel the whole company was built on. We were good at it. We'd sent, over the years, well over a hundred million emails. If anyone had a reason to keep doing cold email, it was us.
But the data started telling a different story. When we looked honestly at where results were actually coming from, around 90% were coming from LinkedIn, and yet around 60% of our cost sat in the cold email side. We were pouring the majority of our effort and money into the channel producing the minority of our results, purely because it was the thing we'd always done.
So we killed it. We stripped cold email out of our core offering entirely, doubled down on the channel that was actually working, and reduced our price because our costs dropped. It felt strange. You don't expect to retire the thing your business was founded on. But the numbers were unambiguous, and sentiment is a terrible reason to keep funding something that isn't working.
That's the discipline most businesses lack. Not the ability to start channels (anyone can start a channel) but the ability to look honestly at what's working, and stop doing the rest.
Why "a bit of everything" fails
There's a reason the scatter approach doesn't work, and it's not effort. It's dilution.
Every channel has a threshold below which it simply doesn't perform. A bit of LinkedIn isn't LinkedIn, it's noise. A handful of posts then silence teaches the algorithm to ignore you. An under-funded ad campaign never gathers enough data to optimise. A trade show with no follow-up system is a weekend and a stand fee for nothing. Below the threshold, the spend is just wasted.
When you spread yourself across eight channels, you're almost guaranteed to be below the threshold on all of them. The research bears this out: teams that concentrate on a focused handful of channels, three to five, done properly, consistently outperform those spreading themselves across ten or more. Not because the extra channels are bad, but because spreading thin means nothing gets the focus it needs to cross the line into working.
How to actually choose
So how do you decide which three to five? Not by gut, and not by what's fashionable. By a deliberate process.
Start with where your buyers actually are. Not where you find it comfortable to post, or where a competitor happens to be loud. Where do the specific people you sell to actually spend attention, and in what mode? A founder selling to procurement teams at large corporates is in a completely different place from one selling to local restaurant owners. The channel has to match the buyer, not your habits.
Look honestly at what's already worked. Most businesses have some history, a channel that's brought in good clients before, even by accident. That's a signal. Equally, be honest about what's never worked despite repeated tries. Past performance is data; use it instead of ignoring it.
Consider the economics of each channel against your deal. A channel that produces a handful of high-value leads is brilliant if your deals are large, and useless if you need hundreds of small ones. The right channel depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you. There's no universal best channel, only the best channel for your economics.
Then concentrate. Pick the three to five that survive those filters, and put real, consistent effort behind them. Resist the urge to keep dabbling in the rest. Focus is the whole point.
The part everyone skips: measurement
Here's what made my own decision possible: we were measuring. We could see that 90% of results came from one channel and 60% of cost from another. Without that, we'd have kept funding cold email forever on sentiment alone.
Most businesses can't make that decision because they genuinely don't know which channel is doing the work. The leads come in, they get worked, and nobody can say which channel produced the good ones. So everything gets funded equally, including the channels quietly wasting money.
You don't need anything sophisticated. You need to know, for each channel, roughly what goes in and what comes out, and you need to actually look. Choosing channels well isn't a one-time decision; it's an ongoing willingness to double down on what works and cut what doesn't. I only knew to kill cold email because I was watching the numbers. If you're not watching yours, you're choosing channels blind.
The uncomfortable truth
Choosing the right channels usually means doing less, not more. Fewer channels, more focus, and the discipline to stop funding the ones that aren't producing, even when they're familiar, even when they're the thing you've always done.
That last part is the hardest. I know, because I had to retire the channel my own business was built on. But the alternative is what most businesses do: spread thin across everything, work hard, and quietly waste the majority of their marketing spend on channels that were never going to work at the level they were being funded.
Do fewer things, properly, in the places your buyers actually are. It's less satisfying than the flurry of activity. It works far better.
Where is your marketing effort actually going?
The Marketing Scorecard scores your setup out of 100 in about ten minutes, including how focused (or scattered) your channels really are.