How to Find and Test New Marketing Channels

Do you remember when Google released AdWords? It was like the gold rush because companies were making millions of dollars from those ads.

If you fast-forward to today, AdWords is still a great marketing channel, but it is more expensive due to its saturated marketplace. You won’t make as much profit from it now as you could in the past because all marketers know about it.

The same thing is happening with Facebook ads. It’s still a great channel, but it was much easier to make money from it a year ago than today.

This situation doesn’t just apply to paid channels either. There weren’t as many SEOs 5 years ago as there are now, which made it easier to rank high. Google eventually caught on and updated its algorithm to combat SEOs.

No matter how good of a marketer you are, it’s never easy to scale marketing efforts. Why? Because every good channel becomes used, and eventually abused, by marketers.

So, what are you supposed to do?

All you can do is continually find and test new marketing channels. Sure, some channels will work better than others, but as you continually expand, you’ll see good growth.

Here is how to find and test new marketing channels:

Experimentation

Do you remember how fun it was to try new things as a kid? Experimenting with your marketing efforts is just as fun!

What is marketing experimentation? It’s all about trying and testing new channels. You’ll never grow your marketing if you don’t constantly test new channels, whether they are paid, organic or partnership-based.

How can you find these channels?

The simplest way to do it is to spy on your competitors. From Spyfu to SEMrush to What Runs Where, the possibilities are endless. All of those tools will show you what your competitors are up to.

In addition to using the tools above, you should continually be monitoring what your competitors are doing. A simple way to do this is to enter your competitor’s URL through the Quick Sprout Analyzer to see the breakdown of what they are doing from an organic and social media perspectives. You can even compare how you stack up against your competition. This analysis will give you a good idea of what you should be focusing on.

Lastly, a simple way to continually learn about new marketing channels is to read the following blogs:

• Search Engine Land – this blog covers all the news and trends of search engine related marketing.
• Marketing Land – this blog covers the news and trends of the marketing industry.
• Moz – you’ll learn about new strategies and tactics from this blog.
• Quick Sprout – I tend to cover tactics as well.

When launching experiments, you should focus on speed. When it comes to money, ideally you don’t want to spend much. I typically try not to spend more than $500 per experiment. If your business has a lot of cash on hand, you can spend up to a few thousand dollars per experiment.

Growth

Experiments don’t always work out, which is why they are called “experiments.” A few of the marketing channels you test out will be instantly profitable, and the majority will be losing you money.

Out of the ones that will be losing you money, some will only be losing a small amount of cash because they would still drive a few paid customers, and some will be losing you a lot of money as they would bring no new customers.

The ones that don’t drive you any new customers can be cut off unless you feel that the channel is a viable strategy in the long run.

The growth strategy I use for paid channels is:

• Increase the spend for profitable channels until they break even.
• Grow the channels that are losing a bit of money, but make sure you aren’t losing any more from a percentage standpoint. You typically don’t want to be in the red more than 5 or 10%.

As for organic channels, keep doubling down and don’t worry about ROI for at least 6 months. If you can’t do this, then come back to organic channels at some point in the future. Getting a ROI in a short period of time rarely works out.

Don’t put too much emphasis on learning each marketing channel. Your overall goal from a growth perspective is only to increase volume.

Optimize

Now that you are getting a lot of traffic and sales from these new marketing channels, it’s time to optimize. Your goal is to keep the number of sales the same, while cutting the dead weight.

The way you would do this is by learning how to leverage each channel. You can find videos on Quick Sprout University that will teach you everything from paid ads, SEO, content marketing, and even social media marketing.

For example, when I was helping Tim Sykes get more applicants to his millionaire challenge, I created Facebook ad campaigns that drove signups.

The overall goal of the advertising campaign was to generate fans of the page and then convince them to apply to the millionaire challenge through wall postings.

Although the campaign was losing around $5,000 a month, I quickly learned that over 90% of Tim’s students were males while I was spending 37% of his ad budget towards females.

I changed the targeting of the ads toward males only. This did decrease the number of new fans Tim received each day, but the number of millionaire challenge applicants stayed the same.

I also learned that most of his students were based in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. But a lot of his fans were coming from Asia. So, I adjusted the targeting to target fans only in the countries that drove applications. This again decreased the cost per new applicant.

From all of those changes, Tim’s Facebook campaign went from losing $5,000 a month to making him well into five figures in profit each month.

The way you optimize each channel is going to vary. You will have to keep playing around until you’re happy with the results.

Tweak and Maintain

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, all good marketing channels become saturated…it’s just a question of “when.”

To keep up, you have to continually tweak and maintain your campaigns. With paid advertising, costs will naturally go up over time, so you will have to remove keywords that aren’t profitable. Because people tend to have banner blindness, you will have to keep changing up your ad copy and images on a regular basis.

As for organic campaigns, you’ll find that they become more cost effective as time goes on. But the moment you let your foot off the gas pedal is the moment your traffic will start declining. So, you will have to continually think outside the box and come up with techniques people haven’t used before.

The biggest mistake you can make is to leave your marketing campaigns on autopilot. You have to adjust them on an ongoing basis since marketing changes over time.

Conclusion

The reason a lot of companies stall in growth is because they aren’t continually finding and testing new marketing channels. If you dedicate at least 10 hours a week to growing your marketing campaigns, you will see your revenue and profit growing month after month.

Before you get started with this whole process, make sure you:

• Test at least one new channel each week.
• Do not spend more than a few days to get an experiment up.
• Cut the channels that are losing you a lot of money.
• Spend roughly a month growing each channel before you move onto optimization.
• Spend roughly a month optimizing each channel before you move to the tweak and maintain step.
• Never stop tweaking and maintaining.

So, how do you find and test new marketing channels?

by Neil Patel