$100M+ E-Com Marketing Channels Ranked from BEST to WORST

I've been running an e-commerce marketing agency for 5 or so years now, and in that time I've worked with 100+ brands. I've worked with brands that are literally doing nothing in revenue, and when I say nothing, like below $10,000 a month in revenue. And the biggest company I've worked with is worth over $3 billion. So I've worked with a wide range of different types of companies and different types of marketing channels. Now, we are primarily an advertising agency, but there's lots and lots of different e-commerce marketing channels that you can use. So in today's video, I'm going to be ranking them all, breaking them down, in terms of what works best for what types of brands based on the average order value, based on your experience and skills that you might have. And yeah, I'm going to try to give you an idea of what e-com channels and marketing channels specifically you should be focusing on for your brand. Let's get into it. So to start off, we've got organic, and these are channels where you can put out content. That content gets seen by people, and as a result, those people then end up on your website or opting in to whatever you are, whatever you're selling. After that, we've got paid ads. So putting actual spend for— behind advertising platforms. After that, we've got outreach. This probably applies if you're selling something much, much higher ticket. There are businesses that are really successful, e-commerce businesses that are successful with outreach strategies, affiliates. So getting other people to sell your products for you. And last but not least, traditional marketing and traditional advertising. If I break each of these down, if we look at organics to start, you've got all of your major social media platforms. So you've got Instagram, you've got Facebook, you've got YouTube, you've got Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Bing for SEO, search engine optimization, Pinterest, and influencers. Influencers would be people posting for you in an organic sense as well. So that's the, the first major category. Now you need to learn content, you need to be good at that, making content, and you need to make a decent amount for it to be successful. It's a relatively easy channel to get started with. So starting from the top, we've got organic content. Organic content has no real cost associated with it. All you need to do is have time that you can put into it. And if you're a new e-commerce founder, you probably have a decent amount of time, or you should at least, and not a upfront capital to be used. For that reason, organic content is probably a really good strategy for you. However, it requires a decent amount of skill to, to be successful with it. Will require a decent amount of trial and error. If you're learning from the right places, if you're applying what you've learned and you're actively posting lots of content every single day, then you should be able to be successful with content and start seeing sales from it within a 30 to 60 day timeframe. For that reason, for new e-com founders, I'm going to put organic content in the S tier category as It doesn't take too long to start seeing success from, assuming that you're putting the work into it, and it doesn't cost you anything upfront to do. Next up, we've got paid ads, and paid ads are awesome because they require typically less time than something like organic content to actually maintain and keep running, but they do require some upfront budget. So typically you're going to expect to spend between $1,000 to $5,000 on ads before you start seeing profitability. However, you get to see all of the purchases directly attributed to each individual ad that you're running. Through the platforms themselves. So they're going to tell you how much money you're making. And for that reason, ads are a great way of understanding whether you're profitable or not. The only caveat is if you're brand new to ads, again, you should— you're probably going to spend between $1,000 to $5,000 before you start seeing profitable campaigns. With all those things considered, I'm going to put ads and paid ads specifically in the B tier for a new e-com brand. Now, after ads, we've got outreach and is free to do. For that reason, it's already beating ads in terms of startup costs. However, outreach is harder to scale than ads, and outreach requires a decent amount of negotiation/persuasion skills. You need to be decently good with copywriting and selling something to people, and you also need to be decently good with systems because if you want to scale outreach beyond just manually sending 20 to 30 messages a day via social media platforms, you are going to need to understand how to create and use automations that are going to allow you to send more messages every single day. And you're also going to have to create a system for handling responses, for monitoring and following up with different conversations, and actually closing deals themselves. So you're probably going to need to get people on the phone of some kind, especially if you're contacting retailers. Now, outreach doesn't really make sense if you're just trying to sell your products to people regularly. The only context in which you might use outreach for an e-commerce brand is if you're targeting retailers, if— or if you're targeting B2B, where these businesses might be spending more than $5,000 to $10,000 on, on your product. So I'm going to put outreach in the A tier category because it has no startup cost, which is awesome, and you can get sales from it. However, it requires a decent amount of sales skills in order for you to get started and start seeing your first purchases coming through outreach. After outreach, we've got affiliates, and affiliates for me are going to sit right up there in the A category. They have almost no startup cost. In fact, they should have zero startup cost. The only really associated cost with getting affiliate sales is the commission that you've got to give people. You need to build an affiliate program, you need to find affiliates, so you need to do some sort of outreach to them or get placed on major platforms that allow affiliates to sell different products, like TikTok Shops as an example, where you can go list your product on TikTok Shops and you can have people actually request to become an affiliate with your store. You can also reach out to hundreds of affiliates on a monthly basis and you can onboard them onto your TikTok Shop. and that's going to be a really great way of getting sales for no associated cost without having to do the actual hard marketing work yourself. All you really need to do is convince people to become an affiliate for your brand. So for that reason, that's sitting right up there in the A category next to outreach. Now lastly, we've got traditional advertising and marketing. Traditional advertising/marketing is something I don't have tons and tons of experience with, and there's a reason for it. It's because on average you're going to be spending between $5,000 to $20,000 on a traditional marketing campaign, and there's no tracking associated with it, or usually little tracking. There are things like tracking the, the calls that people place. If you have a phone number on a billboard, you can track the calls and the orders that come through those calls. But it's going to require something like a sales team and a bit more complicated of a system to figure out attribution in the first place. Sometimes commercials will use things like specific discount codes, and if people use those discount codes, they'll be able to apply them and attribute them to the specific campaign that they're running. However, the tracking isn't great. Rate, and it's not very granular. It's not using any sort of technology, so it's going to be far worse than a platform like Google or a platform like Meta. Traditional still has a place in today's world because there's attention out and about. When you're walking around the city, you're looking at things, and as a result, there are impressions that these billboards get. And the same with TV. People still watch TV to this day. However, because there's not much tracking, because you're going to be spending a few thousand dollars at the very least on a campaign, I'm putting this in the C tier, in the C category as the worst potential marketing channel for you to pursue as a new e-commerce business founder. You're probably going to want to focus on organic content, affiliates, and paid ads as your top 3 platforms to be thinking about. So for organic content, you're going to be wanting to make short-form content on the major platforms. So YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Facebook Reels essentially. And these platforms have much more viral potential. So you're going to want to demonstrate your product. You would want to be funny. And entertaining the creatives that you're making, whether they're going to be posted organically or you're going to be putting ad budget behind them. But if you're not great at content and you're really good at building systems, then something like TikTok Shops and an affiliate program would be worth exploring if you're really, really scared of making content. However, I'd probably say get over it and pick up a camera and start making content. But if you're really, really against it, then start building some sort of affiliate program where you get other people to make the content for you and you kind of start building a bit of a media company into your e-commerce brand itself. The other thing you can potentially do with a $50,000 $1,000 or less average order value is do the big B2B sales. You can look for brands and companies that would order $5,000 to $10,000 plus of your product and you can target them specifically. Now, that's not going to be content focused. That's going to be outreach and networking and conference focused, which I don't love as much as an opportunity, if I'm going to be completely honest with you, even though it's lower ticket, it— most people usually just don't have the sales skills and the knowledge around sales to actually go out there and start selling $100,000 50 units for $5,000 to these big brands. However, if it's something that you want to explore, you should send at least 500 new messages every single day across the major platforms. So that was— that's going to be email, SMS, and then social media platforms. You should be doing this yourself as much as possible. When should I start opening up more marketing channels? And it's been a question I've battled with for years as we've primarily focused on outreach as a company. And I've realized over the years, despite the fact that we've been able to get to a few few million a year in revenue, I made a crucial mistake in not doing way, way more marketing and opening up way more marketing channels way sooner. So the best recommendation I can give you is if you're, if you're early on in your journey selling products online and if you're kind of new to the online business space, build a marketing channel for maybe 2 to 6 weeks and start creating that marketing channel, whatever it may be. Let's say it's organic content and you've decided to choose Instagram as your first platform. Start making lots of content on Instagram. Systemize the process. So come up with structure that makes the process easier for you to follow, that makes it consistent so that you're always getting content up and you have scheduled time to go and film your content. But then start opening up new marketing channels and scaling them up as well. So if you're doing Instagram, start doing TikTok, start doing Twitter, and start moving on to different platforms because you can get to this point where in 2 to 6 weeks you can get almost anything to 80 to 90% quality. So if you take everything you know about how to go viral on Instagram, and it might not be very— it might be very little, it might just be, okay, I know I need to post every single day and probably do some live streams once a week. As you go and apply all of those things, you can usually apply them pretty quickly. However, most people get stuck in this kind of process, and this has happened to me, this process of trying to over-optimize their marketing channel. So you get Instagram to the point where it's like 80% good, and you know how you can make it better, but it's going to take double the amount of time or double the amount of work to make that platform perform much better. It's probably going to be worth— once you get to that point, actually opening up a new marketing channel and going and spending your time focusing on scaling out Twitter and making Twitter process automatic and organic. Because A, that gives you a couple of things. It diversifies your risk. So it means that you have sales coming from multiple platforms. Something happens to your main Instagram account, then you have a backup way of getting sales and you're not going to completely kill your business. B, it also teaches you more about how social media content works and how these algorithms work in the first place. So as you learn more about Twitter success and you learn more strategies and you start implementing systems to help you scale out your Twitter account, you can then go and apply that back to Instagram. As you go and learn and study different topics, you learn these things that you can apply to other areas of your life and business. So as you start learning how to be successful on Twitter, you'll come up with ideas and, and things that you can go and apply to your Instagram strategy that will take you from that 80% effectiveness to 85% effectiveness. For example, one of the best pieces of advice, and this is a question that again that came up last week, uh, with the CEO of one of the brands that we have in-house here Flax, he asked me, he was like, Zach, we've got, we've got Facebook ads working really well now. What should I go and do? Like, do you think I should just keep working on this funnel and this, this ads channel, or when should I go and open up marketing channels? And I said the exact same thing to him because in reality, whilst he understands Facebook ads pretty well and he comes from a conversion rate optimization background, so he's really good at building landing pages and websites and writing things in ways that make people buy into a brand and make people actually come up with a purchase. His funnel on Facebook ads is going to be so, so much better if he goes and learns Google Ads for this brand. Basically what I'm saying is get the most output for the time that you put in, get something to 80 to 80% effectiveness, 90% effectiveness. And if that means that you're spending 2 hours a day to get to 80 to 90% effectiveness and you need to spend an extra 10 hours a day now to get to 100%, then save that extra 8 hours and go and open up more marketing channels and ways to grow your business itself.