Writing

How the channels actually fit together, and why founders should stop buying them one at a time

By Christopher Corben · Surry Hills, Sydney NSW

Christopher Corben sees the same pattern in business after business. A founder buys SEO from one place, Google Ads from another, perhaps a social agency on the side, and ends up with three suppliers each reporting that their channel is doing wonderfully. The accounts look healthy in isolation. The business, somehow, is not growing the way the spend suggests it should. The problem is rarely any one channel. It is that nobody is responsible for how they fit together.

It helps to think of marketing as a journey a stranger takes, not a list of platforms. Early on, most of your future customers do not know you exist and are not searching for you. That stage is won by being visible where attention already is, through content, social, and broad paid reach that introduces the brand to people who were not looking. The middle is consideration, where someone weighing options reads, compares, and revisits. The end is the moment of intent, where branded search, high-intent keywords, and retargeting quietly collect people who have already decided. Each stage wants different channels, different messages, and a different definition of success.

This is where buying channels one at a time falls down. The channels at the bottom of the journey always look the most impressive, because they harvest demand that the rest of your marketing created. Pour everything into them and the early-stage work that feeds them gets starved, so the harvest shrinks a quarter or two later. Meanwhile a channel that looks weak on its own may be doing the unglamorous job of warming people up for one that takes the credit. Judged in isolation, you defund exactly the work that makes the rest possible.

The better question for a founder is not which channel performs best. It is whether the channels cover the whole journey and hand customers along it without gaps or duplicated effort. That is a strategy decision, made once with the business in full view, not a sum of three suppliers optimising their own corners. Get the mix right and the channels stop competing for credit and start compounding. The brand becomes easier to find, cheaper to convert, and steadier to grow, because the system was designed as one, by someone accountable for the whole of it.