Compare potential channels side-by-side based on your specific business goals, audience needs, and team capabilities to make data-driven expansion decisions.
Every B2B marketer eventually hits a wall. You've maxed out your LinkedIn and Google strategies. Your campaigns are optimized within an inch of their lives. Yet growth is flatlining.
The obvious answer? Add a new channel. But doing so typically raises your cost per acquisition, adds complexity to your messaging, and diverts focus from what's already working. In today's economic climate, any spike in CAC comes under intense scrutiny. How can you possibly justify the risk?
Yet the data shows multi-channel strategies pay off. According to McKinsey, companies using multi-channel approaches achieve 25% higher ROI than those relying on a single channel. They also experience sales cycles that are twice as short and see a 30% increase in customer lifetime value because more brand interactions boost loyalty.
The question isn't if you should expand your channel mix, but when and how to do it right.
How do you know when to make the leap? Based on our experience working with dozens of mid-level and enterprise organizations, we've identified three clear signals:
Signal #1: Your current channels run at or above target efficiency. When your customer acquisition cost is sustainable and your existing channels are well-optimized, you've created a foundation strong enough to support experimentation.
Signal #2: Audience research shows your buyers are in places you're not. If you discover your decision-makers are consuming content on platforms you haven't tapped, that's a missed opportunity. Your marketing should be wherever your audience spends time.
Signal #3: You've reached saturation point. When spending more money on your current platforms no longer improves ROAS, you've hit a ceiling. Growth requires new territory.
The goal is finding what Haley Riemann-Schneider, our Head of Advertising, calls the "Goldilocks zone" – the perfect balance of volume and return. Focus too much on ROAS, and revenue suffers. Chase volume at all costs, and efficiency tanks. The sweet spot lies between.
B2B marketers often default to LinkedIn as their primary channel. It's the business social network, after all. But as Ryan Nelsen, StackAdapt's CMO, pointed out in our recent conversation, this narrow focus leaves money on the table.
"LinkedIn is great for targeting business audiences," Nelsen explained. "We're customers ourselves. But we see significantly higher conversions when we expand beyond it."
The data from StackAdapt's platform tells a compelling story about how channels reinforce each other:
These aren't small improvements – they're game-changers. The reason? Channels don't exist in silos. When prospects see your brand in multiple contexts, it creates what Nelsen calls "the everywhere effect."
"The holy grail for marketers is when the CEO gets a text from a friend saying, 'I'm seeing your company everywhere,'" Nelsen noted. That perception of omnipresence builds trust, which accelerates buying decisions.
The distinction between brand and performance marketing is useful conceptually, but can limit our thinking. As Nelsen puts it: "If you only focus on brand, you'll probably get fired for not driving performance. If you only focus on performance, your top of funnel will dry up."
The most innovative campaigns blend both approaches. Remember Coinbase's Super Bowl ad? For 30 seconds, viewers watched a QR code bounce around their screens – a playful nod to the DVD screensaver era. That simple concept drove over 20 million app downloads and made Coinbase the top downloaded app that week.
What made this work? They took a brand channel (Super Bowl TV spot) and transformed it into a direct response vehicle. Instead of spending millions on celebrities, they invested in the backend experience that converts interest into action.
This blending of brand and performance is happening across channels:
"It's such a fun time to be a marketer," Nelsen observed. "The sky's the limit in terms of creativity and the ability to target and measure."
How do you add channels without breaking the bank or losing focus? Start small, measure obsessively, and scale what works.
Technology has democratized access to channels that were previously reserved for deep-pocketed enterprises:
Video production costs have plummeted. "It used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create TV ads," Nelsen noted. "Now AI is making it easy to create world-class video, allowing businesses to shift dollars toward distribution instead of production."
Platforms like StackAdapt remove technical barriers. Their programmatic advertising platform lets you run campaigns across display, video, audio, digital out-of-home, and connected TV without massive platform fees or technical hurdles.
Cross-channel attribution has improved dramatically. New tools show exactly how channels work together, ending the guessing game about which touchpoints deserve credit.
The key is keeping conversion at the center of your strategy, regardless of channel. Whether it's a brand play or a performance tactic, the goal remains the same: convert prospects into customers.
Compare potential channels side-by-side based on your specific business goals, audience needs, and team capabilities to make data-driven expansion decisions.
The multi-channel advantage is real and measurable. But expansion should be strategic, not scattershot.
Before adding any new channel to your mix, ask yourself:
When your current channels are humming, your audience research points to untapped opportunities, and you've hit saturation in your existing mix – that's when the real growth begins.
The brands that win aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest ads. They're the ones that intelligently connect with their audiences across multiple touchpoints, creating an impression of omnipresence that builds trust and accelerates deals.
In B2B marketing, being everywhere matters more than being perfect anywhere.
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