You’ve got more marketing channels than any business owner in history, and that’s the problem. Forty or sixty years ago a small business could take out a Yellow Pages ad, maybe buy some TV, radio or newspaper, and count on word of mouth. Five channels. Today you can build an email list, run social ads, do SEO, buy placements on websites, and still buy terrestrial radio, TV and Roku. If you try to do all of them, you probably won’t do any of them well. So I asked Dr. Christiane Schroeter, a Cal Poly marketing and entrepreneurship professor who also runs her own coaching business and podcast, how she actually chooses. The full conversation is on the episode page.
Start where your buyer already shops
Christiane used her own books as the example. She could have pushed them to Walmart.com and Barnes & Noble herself. Instead she lists them through a print-on-demand distributor, sets the wholesale percentage she’s willing to give, and lets the big retailers pick them up if they want to. Her main channel is Amazon, and the reason is her customer, not the platform.
So for me, I immediately went with Amazon because my main buyer, my main ideal client is an Amazon purchaser, is an online shopper that already purchases, whether that’s groceries or the other goods on Amazon. – Dr. Christiane Schroeter
She’s also an Amazon affiliate with her own storefront, so the decision was natural. Her advice for your business: use what’s already natural for you “and where you feel your consumers are going to be.”
Being everywhere dilutes the brand
This is the part most small business owners skip. Picking fewer channels isn’t only about saving time. Christiane argues it changes how the brand is perceived.
Because being everywhere at all time, as I say, I think is diluting your brand and it’s also not really necessarily finding your unique selling proposition in a way that it seems more premium, more exclusive, limited to these certain channels. – Dr. Christiane Schroeter
Print on demand gives her two more things you can borrow for any product business:
- No inventory. She’s not going to have piles of books in her house, so don’t ask her to mail you one.
- Every copy is the latest version. She can update a book, upload it, and the next print is the new one.
Amazon also sells in every country, so readers in Japan and Germany have bought her books without her shipping anything. If you sell physical products from your own website, shipping is the cost you have to plan around.
Social for awareness, email for sales
Christiane doesn’t promote on TikTok or Snapchat, because her ideal client isn’t there. Social media brings new people in and makes them aware of her work. The selling happens somewhere else.
I really focus on my traditional media, such as my email list, because it belongs to me. – Dr. Christiane Schroeter
She knows the people on that list appreciate what she writes, and that’s where she sees the sales happen. If your social channels are growing and your revenue isn’t, check whether you have anywhere for those followers to land.
Why owning the list matters more now
I see the same shift in SEO. I was going over numbers with a client, a radio station, whose most popular article still ranks number one. It’s getting something like 60% more impressions than last year and about 30% fewer clicks. Same ranking, fewer visitors, because AI Overviews and chat answers hand people the information before they ever click. If you’ve got pages like that, find them first: Zapdigits has a good walkthrough on spotting page-one rankings that bleed clicks. And keep in mind that Search Console doesn’t count everything; our 38-site dark clicks study shows how much it misses.
When the clicks you do get are fewer, each one has to work harder. That means:
- Give people a real reason to join your list. A pop-up that says “join my newsletter” isn’t a reason. A downloadable guide that solves their actual problem is.
- Don’t block a buyer with a pop-up. I’d much rather someone buy that day than join my list.
- Put a juicy call to action on every article. You can’t create endless top-of-funnel content and hope someone wanders onto your about page and decides to buy.
Christiane’s answer to all of it was the same one she gives her clients: find your voice and figure out what makes you uniquely you. I wrote about how she turns that into a brand people trust on the episode recap, and about why AI’s habit of agreeing with everything makes that harder on my own site. Which of your channels would you keep if you could only keep one?
Connect with Dr. Christiane Schroeter
- Website: doctorchristiane.com
- Books: doctorchristiane.com/books
- Podcast: Happy Healthy Hustle
- LinkedIn: Christiane Schroeter