You will score candidate channels on fit, cost and your ability to run them, then commit to two.
By now you have probably got a list of channels you could use that is longer than the hours you have. Search, a few social platforms, email or WhatsApp, ads, partnerships, a market stall. Each one sounded reasonable in lessons 5.1 to 5.3. Trying all of them at once is how small businesses end up with six half-maintained accounts and no idea which one brought in the last customer.
This exercise narrows the list to two. It takes about thirty minutes. You need the channel scorecard template below this lesson, your marketing audit from lesson 1.4, and your target customer description from module 3.
Write down at least five channels you could realistically use. Start with the ones from your audit, including those you paused, then add any from lessons 5.2 and 5.3 that you have not tried. Be specific. "Social media" is too broad to score. "Instagram posts and reels" or "a TikTok account" can be scored.
Give each channel a score from 1 to 3 on each question, where 1 is weak and 3 is strong.
The first question is customer. Does your target customer actually use this channel, and use it in a way that lets them find a business like yours? Base the score on what you know about real customers, such as where past customers say they found you, rather than on what is popular.
The second is stage. Which stage of the journey from lesson 2.1 does the channel serve, and is that where your journey map from module 2 showed the biggest gap? A channel that serves your weakest stage scores 3.
The third is cost: what the channel will take each month in money and hours, as you estimated in lesson 5.3. Cheap and affordable scores 3. A channel you could only run by cutting something else scores 1.
The fourth is skill. Can you, or someone on your team, do it well now or learn it within a few weeks? Be honest here, because a channel nobody on the team enjoys gets abandoned.
Add up the four scores for each channel. The total is a guide, not a verdict. Read the individual scores too, because a channel that scores 1 on customer should rarely win, whatever its total.
For a small team, a sensible starting pair is one channel that finds new customers and one that keeps the ones you have. The first brings people in at the early stages of the journey. The second works on retention and repeat purchases, where lesson 2.1 showed many small businesses leave room to improve.
Look at your scorecard and pick the highest-scoring channel for each job. If the same channel tops both, pick the next best for one of them. Two channels doing different jobs cover more of the journey than two doing the same one.
Before you commit, ask one more question of each: will you still be doing this in three months? A channel you can post to every week, even plainly, will do more for you than a better channel you drop after a month. A Google Maps listing you update every Friday and a WhatsApp broadcast you send every month will beat an ambitious video plan that stops in week five.
Last, list every channel you scored and did not choose, under a heading such as "Not now". Add a date three months away when you will look at the list again.
This step sounds minor. It isn't. Most owners carry a background guilt about the channels they are neglecting: the TikTok account they never started, the newsletter they meant to send. Writing them down as a decision turns guilt into a plan. You aren't failing to do TikTok. You decided not to do it until your two main channels are working.
Priya runs the maths tuition centre from lesson 2.1. Her target customer is parents of P4 to P6 pupils within a short drive of the centre. Her journey map showed a weak retention stage: families left after one term and nobody asked them back. Here is her scorecard, scored from 1 to 3 on customer, stage, cost and skill, in that order:
Google Business Profile and reviews: 3, 3, 3, 3. Total 12. Parents search for tuition nearby, and the listing costs only time. Monthly WhatsApp update to current and past parents: 3, 3, 3, 2. Total 11. It serves retention, the gap in her map. Instagram posts: 2, 1, 2, 2. Total 7. Some parents follow her, but the posts bring in few new families and do nothing to win back the ones who leave. Paid search ads: 3, 2, 1, 2. Total 8. Strong reach, but her example budget of S$200 a month would barely cover a test. Partnership with a nearby bookshop: 2, 2, 3, 1. Total 8. Promising, but she has never set one up and has no time this term.
She chose Google Business Profile to find new families and the monthly WhatsApp update to keep the current ones. Her two sentences read: "Google wins because parents already search for tuition near them and it costs me only an hour a week. WhatsApp wins because my biggest loss is families leaving after one term, and I already have every parent's number with permission to message them."
Under "Not now" she wrote Instagram, paid search and the bookshop partnership, with a review date at the end of the term. She kept posting on Instagram once a week from habit, but stopped treating it as a channel she was responsible for growing.
Your scores will be guesses in places, and that's fine. The point is to make the choice on purpose and in writing, so that when you reach module 6 you have exactly two channels to set numbers for.
Open the scorecard now. Score every channel before you look at the totals, so the answer you were hoping for doesn't bend the scores.
Complete the channel scorecard for at least five channels, choose two, and write one sentence on why each won and what you are dropping.
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