Channel strategy

What a channel strategy is

A channel strategy is a short written decision about where your content is published and where it is not. Website, email, one or two social platforms, print, video, a podcast: for each one, either it stays with a named owner and a stated purpose, or it is closed.

It is not a plan for what to post on each platform. That work follows, and for social specifically it is a social content strategy. This is the decision above it: which channels you are in at all.

It is one chapter of the content strategy plan, sold on its own because it is the chapter that most often needs settling before anything else can move.

Why most of it is subtraction

Almost nobody who asks for this needs another channel. They need to stop three. A small business accumulates channels the way a garage accumulates tools: a platform opened because a competitor was on it, an account a departed employee set up, a podcast that ran to four episodes in 2023 and is still the top result for the founder's name.

Each of them costs something even when nothing is posted. They split the available hours, they make the publishing schedule impossible before it starts, and a dormant account with three posts and a stale photograph does more damage to a buyer's confidence than no account at all.

So the document is mostly a list of things to stop, and the hard part is not deciding which ones. It is doing it properly. A channel that is quietly abandoned keeps taking traffic and keeps disappointing people. A channel that is closed properly hands its audience to a channel you keep.

What goes in it

• Every channel you are actually on. Including the forgotten ones. Most businesses find two or three accounts they had stopped thinking about, and at least one they cannot log into.
• What each one costs and returns. Hours a month against what it has demonstrably brought in. Where the figures do not exist, that is recorded as a finding rather than filled with a guess.
• A verdict per channel. Keep, reduce, park or close. Keep means a named owner and a stated job. Park means the profile stays up, accurate and dated, with nothing promised.
• A closing plan for each one you drop. The final post, where it points, what happens to the profile text, and where the audience is invited to go instead.
• The one channel you own outright. Usually the website and a mailing list, because those are the two nobody can take away from you, and the strategy is written to feed them.

What you get

The channel decision. Two or three pages: the list, the verdicts, and the reasoning in plain language, so the person who championed the channel being closed can read why.

A closing plan. One short set of instructions per dropped channel, including the wording of the final post and the profile text it leaves behind.

A review date. A point six months out to check whether a parked channel should be reopened or closed for good, so that parking is a decision rather than a way of avoiding one.

A worked example

An illustration. A specialist bicycle shop is on five platforms, sends a newsletter when someone remembers, and has a blog with eleven posts, nine of them from one summer. The owner asks which platform to add next. Counting the hours shows six a week going into content and five of those going into platforms.

Two platforms bring enquiries that staff can name. One brings comments and no customers. Two have not been posted to in a year, and one of those is the first result for the shop's name. The decision: keep the two that work, close the commenting one with a final post pointing at the newsletter, park the two dormant accounts with accurate profile text and a link to the site, and move the recovered hours into the newsletter and four service pages the shop has never had. Nothing new was added. The shop published more in the following quarter than it had in the previous year.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you are on, who runs each one, and what made you start. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope and number agreed before anything starts.
3. The sweep. I find every account and page connected to the business, including the ones nobody mentioned, and ask whoever posts to each how long it really takes.
4. The numbers. Read access to your analytics and whatever the platforms report, set against the hours, to see which channels earn their keep. Three to five working days.
5. The decision document and a conversation about it, because at least one verdict will be unpopular and it is better argued out than discovered later.

A week to ten days from first call to the final document.

What it costs

Quoted after the half-hour call, because the work scales with the number of channels and whether any usable figures exist. It is a small fixed-price piece, and the pricing page shows the four ways of working so you can see where it sits. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

If your channels are mostly social platforms and the real question is what to say on the ones you keep, say so on the call and I will point you at the cheaper piece of work instead.

What happens next

The recovered hours have to go somewhere, and that is the useful part. Most people set a pace they can now genuinely keep, which is the cadence decision. Some put the surviving backlog in order through prioritisation. Others put the hours straight into the channel they own, usually the mailing list.

None of that is assumed. The channel strategy is complete on its own. Close what it says to close, and the document has already paid for itself.