Which channel for which job

The nine

The phone is not ringing and I need work this month. Paid ads. Nothing else operates on that timescale. Accept that it stops when the budget does, and use the time it buys to start the slower channels.

Customers say they cannot find me on the map. Local search. The profile is the lever, it is free, and the whole method is published step by step on this network's handbook property.

I rank nowhere for the obvious searches in my trade. Organic search, and expect months rather than weeks. Check the difficulty of your main term first, because a trade at 29 and one at 65 are different projects.

I get plenty of visits and almost no enquiries. Not a channel problem. Fix the website. Buying more traffic multiplies the leak.

I opened a second premises. Local search, specifically a second profile and a second location page. Nothing else reaches a new area the way physical presence plus a profile does.

My competitors appear above me in the map, in my own area. Local search, and check the fundamentals before assuming it is competitive: categories, hours, completeness, review recency.

I want to launch a new service and see if anyone wants it. Paid ads, small budget, tight targeting. This is the cheapest market research available and it produces an answer in weeks.

I spend on ads every month and cannot tell if they work. Not a channel problem. Fix the measurement, including call tracking, before spending another month.

I am about to start and have no site, no profile and no reviews. Website and profile first. Buying reach at this point sends people to nothing.

The pattern in those nine

Three of them, the leak, the missing measurement and the empty foundation, resolve to fixing something rather than buying reach. In practice that is a large share of the businesses that approach an agency, and an agency that sells a channel into any of those three has sold something that will not work.

The one question underneath all of it

How quickly do you need this, and what already exists? Speed points at paid; what exists points at whether reach is even the constraint. The comparison holds the detail, and the last page holds the cases where the answer is nobody.