Which Marketing Channels Should a Small Business Use?

Two.

Not two categories, not two "pillars." Two actual channels you show up in every single week, for at least six months, without needing to be reminded. For most of the small businesses we work with in Ontario, that's your Google Business Profile and reviews as the first one, and then one of: email to a list you already have, one social platform, or paid search. If you have less than about five hours a week to give marketing, make it one, not two.

That's the answer. The rest of this is how to pick which two, and how to know when one of them has stopped earning its place. If you're starting a business from nothing rather than fixing what you're already running, the order we'd spend a first marketing budget in is the more useful piece.

"Be where your customers are" quietly means "be everywhere"

Almost every guide on this opens by telling you to know your audience and go where they are. It sounds like advice. For a plumber in Orangeville, it isn't. You already know where your customers are. They're in a twenty minute radius, they have a leak, and they're going to search for someone or ask a neighbour. Knowing that was never the hard part.

The hard part is that "go where they are" has no stopping rule. Your customers are on Facebook, so you make a page. They're on Google, so you start a blog. Some of them are on Instagram. A few are on LinkedIn. Everyone says email is the highest return channel, so you start collecting addresses. Six months later you have five channels, all of them running at about a fifth of the effort each one needs, and none of them producing anything.

We take over sites in this exact state constantly. A Facebook page last posted to in March. An Instagram account with eleven followers. Three blog posts from the year the website was built. An unclaimed Google Business Profile. Three hundred email addresses that have never received an email. It looks like a business doing a lot of marketing. It's a business doing no marketing, five times over.

Half-run channels don't return half. They return nothing

This is the part that makes "be everywhere" actively harmful rather than just inefficient.

Most marketing channels have a threshold. Below it, nothing happens at all. Posting to Instagram twice a month does not get you a fifth of the results of posting three times a week, because the algorithm never builds any sense of who to show you to and no follower ever forms a habit of seeing you. Publishing four blog posts a year does not get you a third of the results of publishing one a month, because a site with twelve pages of content has no chance of ranking for anything competitive. Emailing your list every eight months doesn't get you a fraction of the results of emailing monthly, it gets you unsubscribes and spam complaints from people who've forgotten who you are.

So the arithmetic that feels right, five channels at 20% each adding up to one channel's worth of results, is wrong. Five channels at 20% each adds up to roughly zero, plus five things you feel guilty about.

Two channels at 100% is not a compromise. It's the only version of this that works.

The constraint is hours, not audience or budget

Here's the reframe that actually decides this, and it's the one no channel roundup makes.

The question isn't "where are my customers." It's "how many hours a week does one person in this business have for marketing, and which channels fit inside that number."

For most small businesses the honest answer is somewhere between two and six hours a week, and it's the owner's hours. CFIB has found the average Canadian small business owner already works 54 hours a week, rising to around 59 for those short-staffed. That's a self-reported member survey published in 2022, in the context of that period's labor shortage, so treat it as the right order of magnitude rather than a precise measurement. It doesn't need to be precise to make the point. Marketing hours aren't coming out of a marketing department. They're coming out of a week that's already full.

So before choosing a channel, work out the real number. Not the aspirational one. How many hours will still be there in month four, on a bad week, in your busy season. That number, more than your industry or your audience or your budget, decides what you can run.

What each channel actually costs

These are typical ranges we see in Ontario, not standardized rates, and they'll vary with your market and how much you do yourself. All figures are CAD.

Channel	Hours a week to run it properly	Typical monthly cost	Time to first real result
Google Business Profile and reviews	1 to 2	$0 doing it yourself, $100 to $300 managed	2 to 6 weeks
Email to a list you already have	1 to 2	$20 to $80 for the platform	Days
One social platform, done properly	3 to 5	$0 to $400 if any of it is outsourced	3 to 6 months
SEO and content	4 to 6, or outsourced	$0 doing it yourself, $800 to $2,500 managed	6 to 18 months
Google Ads	1 to 2 after setup	$500 to $2,000 ad spend, plus $300 to $800 management	Days to weeks
Paid social	2 to 4	$300 to $1,500 ad spend, plus management	Weeks
Referrals and partnerships	1 to 2	Close to nothing	1 to 3 months
Print, sponsorship, direct mail	About 1	$200 to $1,500 per campaign	Weeks, and hard to attribute

Read the first column before the second. A business with four hours a week and $2,000 a month cannot run SEO and social and paid together, no matter what the budget says, because two of those three are hour-hungry and the hours aren't there. This is why the budget-first version of this question gives people the wrong answer.

Three questions that pick your two

1. How do the customers you already have actually find you?

Not how you think. Go and count. Take your last twenty or thirty customers and write down, for each one, how they first heard of you. Most owners have never done this and are genuinely surprised by the result. If eighteen of thirty came from referrals and Google, then Instagram is not your channel, however much time you've been putting into it.

This is also the cheapest research you will ever do, and it beats any generic industry benchmark, because it's measured on your actual business in your actual town.

2. How fast do you need this to work?

Channels differ enormously here and the difference is usually the deciding factor. If you need work in the next eight weeks, content marketing is the wrong choice, and not because it's a bad channel. Ahrefs' study of newly published pages found that only 1.74% of them rank in Google's top 10 within a year, rising to about 6% when the sample is narrowed to pages with real English content, and that 72.9% of the pages currently sitting in the top 10 are more than three years old. Their methodology was a crawl of millions of URLs rather than a controlled experiment, and the authors note some of the change from their 2017 version could be sampling, but the direction is not in doubt and it matches what we see.

That's the honest timeline. SEO and content are a six to eighteen month investment that keeps paying afterwards. Local visibility, email to an existing list and paid search all produce something in days or weeks. Neither type is better. They're for different situations, and picking a slow channel when you need fast results is one of the more expensive mistakes available.

3. What can you sustain in the hours you actually have?

Not what you could do in a good month. What you'll still be doing in February when you're behind. Whichever channel survives that question is the honest answer, and it's usually the least exciting one on the list.

Channel by channel, honestly

Google Business Profile and reviews. For any business with a service area or a physical location, this is the first channel and it isn't close. It's mostly free, it's quick to set up, and it puts you in front of people at the exact moment they're looking to buy. BrightLocal's 2026 local consumer survey, a representative panel of 1,002 US adults, found roughly half of people started their most recent local search on Google and 71% used Google Search at some point during it. It's a US panel and it's self-reported recall rather than observed behavior, so treat it as the shape of local search behavior rather than a Canadian number, but nothing we see in Ontario contradicts it. It's worth understanding what your Google Business Profile actually controls before you start filling it in. Then pair it with actively asking every happy customer for a review, which is where a surprising amount of the work gets done. That pairing is the single highest return hour a local business can spend.

Email to a list you already have. Fast, cheap, and yours in a way a social following never is. The catch is in the wording: to a list you already have. If you have 300 past customers, email is one of your two channels starting this month. If you have nine addresses, email is a channel you're building toward, not one you're running, and building the list is the actual work.

One social platform. Not "social media." One platform, chosen because your customers are genuinely there and because you can stand to make things for it. Three to five hours a week is realistic for doing it properly, which is more than most owners expect, and it's the channel most likely to be dropped in a busy month. It's a good channel when you have something visual to show (finished work, spaces, food, before and afters) and a weak one when you don't.

SEO and content. Genuinely excellent and genuinely slow. Right when people actively search for what you sell, you can commit for a year, and you want an asset that keeps working after you stop paying for it. Wrong when you need bookings this quarter. It's also the channel most often sold to businesses that shouldn't be buying it yet, which is worth settling first: not every small business needs SEO, and the ones that don't usually get more from reputation and local visibility.

Google Ads. The fastest way to find out whether people are searching for what you sell and whether your website converts them. Expensive per lead next to organic, and it stops the moment you stop paying. Genuinely useful as a temporary channel while a slower one builds, which is a use case almost nobody mentions.

Paid social. Works for products, offers and events with a visual hook. Much harder for a service business, because you're interrupting people rather than meeting them at the moment they're already looking.

Referrals and partnerships. The most underrated line in the table. Nearly free, reasonably fast, and for a lot of trades and professional services it's already the largest source of work. Making it a channel rather than an accident means actually asking, and having two or three businesses that serve the same customers as you and send work your way.

Print, sponsorship and local presence. Not dead, particularly in a town like Orangeville where a sponsored team or the local paper still reaches people. Hard to attribute, which makes it easy to over-invest in. A supporting act, rarely one of your two.

Your website isn't a channel

Worth saying plainly, because it changes the maths. Your website is where the channels send people. It isn't one of the two.

That matters because a weak destination caps every channel at once. If your site doesn't make it obvious what you do, who you serve and how to get in touch, then improving it is worth more than adding a sixth channel, and it's worth doing before you spend anything on visibility. If you're not sure which it is, work through why the traffic you already get isn't converting before you go looking for more of it. It also means the website's cost and upkeep sit outside the channel budget, not inside it.

The same applies to what happens after someone gets in touch. If inquiries sit unanswered for two days, no channel will fix that. Answering fast is worth more than another channel, and it's cheaper.

About that "$36 for every $1"

You'll see this quoted as the reason to pick email, so it's worth knowing what it is. The figure comes from Litmus' State of Email survey, and their current page actually reports a spread rather than a single number: 35% of companies reported getting between $10 and $36 back per dollar, 30% reported $36 to $50, 5% reported more than $50. It comes from marketing professionals reporting their own results, not from independent measurement, and the page carries its own note that the information is more than two years old.

None of that makes email a bad channel. It's still one of the best. But the number describes the return on sending to a list, and says nothing at all about the cost of building one. If you're starting from zero addresses, the ROI figure isn't the number that applies to you yet.

While we're on benchmarks: the marketing budget figure people quote at small businesses, around 7 to 8 percent of revenue, traces to surveys like Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, which asked 401 marketing leaders whose companies were overwhelmingly above a billion dollars in annual revenue. It's a real number about a completely different kind of business. Don't let it set your budget.

How long to give a channel before you judge it

Setting this in advance is what stops you either quitting too early or carrying a dead channel for two years out of guilt.

Reasonable windows, before you decide anything:

• Google Business Profile and reviews: 6 to 8 weeks
• Email to an existing list: 3 months, or about six sends
• Paid search: 4 to 6 weeks, once you have enough clicks to mean anything
• One social platform: 6 months
• SEO and content: 9 to 12 months

Write the date down when you start. Then track one thing per channel, not a dashboard: for most small businesses that's inquiries, not impressions, followers or rankings. If you can only measure one number well, make it "how many people got in touch, and where did they come from," which brings you back to the counting exercise from question one.

How to drop a channel

Nobody writes this part, and it's the thing most readers actually need to do.

When a channel reaches the end of its window with nothing to show, stop running it. Deliberately, not by drifting away from it. But don't delete the account. A dormant profile still shows up when someone searches your business name, and a deleted one looks like you went out of business. So: update the profile information so it's accurate, pin or post one final message pointing people to where you actually are, and leave it. That's five minutes, and it converts an embarrassment into a working signpost.

Then put those hours into one of the two channels you kept. Not into a new sixth channel. The hours you free up are the whole point.

One caution before you cut: check that the channel actually failed, rather than the destination failing. A channel that sends people to a website that doesn't convert them looks exactly like a channel that isn't working.

Two things that are specific to Canada

Email has a legal prerequisite here. Under Canada's anti-spam legislation you generally need consent before sending commercial email. An inquiry about your products or services gives you implied consent for six months. Adding someone to a newsletter needs express consent, which means they took a deliberate action to opt in. Express consent, as the CRTC describes it, means the recipient took a proactive action to opt in. Practically, that's a clearly worded, unticked checkbox where you collect addresses, which is one of the few fields genuinely worth the space on a contact form. It doesn't make email a worse channel, but it does mean list-building takes longer here than the US-written advice assumes, which is one more reason it's a channel you build toward.

Local search is doing more work than it used to. The same BrightLocal survey found people using AI assistants for local business recommendations jumped from 6% of respondents in 2025 to 45% in 2026. A single year-over-year jump that large is worth reading as a direction rather than a precise level, and it's still a US panel. The practical implication is reassuring rather than alarming: it isn't a new channel to add. The profile, the reviews and the clear website content you'd already be maintaining are the same things those systems read. It's the same work paying out in two places.

The short version

Pick two. If you serve a local market, make one of them local visibility. Make the second the fastest channel that fits the hours you'll still have in four months. Give each a written deadline, count where inquiries actually come from, and when one fails, put its hours back into what worked rather than into something new.

Two things done properly for a year beats six done badly forever, and it's a great deal less exhausting.

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Not sure whether your channels are underperforming or your website is? Our free Website Grader checks the five things that decide whether the visitors you're already paying for actually turn into inquiries. It's worth ruling that out before you change anything about your marketing.

And if you'd rather not work out the shortlist alone, get in touch. We'll look at where your customers actually came from and tell you which two channels are worth your hours, even if the answer is that you're already running one of them and just need to stop the other four.