Start from who you are talking to, and the channel list gets short fast.
A decision tree from audience to shortlist, then what each channel costs you — in money, and in the patience it demands before it returns anything. One page, meant to be read in five minutes and argued with in ten.
FUEiNT Technologies is a software studio in Coimbatore, India, building custom software since 2014. This is a free one-page checklist that accompanies our comparison of traditional and digital advertising — no sign-up and no file to download.
Start here: who are you actually talking to?
Every channel decision is downstream of this one. Not what you sell, not what your competitors advertise on — who is on the other end, and where they already are.
The decision tree
Find your audience, take the shortlist. If two branches describe you, run them as two plans with two budgets rather than one blended one.
A local community, within a few kilometres
- Google Business Profile and local SEO
- Facebook and Instagram, geographically targeted
- Local events and sponsorship
- Print and flyers, where the audience is genuinely local
Decision-makers at other businesses
- LinkedIn, targeted by role and company
- Email, over a long nurture
- Industry events and trade bodies
- Written content — guides, comparisons, whitepapers
Younger consumers
- Instagram, especially Reels
- TikTok
- YouTube, both long-form and Shorts
- Creators and influencers in your category
Someone already searching for a solution
- Google Search Ads
- SEO on the specific problem, not the product name
- Review and comparison sites
- Being answerable by an AI assistant asked about your category
What each channel costs you
Two costs, and the second one is the one people forget. Fill the last column with what you would actually be quoted.
| Channel | Money to start | Patience needed | Scales? | Your quoted cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO and content | Low to medium | The slowest thing here | Yes, and the cost per visit falls as it does | |
| Google Search Ads | Medium to high | Fastest — traffic the day it goes live | Yes, until you exhaust the search volume | |
| Social media ads | Low to medium | Weeks, while the targeting settles | Yes | |
| Low | Immediate, once you have a list | Only as fast as the list grows | ||
| Traditional — print, radio, TV | High | Slow, and hard to attribute at all | Poorly |
The first ninety days, in order
Tick them off. Nothing here is optional, and doing them out of order is the usual reason a launch produces data nobody can read.
Weeks 1–2 — before a rupee is spent
- Accounts created and verifiedAd accounts, business profiles, payment methods. Verification takes longer than anyone plans for.
- Tracking installed and confirmed firingAnalytics and the platform pixels. Submit your own form and watch the conversion arrive before you believe it.
- Creative and landing pages readyThe page the ad points at matters more than the ad. Sending paid traffic to a home page is how budgets disappear.
Weeks 3–4 — the test phase
- Campaigns live, deliberately smallYou are buying information, not results. Expect the cost per enquiry to be at its worst here, and do not panic at it.
- More than one message runningOne ad tells you nothing, because there is nothing to compare it against.
- Enquiries answered within the dayThe follow-up is part of the campaign. A lead answered on Thursday for a Monday enquiry is a lead you paid for and lost.
Month 2 — cutting
- Losing ads paused, not tweakedStop them. Editing a losing ad restarts its learning and costs you the comparison.
- Budget moved onto what is workingMove it in steps rather than all at once, so you can tell whether it holds at the higher spend.
- The audience narrowed around who actually convertedThis is usually a smaller and stranger group than the one you targeted at launch.
Months 3–6 — judging
- Cost per enquiry compared against what a customer is worthThis is the only comparison that decides anything. Everything before it is preparation.
- SEO work started or continuedIf it was not begun in month one it will not help you in month six, and it is the channel that eventually lowers the cost of all the others.
- A written decision on each channelKeep, scale or stop, with the reason recorded. A channel nobody decided about carries on spending forever.
Five channels running badly is worse than one running properly.
Tell us what you are spending and where, and a senior engineer will write back with what we would stop, what we would keep, and what we would leave alone.
Saravanampatti, Coimbatore, TN, India — 641035
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