The Benefits of Human-First Marketing Pt 2: Channels

Sector Insights

20 October 2026

Alisdair Straughan

This series looks at what brands gain from an audience-first approach. Each piece takes one area of marketing and sets out the practical benefits, all learned from running Edge for real clients.

When deciding what channels to run your campaigns on there are some common questions to answer first: what channels have we used before, which are we most familiar with, which are we good at, where do our competitors appear, which have given us the best results in the past and, demographically, what do we know about the audience.

These are sensible questions, and most marketing teams already know who they’re talking to.

But none of these questions tells you where a buyer looks when they are trying to make up their mind, or what they need to find there before they will move closer to buying what you’re selling.

A message resonates when it reaches the right person, in the right place, at the right moment, consistently and over time.

Starting with deep audience understanding gives you a channel plan you can explain with evidence. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Find where your audience looks

Search behaviour, social listening, customer reviews, competitor data and your own advertising performance tell you where buyers go for answers. Put together at persona level, they give you a much sharper picture than a single audience profile. In a fleet leasing example, each fleet persona had a distinct barrier and a set of channels they actually use, so the plan followed each of them instead of treating the audience as one group.

The places people look for answers are also changing. AI summaries and chatbots now sit alongside traditional search results, so a buyer’s research can happen in several places before they reach your website. LLMs tend to draw on what is published about a brand across the web, so the places your brand is mentioned matter as well as your own website.

The practical step is to check where your audience researches today rather than rely on where they researched when the plan was last written.

Give each channel a job at every stage

Pushing the same message across all channels at the same time can work, but people use different channels for different information depending on where they are in their journey.

Mapping the journey stage by stage, with stages built to fit the audience, gives you the best possible starting point for more resonant communication and budget management. For a considered-purchase interiors brand, we mapped five stages: Browsing and Inspiration, Active Search, Evaluation and Doubt, Purchase and Post-Purchase. In the first, people are looking for ideas and imagery, and by Evaluation and Doubt they want reviews, delivery details and reassurance about returns. Each stage called for wildly different channels, from brand discovery on social early on, to a printed seasonal brochure and an in-box insert post-purchase that reached customers when they were most receptive to hearing from the brand.

Gartner’s research on B2B buying points the same way. Buyers get through complex purchases when the information they meet on digital channels and from sales collateral is consistent and matched to the task they are trying to complete.

Once you know the emotional barrier at each stage, a video can have the job of creating attention, an email the job of dealing with doubt and a review page the job of building trust, so no single channel has to do all three.

Move budget towards the channels that fit

Once you know where each persona looks and when, you can also see which channels have no clear role for them, and budget can move to the channels that do.

Test organically, then put paid behind the proof

A single audience insight can carry a lot of content. Take a fleet manager who is anxious about the transition to an EV fleet and wants to know the real cost of going electric. That one insight can become multiple pieces of content across multiple channels: a YouTube video, an email, an article, a podcast, an Instagram piece and a LinkedIn post, all pointing back to the website.

Organic is the lowest cost place to find out which of those insights land, and paid media can then go behind the ones that have shown they work.

Retarget with the reason they left in mind

Retargeting works best when it answers the question the visitor left with. Meta’s reporting credits an ad with a sale when someone saw it and then bought within a set window, even if they never clicked, so retargeting can look more effective than it is. Judging it by that dashboard alone misses whether the message dealt with what held the buyer back.

The barrier a buyer faces changes through stages like attention, openness, belief, risk, trust or momentum. Someone who left a pricing page is often weighing risk, so an ad showing evidence of results gives them what they need. Someone who left after a first article may need a different angle on the same problem.

Key takeaway

Channels perform best when they are chosen for the audience, not because they are the most familiar. If you understand who you are talking to, what they need to know to buy from you and where they find their information, the channel plan practically writes itself. It’s not an exact science, unfortunately nothing in marketing is, but it does give you the most informed starting point.

Next step: a conversation about Edge

This is what Edge is built to produce. It maps your buyers, their journeys and where they look for information at every stage. Edge is the data layer that makes our Go To Audience strategies super effective, because the plan is put into action across whichever channels the audience actually uses.

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