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Growth strategyJul 31, 2026 · 5 min read

One marketing channel, done well, isn't enough anymore

Fewer than one in nine small businesses now runs on a single marketing channel, down from one in four just three years ago. The ones that made the switch aren't spreading themselves thin. They're building a system.

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The Trade Script
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A small business owner checking a laptop and a phone side by side at a bright counter, coordinating marketing across more than one channel

In 2022, one in four small businesses ran their entire marketing effort through a single channel, a Facebook page, maybe, or an email list, worked well and left alone. By 2025 that number had fallen to one in nine (Taradel, 2025 Small Business Marketing Survey). The businesses that made the shift did not do it because single-channel marketing stopped working. They did it because it stopped being enough.

The channel that used to be plenty

Taradel’s survey of small business owners and advertisers tracked the same question three years running, and the trend only moves one direction. In 2022, 24 percent of small businesses relied on a single marketing channel. By 2023 that had dropped to 13 percent. By 2025 it was 11 percent, and 81 percent of small businesses now run at least two channels at once (Taradel, 2025 Small Business Marketing Survey). Facebook ads, direct mail, and email remain the top three individually, at 69.2, 61.7, and 60.9 percent of respondents respectively, but the real shift is not which channel wins. It is that fewer owners are willing to put everything behind just one.

That is not businesses chasing a trend. It is businesses noticing that a customer who only sees you in one place is a customer who can miss you entirely, and building around more than one point of contact closes that gap.

The confidence gap most owners haven’t closed

Here is the part that should give you pause: 82 percent of small businesses already agree that using multiple marketing channels leads to better results. Only 16 percent feel confident they are using the right ones (Constant Contact, Small Business Now report, 2024). That 66-point gap is not a knowledge problem you fix by working harder. It is a systems problem, the same one behind most of what slows a small operation down.

“Small business owners are usually much more passionate about their products and services than they are about marketing, but they still need to attract and retain customers to grow,” said Sarah Jordan, chief marketing officer at Constant Contact. “Our research shows that while most recognize the importance of marketing, they often lack the time and expertise to be effective” (Constant Contact, Small Business Now report, 2024). The businesses closing that gap are not the ones with a bigger marketing budget. They are the ones who stopped treating every channel as one more manual task and started treating it as infrastructure.

What the upside actually looks like

Cross-industry retail data puts a real number on why this is worth doing. Customers who engage with a business across three or more channels convert at purchase rates 250 to 287 percent higher than single-channel customers, and retention runs as high as 89 percent for customers engaged across multiple channels, against roughly 33 percent for customers reached through just one (Revenue Memo, “Multi-channel marketing statistics for 2026,” April 2026). Those figures span industries larger than a typical small shop, so treat the exact multiple with some caution. The direction of the effect does not need caution. A customer who sees your work on your website, in their inbox, and in their feed trusts you more than one who saw it in exactly one of those places, and trust is what turns a look into a booking.

None of that requires being everywhere. It requires being in more than one place on purpose, with each channel doing a job the others don’t.

The Trade Script connection

This is the exact shape of the systems we build. A website is the channel that works while you sleep. An email list, once it is wired to fire automatically after a booking or an inquiry, is the channel that follows up so you don’t have to remember to. A social presence that posts on a schedule across Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky is the channel that keeps you visible between jobs instead of only when you have time to think about it. None of those replace the others. Together, they are how a two-person shop shows up like an operation three times its size, without three times the hours.

The owners stuck at one channel are not usually lazy. They are busy, and adding a second channel by hand, one more login, one more thing to remember on a Tuesday, is a real cost that a lot of small operations correctly decide isn’t worth it yet. The fix isn’t willpower. It’s building the second and third channel so they run the same way the first one already does: without you having to think about it every day.

The takeaway

The channel that fails a small business is rarely the wrong platform. It’s having only one. The principle: pick the channel you already have and aren’t using well, most often email, and the channel you don’t have at all, most often a second social platform, and treat both as a system to build once rather than a task to repeat forever. The step this week: turn on one piece of automation on the channel you already own, a welcome email, an automatic follow-up, a scheduled post, and use the time it frees up to stand up the channel you don’t have yet.

Sources

#growth-strategy#marketing#multi-channel#automation#small-business

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