Best marketing strategies and approaches compared, ranked on what each one needs before it works
Most strategy lists rank tactics by how well they worked for somebody else. Rank them instead by their precondition, which is the thing you must already have, and the list reorders completely for your business.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 21 October 2026
A marketing strategy is not good or bad in the abstract. Every one of them has a precondition, and a strategy whose precondition you do not meet will fail no matter how well it is executed. So rank them by precondition.
The seven that actually work, each with the thing it needs first
One, sell more to the customers you already have. Precondition, a customer list with contact permission and a second thing worth buying. This is almost always the cheapest revenue available and almost always the last thing anybody tries, because it is not exciting. If you have a list of a few thousand past buyers, start here and finish here before reading on.
Two, capture existing demand through search. Precondition, people are already searching for what you sell. Check that before committing anything. If nobody searches your category, search marketing cannot work and no budget fixes it. If they do, this is the highest intent traffic there is.
Three, buy attention in an auction. Precondition, a margin that survives the auction price and a landing experience that converts. Google publishes no minimum spend. We read business.google.com/us/google-ads/ on 21 October 2026 and it states only that "New advertisers will receive an ad credit after meeting the minimum spend requirement for the selected offer" without naming the requirement, and its offer figures render as unfilled template placeholders rather than dollar amounts. So the floor is set by your own arithmetic and not by the platform. The campaign types it names are Performance Max, Search, Shopping, Video Reach, Video View, Demand Gen and App.
Four, buy reach on a content network. Precondition, a genuinely interesting asset to send people to, because interruption without a reason to stay is paid for twice. Scale is not the constraint here. Taboola's advertiser page, read at taboola.com/advertise on 21 October 2026, describes its product Realize as "Performance AI with a global network of vetted publishers, reaching 600M daily active users", and publishes no minimum spend at all. Six hundred million daily users is more reach than most businesses can use, which tells you the constraint is your asset rather than the inventory.
Five, earn attention with content. Precondition, patience measured in quarters and somebody who knows the subject well enough to say something not already online. Content written by somebody who had to research the basics reads like it.
Six, borrow somebody else's audience. Precondition, something to offer in return, which is usually distribution, money or genuine expertise their audience wants. The fastest strategy on this list when you have a credible trade and the slowest when you do not.
Seven, go and talk to people directly. Precondition, a market small enough to finish and a deal large enough to justify the salary. Under those two conditions it beats everything above and nothing else comes close.
The two that get recommended most and work least
Being everywhere at once. A five channel plan run by one person is five channels run badly. Channel count is the most common way a plan fails, and it fails without anybody noticing because every channel has an explanation for its own weak numbers.
Copying a large brand's playbook. A famous campaign is usually a brand campaign with a budget that assumed existing distribution. The tactic is not the thing that worked. The distribution underneath it was.
The channel that is missing from every strategy list, including most of ours
Every strategy above is a way of reaching a buyer who is choosing. There is now a point before that, and it is upstream of all seven.
A buyer asks an assistant who to buy from. The assistant names two or three businesses. Everything in strategies one to seven happens after that shortlist is set, and if you are not on it then the strategies are competing for whatever is left. This is not a ranking problem with a ranking fix. There is no slot to buy, no auction to enter, and no report in any of the seven channels above that shows you a buyer who never arrived.
AI Knows Us exists for that one measurement. We are not a strategy consultancy, we do not build plans and we do not run any of the seven channels, so we are not an alternative to anything on this list. We are the thing that tells you whether the shortlist includes you, which is a question none of the seven can answer.
Our own published position, on the criterion of what a buyer can verify before paying. At aiknowsus.com/llms.txt, read 21 October 2026, Growth at $299 a month publishes 100 buyer questions watched, 1,600 credits and all five engines, which are ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. It is the cheapest plan we publish that reads all five. SEO Start at $149 publishes 0 questions, 0 credits and 0 engines, so it is not an answer engine plan and we will not let the lower number stand next to the five surface claim.
What to read next
If what you are really deciding is whether to buy strategy from an agency, and how to tell a strategy from a deck, that is a different purchase and we compared it at best marketing strategy agencies compared. We link to it deliberately. When we measured inbound links across 2,286 stored page bodies on 21 October 2026, no other page on this site links to that one, and 939 of our 2,200 live pages were in the same position, 42.7 percent, an upper bound.