5 Marketing Channels You Might Be Overlooking

Maybe you tested a campaign on one and burned through the budget with nothing to show for it. Maybe someone on your team pitched one and it sounded like a fad. Or maybe you stopped using it yourself, and assumed your audience had, too.

You might have even been right at the time, but as we’ve seen recently, times change.

I’m not suggesting you should jump on every platform (our 10-year anniversary retrospective shows that some are actually better left alone). But you should occasionally check whether your reasons for skipping a platform are still true and evaluate the ones you never considered in the first place. AI search is changing where buyers do their research and that’s shaking up every marketing channel.

The five platforms listed below are easy to miss for different reasons. One is brand new, while another has developed a misleading reputation that’s turned some marketers away. The other three have picked up a second job as major sources for the answers buyers get from AI tools. We’ll look at where each stands now and what you could do with it.

ChatGPT Ads: A New Path in the Buyer’s Journey

This is the new one, so you might have missed its launch. OpenAI started testing ads in the U.S. in February and opened a beta self-serve Ads Manager for U.S. businesses in May, with more countries added since. Ads appear below responses for users on the Free and Go plans, labeled as sponsored. According to OpenAI, the ads don’t influence ChatGPT’s answers.

The potential appeal for advertisers is context and detail. On Google, a buyer might type “payroll software” looking for a solution for their small business. But what if you sell enterprise payroll software? On Google Ads, that search might trigger your ad and lead to a click, with the only result being an uninterested visitor and a couple dollars of your ad budget wasted.

In ChatGPT, that buyer is a having a whole conversation, where they reveal that they’re really looking for the best payroll tool for a 15-person company with contractors in two states. ChatGPT ads are intended to match the ad to the whole context of the conversation. If you’re selling enterprise software, your ad won’t trigger. If you’re selling what the user is actually looking for, it will.

Advertisers don’t bid on keywords in the platform, like they would in Google Ads. Instead, the advertiser describes their offer in what OpenAI calls “context hints,” and the ad system decides when the ad fits.

That sounds great, especially if you’ve ever had to manage a traditional search ad keyword list. What’s missing right now is independent evidence about performance. OpenAI isn’t shy about the fact that the platform is still in its early stages and eligibility is still limited. The focus so far is consumer categories, with regulated ones like financial services and healthcare approved only case-by-case.

OpenAI is treating this as an experiment and you should, too. Check if you’re eligible, budget like you would for any other test and see what comes out of it.

Facebook: Not Dead Yet

Plenty of marketers decided Facebook was over when they and their friends stopped posting on it. They weren’t wrong about the posting. Mark Zuckerberg testified last year that sharing with friends on Facebook, and even friending itself, have been on the decline for a while, as feeds fill up with recommended and sponsored content instead. If you judge it by your friends’ activity, Facebook does look like a ghost town.

Facebook has also developed a reputation as now being only for older people, which is directionally true. The youngest consumers have definitely drifted away from it en masse. Only about 3 in 10 teens use Facebook now, as opposed to 71% a decade ago.

But a lot of the Facebook audience didn’t actually go anywhere. In 2025, 71% of U.S. adults said they use Facebook, and use was highest among people aged 30-49. That age group includes plenty of people making buying decisions for their households and businesses. And the “only older people” impression isn’t exactly accurate. While teens have mostly gone elsewhere, adults under 30 are more likely to visit Facebook daily than adults 65 and older.

Advertisers haven’t left either. Meta reported $59.36 billion in ad revenue in Q2 of 2026, up 27% year-over-year.

Two caveats to that: that figure includes all of Meta’s apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, and revenue tells you what advertisers spent, not the advertisers’ own ROI. The average cost of an ad also rose 12%, so part of that growth is advertisers paying more.

What that growth does tell you is that as many companies as ever, potentially more, are looking at Facebook as a sound use of their advertising budget. We wouldn’t see that if Facebook ads were underperforming like its “dead platform” reputation would suggest they should.

If you sell to other businesses, LinkedIn is usually the better place to start, since it can target by job title and company. Facebook can still earn its keep when your buyer is a small business owner, though, or as a less expensive way than (notoriously expensive) LinkedIn to stay in front of people who’ve already visited your site or engaged with you.

Check your own data before you trust vibes or opinions about Facebook. Look for it in your referral traffic, lead sources and customer surveys. If you see it cropping up, consider leaning into that and devoting some of your marketing efforts to it, whether paid or organic. If not, it’s still worth testing, depending on your audience.

Reddit: Buyers Unfiltered

Reddit’s reputation among marketers is that it hates marketers. That’s kind of true and kind of deserved. Marketers often fail to read the room on Reddit, and just show up to drop links rather than authentically engage with a subreddit’s community and culture. Just ask Woody Harrelson and the Rampart marketing team.

That does not mean you should avoid the platform, because it’s Redditors’ bluntness that makes it useful. Users ask pointed questions, compare vendors and describe their frustrations in public and in often exhaustive detail. If you want to know what objections prospects will raise ahead of time, more than likely someone on Reddit has already started a thread that can tell you.

If you approach Reddit transparently, it can work for you and can be a great way to connect with your audience. That means being upfront about who you are and what company you work for, being honest about your offering and engaging with the community rather than pitching them. You’ll never fully escape some “be gone, brand” reactions, but you can limit them.

Maybe more important, though, and the reason that we’re taking a second look right now, is that Reddit has become a key tool in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

AI tools lean heavily on third-party sources to find consensus when they answer buyers’ questions, and Reddit is second only to YouTube in number of AI citations, according to Ahrefs’ August 2026 AI Visibility Index.

That raises the stakes of getting visibility on Reddit, but it doesn’t actually change the playbook at all:

Listen before your post. Search Reddit for your category, your competitors and the questions your sales team hears most, read a few months of threads and draw on what you learn for your website and sales materials. If you participate, follow each community’s rules, say who you work for and answer the questions people are asking. Don’t pitch them.

Resist the urge to ask customers to post about you. Reddit’s own rules suggest it might be considered content manipulation rather than authentic engagement. Coordinated praise also tends to get spotted, with predictable backlash and a post on r/HailCorporate ensuing. If a happy customer is already a Redditor and posts about you, be thankful for the gift the universe has given you and don’t get greedy.

YouTube: You Don’t Need a Studio

Businesses that dismiss YouTube as a marketing channel usually do it because they’re imagining a heavy lift: high production budget, on-screen talent and a relentless upload schedule, forever. It’s simply too much effort for an uncertain ROI. That impression is understandable, since the most visible channels on the platform do have all of those things.

That is the “creator” version of YouTube, though. For businesses, that level of effort isn’t strictly necessary, and a lot of value can be captured without it.

And there is a lot of value. 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube, more than any other single platform, and they average almost an hour per day, every day, on the platform. Most of your buyers are almost certainly there, and they’re researching the purchases they plan to make.

YouTube is where someone goes when they want to watch some explain or demonstrate something, instead of reading about it. Think about where the best explanations of your offer live now. That’s probably in places like sales calls, demos and conference sessions, which only reach as far as whoever is on the call or in the room.

If you record and post that same content, suddenly it can reach anyone at any time. Prospects can find it on YouTube or Google. Your sales team can send it before a call, so the first conversation starts further along. You can embed it on your website to support a key page. Even if your niche business video never reaches a huge audience, it can earn its keep in little ways all over the place. We don’t have to hit MrBeast numbers here.

What makes YouTube especially important right now, though, is the same as Reddit: AEO. YouTube is the most cited source in U.S. AI responses, so any thorough AEO strategy can’t afford to ignore it.

Here are three ways you can get started with YouTube:

• Determine the three most common questions your sales team fields and record a short, direct answer for each one.
• Walk through a process buyers ask about, like how your product connects to software they already use.
• Cut and post the best segments of a webinar or event session you’ve recorded. Businesses record a lot of great material already and then let it sit mostly unwatched in shared drives or in the inboxes of a small audience.

Again, polish is nice, but not necessary. Clear audio, decent video quality and useful answers are the most important things, and the first two are well within reach of a cheap mic and an iPhone nowadays.

Counterintuitively, most of a video’s findability by AI doesn’t come from the video itself, but actually the text around it, since AI models work most efficiently with text. For any video, title it the way a buyer would phrase the question, say what the video answers at the top of the description and add timestamps for each section. That will make it as easy as possible for an AI to parse your content.

Once you have a video, put it to work in as many places as you can think of. Post it to YouTube, of course, but you can also send it in sales follow-ups, embed it on your website and share it on social, among other things.

Review Sites: Let Your Customers Do the Talking

If you’ve done a proof inventory, you know some of the most persuasive evidence about your business doesn’t come from you at all. Buyers have always looked to what other customers say before believing a vendor, and AI acts exactly the same way. Customer reviews on sites like G2 are a top source for AI answers, up there with YouTube and Reddit, so any AEO strategy needs to account for this.

Buyers also extend their preference for real customer experiences to their AI research. In a survey of B2B software buyers, citations from software review sites were the top factor that increased confidence in an AI’s answer. That’s not limited to software, either. In another survey, 45% of consumers said they use AI tools like ChatGPT to get local business recommendations, making it the third most common source behind Google and Facebook. I expect that number to grow a lot in the near future, since AI is only a few years old and already hitting that kind of market share.

So, reviews are pulling double-duty: they help the AI find and recommend you in the first place and make the buyer trust the AI when it recommends you.

No business really overlooks the value of reviews, yet many don’t have a strategy in place to consistently capture them. Consistency really is key. Buyers notice when a rave review is an outlier that isn’t backed up by similar sentiment, and 74% only care about reviews from the last three months. A steady stream of recent, honest reviews is the ideal scenario.

Here’s where to start with that:

Make sure your profiles on relevant review sites (determined by your category) are accurate and complete. Then, build review requests into a regular point in your customer relationships, like the end of onboarding or a project, and ask every customer. Keep the request brief, but include one specific prompt, like “what problem were you trying to solve?” That way the reviews carry specifics buyers and AI summaries can use, instead of a vague and generic “they were great.” Reply to reviews personally, even (and especially) the critical ones.

Pick One, Then Test It

This isn’t a to-do list. Taking on all five channels at once would stretch your team (and potentially your budget) too thin to learn much from any of them.

Choose the one that fits best, based on where your audience spends time and does research. Pick one measurable goal tied to revenue, like qualified leads or booked demos. Set a timeframe, decide in advance what success looks like and evaluate the results at the end. If it works, build on it. If it doesn’t, you can move on to the next candidate. Maybe come back to it in a year or two. As we’ve seen, things do change.

If you’d like a second opinion on which channel deserves your first test, let’s talk.