“Is LinkedIn an awareness channel or a conversion channel?” It’s the kind of question that sounds reasonable and has no good answer, because it assumes a channel does one job. None of them do.
The same channel does completely different work at different stages of the funnel. Get that wrong and you’ll judge a channel on the wrong number, defund the thing that was quietly working, and double down on the thing that wasn’t.
One channel, several jobs
Take paid social. At the top it buys cold reach to people who’ve never heard of you: lookalikes, interest and account-based audiences. In the middle it talks to warm prospects weighing you up. At the bottom it retargets existing customers to bring them back. Same channel, three jobs, three briefs, three success metrics. Report one blended “cost per click” across all three and you’ve learned nothing.
The opposite mistake hides in plain sight: organic social. It feels like an awareness channel, so it gets briefed as one. But organic reach is capped at the people who already follow you, which makes it almost useless for planting a problem in a cold audience. Its real job is at the other end of the funnel: advocacy, community, customers sharing your work, a continuous trust signal humming under everything. Brief organic to do cold reach and you’ll conclude, wrongly, that social “doesn’t work”. The plannable cold-reach job belongs to paid social. Organic’s job is Preaches.
If you can’t name the push lever and the pull lever at every stage, your methodology isn’t running. It’s half-running.
Push and pull, at every stage
There’s a second axis under all of this. Push is the company moving towards the customer. Pull is the customer moving towards the company. Both fire at every stage, and the ratio shifts as you go.
Early in a long B2B cycle, push leads: you plant the problem. Through the middle, pull takes over: the buyer goes hunting and finds you. At the decision both fire at once, the sales team pushing for the close while the buyer pulls in references and reviews. In B2C the same sequence compresses into a single session, sometimes a few seconds. The principles don’t change. The clock does.
In retention it rebalances again. Onboarding is push. Self-serve help is pull. Advocacy is almost entirely pull, but it’s unlocked by push: you have to hand advocates the materials before they’ll carry them.
The test
Here’s the discipline that keeps it honest. At every stage, name the push lever, the pull lever, and the commercial metric each one moves. If you can name both, the methodology is running. If you can only name one, it’s half-running, and the gap is usually where your funnel leaks.
So stop asking what a channel is for. Ask what job it’s doing, at which stage, for which customer. That’s the question with an answer.
