When Substack belongs in your marketing toolbox
Substack keeps coming up in client conversations. Not as a recommendation, usually.
More as a question: should we be on Substack?
It’s a fair question. The platform has grown significantly over the past two years, and the engagement numbers are hard to dismiss. But “everyone seems to be talking about it” is not a strategy, and adding a new channel before you know why tends to create more noise than momentum.
The better question is whether Substack is the right tool for what you’re trying to build. For some organizations, it is. For others, it isn’t. The difference is worth understanding before you start.
What Substack does that other tools don’t
Most marketing tools are designed to reach more people. Substack is designed to go deeper with the ones already paying attention.
It’s a publishing platform that delivers content directly to subscriber inboxes, with a public-facing website, optional paid tiers, and a growing internal discovery network. The setup is simple and the barrier to entry is low.
What makes it worth considering is the engagement. Active publications on Substack average open rates above 45%, compared to an industry-wide email average of around 21.5%. That gap reflects something real: Substack subscribers opted in deliberately. They chose to receive your thinking. That’s a different relationship than a follow.
There’s also the ownership piece. With social media, you’re building on someone else’s platform. The algorithm changes. Reach drops. Your audience is conditional. Currently on Substack, you can download your email list at any time. For organizations thinking about long-term marketing health, that’s one of the most durable assets you can build.
What businesses are a great fit
Substack works for organizations that have something worth saying and a reason for people to
keep listening.
That sounds obvious, but it’s the most important filter. Substack is not a lead generation tool, a promotional channel, or a traffic driver. Its terms of service restrict publications whose primary purpose is advertising products, driving traffic to external sites, or distributing offers.
The platform is designed for publishing, not marketing in the traditional sense.
That means you’ll have to tell your audience that you’re on Substack. It’s another thing for you to promote.
The businesses that get the most from it tend to share a few things:
- They have a specific perspective their audience wants to follow, not a posting schedule
- Their audience wants to learn from them, not hear from them on a schedule
- They’re building trust with a specific group over time, not casting wide for new leads
- They’re service-based businesses, nonprofits, consultants, or thought leaders where relationships drive decisions
- They can publish consistently, even if that means every two weeks rather than every day
Substack rewards generosity. Organizations that show up to give something, insight, perspective, honest information, tend to do well. Organizations that show up to sell tend not to.
Best practices worth taking seriously
The mechanics of Substack are easy to figure out. Showing up in a way that builds something durable takes more intention.
Publish what you believe. Subscribers signed up for your thinking. They’ll notice when the voice shifts or the writing starts to feel produced rather than genuine. The standard isn’t perfection. It’s honesty.
Consistency matters more than frequency. A newsletter that arrives every two weeks and says something worth reading builds more trust than one that arrives daily and fills space. Decide what cadence you can sustain before you start and hold to it. Irregular publishing is one of the fastest ways to lose what you’ve built.
Stay light on promotion. You can mention your work. You can point readers toward a resource. But the primary reason someone opens your email should be that they expect something useful, not that they’re waiting to be pitched. The moment a newsletter starts to feel like a sales channel, the relationship changes.
Use this today
Before you create an account, answer these three questions:
- Do I have something to say consistently? Not promotions, but perspective or insight my audience would seek out?
- Can I sustain this for six months before expecting a meaningful return?
- Is my message focused enough that a new reader would know within two paragraphs whether this is for them?
If your answers are yes, Substack is worth exploring. If any of them give you pause, that’s useful information. It might mean the foundation needs work before the channel does.
Substack won’t fix a marketing strategy that doesn’t have something real underneath it. But for organizations that already know their voice, their audience, and what they want to say, it’s a channel worth adding.
We’re still learning too. New platforms, new tools, new data. It moves fast and nobody has it fully figured out. What we do at Good Circle Marketing is stay close to what’s working, test it in our own business first, and share what we find. If something is worth your time, we’ll tell you. If it isn’t, we’ll tell you that too.
If you’re not sure whether your messaging is focused enough to hold a newsletter audience, that foundation usually comes before the channel decision. The Marketing Machine is where we build that foundation and determine what channels are best for your business.