It is funny because most times it is not even the marketer’s job to argue for distribution. A company that understands its product should already be thinking about how to enable distribution.
But in reality, the people who see distribution opportunities the earliest are usually marketers. We are the ones who notice where users hang out, where they move, and where the product could plug itself in. So making a case often falls on us.
To explain this better, I want to start with something outside tech. Think about billboards. I am not sure if marketers still use the exact same formulas, but in civil engineering, we did a lot of work on traffic volume. We calculated how many people would pass a road at a given time, how many cars would park in a certain space, and even how many vehicles would cross a particular point during peak hours.
These calculations were never perfect. They were estimates. But they helped us predict flow. And when you think about billboards, it is the same idea. You place a board in an area with heavy movement because you understand the flow of people. That is why billboards in high-value areas cost more. It is not magic. It is traffic math.
This idea of estimating flow translates beautifully into distribution. When you want to embed your product somewhere, an excellent question is, how many people could potentially use it there? Not exact numbers. Just a reasonable estimate that helps you understand the magnitude of the opportunity.
I do something similar in my own work. Sometimes I estimate the impact of an ad or a feature by relating it to our GMV. I look at total merchants, total GMV, and calculate the average GMV per merchant. Once I find that number, it becomes a simple way to think about the potential value of the change.
This is not about accuracy. It is about direction. It is about giving your team a sense of the size of the opportunity if we show up in a certain channel.
Now, when you bring this into distribution, it becomes powerful. Because you are not just saying, let us embed here because it feels right. You are saying, here is the estimated number of people who might see this. Here is the possible conversion. Here is the possible revenue. And even if the numbers are rough, they help decision makers understand that this is not random. There is a path from visibility to value.
Beyond the numbers, there is another part that matters. You have to make it easy for everyone involved. You have to make it easy for the CEO to understand. You have to make it easy for product to implement. You have to make it easy for support to run with it. And you also have to make it easy for growth to communicate it.
Documentation helps here. You might have to read through the platform’s documents, summarise them, rewrite them into something simple, and create a small PRD that the team can adopt. Even if the idea is complex or expensive, the clearer the execution steps are, the better your chances of getting approval.
Because people do not only care about the reward. They also care about the effort. If you can show why the reward is meaningful, and you can reduce the perceived effort, your case becomes stronger.
Now, here are a few extra things you can use to strengthen any case you make.
You can link your estimate to a real user story. Not storytelling for drama, but for clarity. When people see the life of a user before and after a distribution feature, your numbers stop feeling theoretical.
You can include the cost of doing nothing. Sometimes the strongest part of a case is showing what the company loses by ignoring the opportunity. Markets move, channels decay, timing changes, and you either act or you pay for it later.
You can highlight the compounding nature of distribution. Many people inside a company think in single moves. Distribution works in stacked moves. When you show how a small integration today multiplies into organic growth later, you shift the frame entirely.
You can bring examples of similar companies. Not in the sense of copying them, but in the sense of showing that this type of distribution is a known path, not a wild experiment.
All of this makes your case sharper and easier to approve. Nothing guarantees a yes, but clarity increases your odds every time.
Tomorrow we will talk about something important, the cost of distribution.