How do you coordinate the best channels for your product launch?

1 Define your goals and metrics

Before you decide on the channels for your product launch, you need to define your goals and metrics. What do you hope to achieve? How will you measure success? Common goals and metrics for product launches include awareness, interest, conversion, and retention. Awareness is measured by impressions, reach, mentions, and referrals. Interest is measured by clicks, visits, downloads, and sign-ups. Conversion is measured by sales, revenue, trials, and subscriptions. Retention is measured by retention rate, churn rate, and customer lifetime value.

2 Identify your target audience and personas

Once you have your goals and metrics, it's important to identify your target audience and personas. Who are you trying to reach with your product launch? What are their needs, pain points, preferences, and behaviors? You should consider how they discover, evaluate, and purchase products like yours. Creating buyer personas can help you segment your audience and tailor your messaging and positioning to their specific needs and motivations. To create your personas, you can use various sources of data and research, such as market analysis to identify trends, opportunities, and challenges in your industry; customer feedback to understand common questions, complaints, and praises from existing or potential customers; user testing to see how people interact with your product; surveys and interviews to learn about the demographics, psychographics, and goals of your ideal customers; analytics and CRM to uncover patterns, behaviors, and profiles of website visitors and leads.

3 Map out your customer journey and touchpoints

After you have your target audience and personas, you need to map out your customer journey and touchpoints. How do people move from being unaware of your product to becoming loyal customers? What are the stages and steps they go through along the way? What are the key actions and decisions they make at each stage? What are the barriers and objections they face? What are the triggers and incentives that motivate them? Understanding how people experience your product and what channels to best reach them at each stage can be achieved by mapping out your customer journey. Various tools and frameworks can be used for this, such as AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action), Pirate Metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Referral), or Jobs to be Done--a methodology that helps uncover customers' underlying needs and goals.

4 Select and prioritize your channels

When you have your customer journey and touchpoints, selecting and prioritizing your channels is the next step. You need to consider which channels are most effective and efficient for communicating with your audience at each stage, as well as how to balance your budget, resources, and time among them. Additionally, you should align your channels with your goals and metrics. This can help optimize reach, engagement, and conversion rates. To select and prioritize channels, criteria such as channel fit, performance, cost, scalability, and testing should be taken into account. Channel fit looks at how well the channel matches your product, audience, message, and goal. Channel performance evaluates how well it delivers on metrics and KPIs. Channel cost examines the amount of money, time, and effort it requires. Channel scalability assesses how easy it is to scale up or down the channel depending on your needs and results. Lastly, channel testing considers how easy it is to test different variations of the channel.

5 Plan and execute your channel strategy

Finally, you need to plan and execute your channel strategy. How do you create and deliver compelling content and offers for each channel? How do you coordinate and integrate your channels to create a consistent and seamless experience for your audience? How do you monitor and measure your channel performance and optimize your strategy accordingly? Planning and executing your channel strategy can help you achieve your product launch goals and create a lasting impression on your audience. To do so, you can use various tools and techniques, such as a content calendar to organize and schedule content creation, a channel mix to combine different channels, channel attribution to track the impact of each channel on conversions, and channel optimization to test and improve your ROI.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?