How do you pick the best channels to reach your customers?

2 Identify your customer segments and personas

Next, you need to segment your target market and create customer personas that represent your ideal buyers. A customer segment is a group of people who share common characteristics, needs, or behaviors. A customer persona is a fictional representation of a specific segment that includes details like demographics, psychographics, pain points, goals, and preferences. Segmenting your market and creating personas will help you understand who your customers are, what they want, and how they make decisions.

3 Map your channels to your customer journey

Once you have your goals, metrics, segments, and personas, you can start mapping your channels to your customer journey. The customer journey is the process that your customers go through from becoming aware of your product to becoming loyal advocates. It typically consists of five stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy. Each stage requires different types of channels and messages to move your customers along the funnel. For example, you might use social media, blogs, or podcasts to create awareness, webinars, case studies, or demos to generate consideration, landing pages, email, or chatbots to drive conversion, newsletters, surveys, or loyalty programs to increase retention, and referrals, reviews, or testimonials to encourage advocacy.

4 Evaluate your channel options and prioritize your experiments

Now that you have a map of your channels and your customer journey, you can evaluate your channel options and prioritize your experiments. There are many ways to categorize channels, but one useful framework is the Bullseye Method by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It divides channels into three rings: the inner ring (the most promising channels), the middle ring (the potentially promising channels), and the outer ring (the long-shot channels). To use this method, you need to brainstorm as many channel ideas as possible, then rank them based on your assumptions and hypotheses about their relevance, reach, cost, and conversion. Then, you need to test your top three channels from the inner ring with small-scale experiments and measure their performance against your goals and metrics. Based on the results, you can either double down on the winning channel, iterate on the promising channel, or discard the losing channel. You can also move channels from the middle or outer ring to the inner ring and repeat the process until you find your optimal channel mix.

5 Optimize your channel performance and scale your growth

Finally, once you have validated your best channels, you need to optimize their performance and scale your growth. This means finding ways to improve your efficiency, effectiveness, and engagement across your channels. You can use tools like analytics, A/B testing, automation, and personalization to optimize your channel strategy. You can also leverage cross-channel synergies, partnerships, and viral loops to amplify your reach and impact. The key is to keep testing, learning, and adapting your channels to your customers' needs and behaviors.

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?