Great question. I believe in data-driven market insights as a foundation for your channel strategy. I always start the assumption that the market is heterogeneous, and therefore, requires a personalized communication strategy. For example, a recent marketing research project I was able to lead here at Uber, helped us understand the different business travel personas, their demographic information, their individual needs, pain points, wants and values and the channels they use to communicate and receive information.
Armed with this information, we put a plan together with targeted keywords and value propositions tailored to each persona group and used their preferred communication channels. For group A, we relied heavily on CRM, for group B we focused on Events and Tradeshows and for group C we mostly used performance marketing channels such as online Ads, Social Media and Web.
Use surveys, focus groups or marketing research to help drive your channel strategy and activation. While at my previous company, in the field of healthcare, because of marketing research and focus groups, I was able to learn about a new channel that doctors were using to communicate with each other and learn about new products or clinical solutions. This new channel is called Doximity, you can think of it as the LinkedIn for Doctors, they have over 1M physicians registered in this platform, and you need to be a physician to sign-up. This completely changed our channel strategy. Initiatially we our assumption was that Doctors were actively looking for product information on Facebook or Twitter so instead we were planning a LinkedIn campaign which we ended-up changing after we learned about Doximity.