How do you choose the right channels to activate the audience when you're launching a brand new product?

The channels you use depend upon the audience you're reaching. Where does your audience spend time? What channels have historically worked best for your organization or similar products? 

You can usually get a good sense of channels to activate based on persona research. Even if you're launching a first-of-its-kind product, your audience has preferred publications, sites, and places where they spend time. Prioritize those channels based on budget and funnel stage (and work with your demand gen team to hone in on the plan!)

The only way to figure out what channels reach and influence your audience is to ask and observe them. You have to do both - ask and observe. Asking is helpful. Most people can tell you where they hang out online, or how they heard about recent product purchases in their lives. But they often won't tell you the full story. People may say that they decided to sign up for a product because their friend tweeted about it. But really, they made the decision because they also saw your product remarketed on Facebook, or they read a post on your blog a month ago, etc. So you want to also just watch how your users find out about you and decide to convert to get all that detail. 

I think there's often temptation or pressure to fire on all cylinders. Have a plan for many channels and be as ubiquitous as possible. But if you're really honest with yourself, a smaller subset of channels would probably reach the bulk of your audience. And when you give yourself the benefit of focus, you can do a lot more to make the channels you do use successful. I think it can be helpful to give yourself some artificial constraints. Look at your launch plan and then force yourself to eliminate several channels. Go through that thought exercise of interrogating their value. Give yourself the benefit of doubling down where you know your audience lives and is likely to be transformed.

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.