Choose Your Channel

Do you ever wonder if you are hitting all the channels you need to when promoting your brand? Here’s a brainstorming technique to make sure you are using the ones that will connect with your customers.

With on-demand media, we are all curating what goes in our eye and ear holes. The idea here is to look at your brand touchpoints in isolated channels and then see where you might be missing a connection. Think about what kind of “media bubbles” your audiences live in and make sure you are reaching them. Some of these are extreme examples, but they might actually be true for some.

Divide up into groups and assign these different channels to each team member or small group. If you’re going it alone, do your brainstorming in a series of sessions to make sure you are in a new frame of mind for each one. Answer these questions for each channel.

Print

Imagine your customers only read newspapers and magazines. What will they know about your brand? What assumptions might they have about your products or services? What are ways you could get in front of them with paid or unpaid media? Which publications align with your brand?

Audio

What if your customers only listen to the radio, streaming music channels, and podcasts. How can you connect with them? What audio content relates to your brand?

Social media

This one’s tricky because social media is so diverse and it’s heavily curated by the user. You might need to break it down into subcategories. What if your customers only read Twitter for all their news? What if they shopped exclusively on Pinterest? What if their business connections came exclusively from LinkedIn? Where can you make the most impact?

Email

What if your customers only read emails about your brand? Could they connect with you via your own email campaigns or personal emails?

Online and search

The first place a lot of people go to find out about a brand is Google. What if that was the only way your customers could reach you? What content is on your website? How high are your search rankings? Is your information up-to-date on directories? What are your reviews like?

You can expand this list of channels depending on your industry and time available. Think about tradeshows, media in public spaces like billboards and bus boards, word-of-mouth and in-person networking, direct mail, phone calls, point-of-sale, etc.

Once you’ve made your lists of channels and how the content in them connects to your brand, look at your audience profiles. Which channels are most important? Which ones could duplicate content? Which ones need targeted content? Which ones are unnecessary for your customers?

Now you have a plan to move forward and a way to know you’re moving in the right direction.