Channel Strategy

---
name: channel-strategy
description: Choose and govern marketing channels from audience behavior, message fit, economics, control, measurement, lifecycle role, operational capability, and diversification rather than platform fashion.
---
# Channel Strategy

Use when deciding where marketing should invest recurring attention or budget.

## Procedure
1. Define target audiences, buying or adoption journey, geographic scope, product economics, and the outcomes channels must influence.
2. Map where the audience discovers, evaluates, asks peers, searches, purchases, and returns, including owned, earned, partner, community, sales, and paid surfaces.
3. Evaluate each candidate channel on audience fit, message format, reach, control, cost, speed of learning, attribution limits, operational skill, and downstream customer quality.
4. Assign a role to selected channels rather than expecting each one to perform awareness, education, conversion, and retention equally.
5. Decide test, maintain, scale, or deprioritize thresholds and the evidence required to move between those states.
6. Balance concentration and diversification so the strategy can exploit strong channels without becoming fragile to one platform or partner.
7. Define content, creative, landing, analytics, sales, community, or support capabilities required to operate each channel well.
8. Reassess channel assumptions when audience behavior, economics, platform rules, or product strategy change materially.

## Decision rules
- A channel is attractive when it fits the audience and economics, not because it is currently fashionable.
- Platform reach without downstream customer quality can be expensive noise.
- Owned and partner channels may create strategic value not captured by last-click attribution.
- Verify current platform rules and capabilities when execution depends on them.

## Quality gate
The strategy is ready when every active channel has a defined audience and journey role, investment reflects economics and operating capability, test and scale criteria are explicit, concentration risk is understood, and channel choices can be revisited from evidence rather than habit.