Customer channels

Customer channels

This section of the canvas is about defining the channels where you should reach your customers. With an optimised customer channel strategy, you will save a lot of wasted time by increasing the chance of your messages landing. It includes:

Sales - Driving awareness of your brand and products
Loyalty - Creating a relationship with existing customers to retain them

You should have defined a target customer group before you undertake this exercise. See here on the market positioning canvas.

Identify where your target customer group are in both digital and non-digital channels. This may be conferences or specialist meet-ups in B2B (Business to Business). A good place to start is to identify where your competitors are. It can be tempting to select many channels, but remember that each comes with a cost.

Refining channels and content

You don’t have to send content to every channel. Whether you are looking to reach new customers or current ones, when deciding which channels you will use, set a clear goal. Here are a few examples:

You want to increase brand awareness
You want to improve your brand’s perception
You want to engage more with potential customers to appear more friendly
You want to drive more people to your website

Treat your content as an experiment, measure how well it is working and adapt. For example, how much engagement did you get?

Be careful to differentiate between high levels of interaction with target customers versus those who are not. For example, I am targeting CEOs and put out a message on LinkedIn about improving product management, I discover that mainly product managers respond. Even though my metrics look very healthy, this won’t help me achieve success.

When your results come back, you can learn from them and refine your messaging. Based on trends, you may even decide to stop using a channel or expand to a new one.

Ensure your team has sufficient experience in the channel they create content for. It is a very different skill to make TikTok videos versus producing detailed blog posts.

Content type

Let’s consider two different ways to approach product development with a new type of running shoe designed to reduce knee pain. The second is a form of Design Thinking:

I have a light understanding of runners, but I think I know enough about them. I run a few times a week, and I get light knee pain. I see an opportunity to create something useful and build it. I show this to other runners who like the look of the product. I spend a lot of time developing the product and working through my costs. I eventually find there is insufficient demand for my product, and my business fails.
I have an assumption about many runners getting knee pain when running. I define a target customer group and go and meet these people to validate my assumptions. This could result in two outcomes:
- I can see that the problem I’m trying to solve is really big. I then refine my product using prototypes and validate they work. I see my business start to take off.
- I can see that the problem is affecting very few people, and where it does, many say the knee pain doesn’t last long. I stop my product development and save a lot of wasted time and effort.

In the first approach, the problem was based on anecdotal evidence, but I chose to rely on it anyway. In the second approach, I built deep empathy with my customers and learned much faster.

Applying the second approach to your messaging will benefit your organisation. The problems you solve will resonate with customers. A good example of this is from Reebok with the very successful “Belly’s gonna get ya” advertising campaign. This focussed on the difficulty people have losing weight and how Reebok’s products could help. Reebok could have chosen to focus on the insole material or other design aspects but instead sought to connect on how they solved a big customer problem.

Outreach health

These are good questions to ask when considering sales-focused content:

Are they aware of my offering?
Do they know they need my offering?
Do they like my offering?

Consistent experience

When you create content, ensure it gives the customer a consistent omni-channel experience. This could be across physical locations such as a shop and on digital channels. This is particularly important when different people create content across different media.