Somewhere between 25% and 40% of new products fail within their first two years. The popular statistic claiming 95% failure is inflated, but even the conservative numbers should give pause. When nearly a third of launches underperform despite significant investment, understanding why becomes commercially critical.

The usual suspects – poor product-market fit, inadequate research, weak differentiation – receive extensive attention. Less discussed is channel selection: the decision of where and how to reach potential customers. Yet research from Harvard Business Review identifies marketing execution, not product quality, as the primary driver of launch failure. Companies spend months perfecting products and days deciding how to promote them.

This imbalance matters because channel mistakes compound. The wrong channels do not simply underperform – they consume budget that could have been deployed elsewhere, generate misleading data about product viability, and sometimes poison the market perception before the right channels can be tested.

Marketing Channels Selection – Comfortable Irrelevance Trap

Most channel selection follows a predictable pattern: teams list available options, eliminate anything unfamiliar or expensive, then distribute budget across whatever remains based on internal comfort rather than strategic fit. The result is what might be called comfortable irrelevance – marketing activity that feels productive but never intersects with actual buying behaviour.

Consider a B2B software company launching a new enterprise product. The marketing team knows LinkedIn, has experience with Google Ads, and has always wanted to try podcasts. These become the channel mix, not because research indicates enterprise software buyers discover products through these channels, but because the team can execute them confidently.

Meanwhile, the actual buying journey for enterprise software typically involves industry analyst recommendations, peer referrals, and detailed evaluation processes that never touch LinkedIn feeds. The marketing generates metrics – impressions, clicks, even leads – but the metrics measure activity rather than commercial progress.

This pattern explains why Gartner research indicates 75% of B2B buyers now prefer rep-free purchasing experiences. Buyers are not rejecting sales conversations because they dislike salespeople. They are completing their evaluation process through channels marketers often ignore or undervalue, then arriving at sales conversations with decisions already made.

Customer Journey as Channel Map

Effective channel selection starts from a different premise: where do your specific customers actually go when solving problems like the one your product addresses?

This question sounds obvious but rarely gets answered rigorously. Teams assume they know customer behaviour based on general industry data or their own media consumption patterns. Both assumptions mislead. General data obscures the specific behaviours of your target segment. Personal experience reflects your demographic and psychographic profile, which probably differs from your customers.

The alternative is primary research – actual conversations with people in your target market about how they discovered, evaluated, and purchased similar products. This research often reveals uncomfortable truths. The channels you assumed were important may be irrelevant. Channels you dismissed may be where decisions actually happen.

One pattern emerges consistently across industries: the channels that generate awareness rarely drive decisions, and the channels that drive decisions rarely generate awareness. This creates a sequencing problem that single-channel strategies cannot solve. You need different channels for different stages of the customer journey.

For a new product launch, this typically means:

Discovery channels introduce potential customers to the problem your product solves. Content marketing, thought leadership, and educational resources excel here. The goal is not immediate conversion but establishing relevance.

Evaluation channels support customers actively comparing options. Case studies, detailed specifications, third-party reviews, and peer recommendations matter most. Credibility trumps creativity.

Decision channels facilitate the final purchase action. These often involve direct sales conversations, trials, or demonstrations. Friction reduction becomes paramount.

Budget Allocation Trap

Even teams that understand customer journeys often allocate budget poorly. The temptation is to concentrate spending on decision-stage channels because they produce measurable conversions. This logic is arithmetically appealing but strategically flawed.

Decision-stage channels convert customers who have already completed their evaluation. If insufficient customers enter evaluation in the first place, decision-stage spending simply fights harder over a smaller pool. You win a larger share of an inadequate market.

This explains a common pattern in struggling launches: declining cost per acquisition despite stagnant overall growth. The efficiency metrics improve because spending concentrates on customers already predisposed to buy. But the absolute numbers flatline because nobody is feeding the top of the funnel.

The inverse mistake is equally damaging: concentrating on awareness without supporting later stages. Awareness spending generates interest that competitors convert because your evaluation and decision infrastructure is inadequate. You effectively subsidise competitors’ customer acquisition.

The balance point varies by product category, price point, and competitive intensity. High-consideration purchases require more evaluation support. Commodity categories require more decision-stage differentiation. New categories require more problem education before any product evaluation occurs.

Channel-Market Fit

Just as products require market fit, channels require market fit. A channel that works brilliantly for one audience may fail entirely for another, even within the same industry.

LinkedIn advertising demonstrates this principle clearly. For certain B2B segments – technology, professional services, enterprise sales – LinkedIn provides unmatched targeting precision. For other B2B segments – manufacturing, construction, local services – the target audience simply is not there. The channel’s general reputation as “the B2B platform” obscures this nuance.

Similarly, influencer marketing’s effectiveness varies dramatically by audience. Consumer products targeting younger demographics may find influencer partnerships essential. B2B products targeting senior executives typically find them useless. The executives do not follow influencers; they follow industry analysts, trade publications, and trusted peers.

Channel-market fit also shifts over time. Email marketing’s effectiveness has declined as inbox competition increased. Podcast advertising’s effectiveness has risen as listenership grew. Channels that seemed marginal five years ago may now be essential, and vice versa.

This temporal dimension argues against treating channel selection as a one-time decision. Effective go-to-market strategies include ongoing channel testing, with budget reserved for experimentation even after primary channels are established.

Integration Imperative

Individual channel performance matters less than channel integration. Customers rarely convert from a single touchpoint. They encounter brands multiple times, across multiple channels, before purchasing. The question is whether those encounters reinforce each other or create confusion.

Integrated campaigns tell consistent stories across channels while adapting format and depth to each channel’s constraints. A LinkedIn post, a blog article, an email sequence, and a sales presentation can all address the same core value proposition while serving different information needs.

Disintegrated campaigns treat each channel as an independent entity. Different teams create different messages based on what they believe works for “their” channel. The customer experiences a fragmented brand with unclear positioning. Even good individual performance cannot overcome this fundamental incoherence.

Integration requires two things most organisations resist: centralised message control and delayed gratification. Centralised control feels bureaucratic. Delayed gratification – accepting that awareness investment pays off in evaluation, which pays off in decisions – conflicts with pressure for immediate results.

But integration is where compound returns live. Each channel investment makes other channels more effective. Awareness creates familiarity that improves evaluation engagement. Evaluation content builds credibility that supports decision conversations. The customer journey becomes a system rather than a series of disconnected interactions.

Starting From Where You Are

The principles are clear; the execution is messy. Most teams cannot fund comprehensive multi-channel strategies from launch. Resource constraints force prioritisation.

The prioritisation framework that typically works: start with one channel that reaches your target audience during active evaluation, support it with minimal awareness activity, and only expand once the initial channel demonstrates conversion capacity.

This approach sacrifices scale for learning. You will not generate massive awareness. You will generate data about what moves your specific customers from evaluation to decision. That data becomes the foundation for intelligent expansion rather than hopeful experimentation.

The channels most worth testing first are typically those where purchase intent is already present. Search advertising, while expensive, reaches people actively seeking solutions. Review sites, while requiring reputation building, reach people actively comparing options. Trade publications, while seemingly old-fashioned, reach people actively following their industry.

These are not the most exciting channels. They lack the creative possibilities of social media or the novelty of emerging platforms. But they connect with customers at the moment when marketing investment most directly converts to revenue.

Go-to-market channel selection determines whether your product reaches the customers who need it. If your current approach is generating activity without commercial results, a strategic consultation can audit your channel mix and identify specific opportunities for your market. Explore our Go-To-Market Strategy services to see how we approach new product launches.