Any Company that seeks to succeed in its online marketing endeavors must adopt the appropriate digital marketing channels. There are different types of digital marketing channels, with each requiring specialist skills, knowledge, flare, and aptitude. Therefore, the success of a company’s digital marketing strategy depends on its choice of digital marketing channels.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)
SEO is a way of enhancing your website ranking on search engine result pages (SERP) to increase visibility, Alexa scores, and authority. The higher a page ranks, the more authoritive it is, and thereby, it attracts more traffic, activity, and conversions.
For a long time, SEO has focused on page optimisation through keywords and managing links from different sites that use your targeted keywords. However, Google Penguin’s algorithm has considerably limited the efficacy of keyword stuffing and link manipulation schemes for SERPs. The vital tools used to advance on SEO include Keywortool.io, Bing Webmaster, Google Keyword Planner and Moz SEO tools.
Professionally done, SEO ranks your page high on the search engine, and this gives your website credibility. With credibility, customers can easily convert because they tend to trust highly rated sites.
PAID PER CLICK
Paid per click is the fastest marketing channel that you can use to drive your targeted traffic to your website. However, if done aimlessly, it can significantly cost you a lot of money without any ROI. The benefit of this digital marketing channel is that with an optimised campaign ad, you can comfortably compute a profitable ROI.
Unlike other channels that focus on targeting keywords, PPC focuses on transforming dormant users into engaged prospects to purchasers. You achieve this; you must first lure your traffic to click on a promotion, and then send them to the relevant landing page with content that matches the ad. The logic behind PPC is to ensure that your phrasing remains similar throughout the entire experience to retain the guest. Therefore, any overemphasis on keywords may not work for PPC marketing.
Although PPC is the fastest marketing channel, the method is quite expensive. Businesses choosing this method of advertising must organised and cautious before investing in PPC advertisement,
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Presently, social media is the most used digital marketing channel. The platform allows users to access a massive audience by targeting their ad through direct social engagement. Platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram continue to develop new features for marketing to their ever-growing users.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
If you want to access a wider audience, you need to use affiliate marketing. In this type of marketing, a person located in any part of the world sells something for you on a commission basis. Each affiliate marketing program comes with guidelines and prerequisites that the marketer must meet before entering the program. Also, most affiliate marketers provide their unique substance besides the affiliate service.
Affiliate marketing not only increases web traffic but also enables businesses to access customers in different countries. Additionally, for a company using the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model, affiliates receive commissions after generating leads, and this benefits businesses.
CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is a powerful online marketing channel that focuses on creating and sharing online material without explicitly promoting a brand. This type of digital marketing focuses on the objectives of sharing, initiating discussions, generating leads, and making sales. Content marketing rotates around these objectives, and any content that doesn’t capture these goals is just content for contents’ sake. Marketers use content to stimulate interest in the products or services they are promoting.
VIDEO MARKETING
YouTube has long been a great source of entertainment, but it’s slowly claiming its spot in online marketing. As the second largest search engine, YouTube is a formidable force. It has more than one billion active viewers at any given time who access the platform in 76 different languages.
Video marketing is very beneficial for companies launching a product or service. Using videos, a company can explain processes using humans or animations. Animation can considerably bring concepts to life that live video or text can. Apart from learning, video is also easy to consume. Videos can engage even the laziest of buyers and lure them into making a purchase.
EMAIL MARKETING
With SEO, social media and mobile marketing taking great strides in digital marketing, one may consider email marketing obsolete. But email marketing is still alive and arguably one of the most profitable channels of marketing. It offers a lot of opportunities for your business and gives you a better ROI. Email marketing can provide your business with deeper relations with a broad audience at a tremendously smaller cost compared to traditional media.
MOBILE MARKETING
As a part of digital marketing, mobile marketing enables businesses to reach mobile and tablet users. With Mobile internet traffic as a percentage of total web traffic standing at 47.9 per cent in February 2019, brands are seeking ways of reaching these audiences in real-time. A business can target customers through their mobiles using social media, YouTube, SMS, Apps, email, and websites. Mobile marketing continues to evolve everyday with changes in mobile technology, and big brands are increasingly focusing on mobile ads.
DISPLAY ADS
The use of display ads entails designing graphical advertisements and positioning them next to the available content on emails, websites and other digital platforms. The ads can be videos, boxes, banners, etc., linked to a site and help in promoting new offer and products. These advertisements can be targeted to the appropriate audience and require a small budget to implement.
HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST CHANNEL
So, you’re contemplating investing in a digital marketing channel that will drive up your sales, but you are not sure which one will work best? Well, first set your business objectives. Are you looking for brand awareness, lead generation or direct sales?
Once you have an objective consider the following**:**
- Who is your target audience?
It is essential to know your target audience and the platforms they use. Also, find out about the content they consume and their buying decisions.
- What is your budget?
Begin by determining your marketing budget. How much will you be allocating to each digital channel? Finally, decide on the ROI you expect from the channels.
- Do you have the required talent?
Decide whether you want to partner with a digital agency or you want to use an in-house digital marketing team.
Finally, you should undertake a competitor bench marking to see the channels they are using.
So, the choice of the best channel depends on a multiplicity of factors to suit your peculiar situations. Above all, social media remains a promising option because it continues to evolve with the needs of customers.