Which digital marketing channel should you use?
“99% of 501 digital marketers in the U.S. plan to increase their investment in at least one digital marketing channel in 2019.”
The focus of marketing has shifted from offline to digital as customers are more reachable now through online channels. Choosing the right digital marketing channels is part of your marketing strategies. Depends on how you invest on it, your marketing channels can make or break your business. These are few things that you need to understand before choosing the best digital marketing channels for your business.
1. The Popular Digital Marketing Channels
There are many digital marketing channels that cater to different demographics with different purposes. We have listed commonly used digital marketing channels below for you to review.
- Facebook – Facebook caters multiple target audiences through user groups and fan pages. It is a good platform for starting a marketing campaign as long as you know your target audience and what pages they are interested in. Facebook also has a feature called Facebook Ad that enables you to set your advertisement on Facebook pages. A strategically placed Facebook Ad can draw numerous people to your site and generate more sales for you.
- Instagram – Instagram is one of the most important marketing channels at the moment. 75% of instagram users get engage with a company after they see a post published by business brand, with 62% of users follow at least one company account. Instagram has a very high engagement level compared to other channels. Instagram’s distinguishing quality is the number of online influencers inside it. Influencers can help you promote your brand and engage your customers. Instagram can also help you perform marketing campaign with the hashtag feature.
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn users are the place of business and brand owners. It offers you professional and business connections. LinkedIn is the correct platform for you if you target professionals as your audience.
- Twitter – Twitter excels in developing brand awareness. Its seamless feeds are useful to generate views for new businesses. Your active presence on Twitter will build an organic relationship with your followers. Paid advertising is also an option on Twitter. Paid advertising covers promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends that you can use to promote your marketing campaign. The advertising is optimized so it will appear only to the relevant users.
- Website: A website is the bread and butter of a company’s digital marketing. A company website is a storefront for its digital presence. It also serves as an effective online business promotion. A company website is easily constructed with little or even no cost at all. You can use website building tools to make creating website easier.
- Email: Email marketing is still as useful as a marketing platform. Data collected from email marketing can be used to generate leads and acquire customer’s contact information. Email marketing is also useful for delivering ROI, up to 4.300%.
- Blog: A company blog is useful for posting content marketing and your product/services updates. Highly relevant content generates traffic that can be converted into potential customers.
2. Know Your Audience
The choice of marketing channels depends upon the presence of your ideal buyers. You only need to focus on the channels used by your ideal audience. If you aim the professionals and business-to-business (B2B) audience, try using LinkedIn, blog, and email marketing. If your aim is millennials, Instagram is your choice. If you choose to attract the more common audience, you can always rely on Facebook and Twitter.
3. Your Digital Marketing Goals
Different channels attract different customers. Set your goals according to marketing channels that you want to invest in.
- Brand awareness – Raising brand awareness requires a high engagement rate with customers. Social media such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are suitable for raising brand awareness. Instagram, in particular, has a profound impact on increasing brand awareness because of the influencers in the platform.
- Lead generation – To generate successful leads and reach a constantly evolving and elusive audience, marketers must be investing their resources in the most effective lead generation marketing channels. For example, email marketing is perhaps the oldest marketing tactics, but email marketing is the most effective lead generation channels, it allows you to send automated, highly-targeted and personalized emails to leads.
- Sales Generation – Growing your business requires a steady stream of a sales lead. Digital sales are the forte of website and email marketing since they facilitate communication with the customer.
4. Your Budget
Defining what digital marketing channels to use will also help identify the budget that you will set aside for pursuing the campaigns. Building websites cost little or even no money especially with the help of website creating tool. Blog posts are affordable to maintain as long as you have dedicated content writers. Email marketing is also easy to maintain with little to no budget. Social media marketing requires you to spend some money, depending on the scale you’re expecting. Hiring a famous influencer with general audience costs higher than if you choose a particular influencer with a niche audience.
5. Your Team Skills
Maintaining digital marketing campaigns will require the use of personnel with a certain level of skills and knowledge on various aspects of your channels. Most of the time, a company uses more than one marketing channel to broaden their scope. Digital marketing effort requires coordination through various teams with different specialities. Experts on business, content writing and editing, finance, design, and programming are needed in order to fulfil the ideal expectations of a digital marketing team.
Conclusion
Each of digital marketing channels have their strengths and weakness such as being inappropriate for certain audiences and business niche. The best way would be to rely on combining these tools and channels at your disposal and making use of what they have to offer that will help you reach your end goals.
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References:
https://themanifest.com/digital-marketing/how-businesses-invest-digital-marketing
https://id.oberlo.com/ebooks/marketing-channels-guide/introduction
https://www.fourthsource.com/ecommerce/the-most-important-digital-marketing-channels-23129