Having a great business model along with an excellent online marketing strategy but poor marketing channels for your business can cost your time, efforts and most importantly the growth of your business.
While marketing online you need to communicate your brand, products and services well with your customers no matter what stage of online marketing it is. This will ultimately help the customers to position your brand in the way you communicate with them. As a result, choosing effective marketing channels must be considered a very crucial part of your digital marketing strategy to achieve your online marketing objectives efficiently.
Choosing an effective online marketing channel not only will help you achieve your marketing objectives, but also will impact your brand awareness. After all, channels are the platforms that help you to reflect your brand’s values and identity.
However, when it comes to marketing channels, some businesses favour digital marketing channels, while some traditional marketing channels. While a few prefer having a perfect blend of both.
Well, having a good blend of both is preferable, but having a clear understanding of what channels will work better for you depending on the reach, product type and requirements of your business is critically important.
So, before discussing the effective online marketing channels, let’s have a look at which type of channels should be preferred more considering your product and its reach.
Online Marketing Channels Vs Traditional Marketing Channels
A survey report reveals that about 2.7 billion adults around the globe still read newspapers, while some reports also revealed the increase in TV households worldwide. This means that popular traditional marketing channels like newspapers, TVs or radio are not dead.
With almost every business now marketing online, we still can’t ignore the impact of traditional marketing channels. However, in the end, it still depends on the type of product or service and its reach.
If you have a business having a product or service that is generic and meant for a larger audience, you should emphasise more on traditional marketing channels along with a perfect blend of online marketing channels.
There are almost 1.5 billion social media users around the world. Not only this but other online marketing channels such as emails can give 4400% ROI. Hence, both online and traditional marketing channels are impactful and efficient when it comes to marketing your business.
However, if your product or service is meant for a targeted audience and comparatively not a larger one then, you must focus more on online marketing channels along with a balance of traditional marketing channels.
In a nutshell, in this era of the digital world, you must have a perfect blend of both types of marketing channels depending upon your product type whether it is generic or for a targeted audience.
Let’s now get back to having the best online marketing channels for achieving your online marketing objectives most efficiently. Well, this all starts with a great, clear and simplified strategy and considering certain factors affecting your choice. Let’s have a look at the same further.
Key factors for choosing Effective Online Marketing Channels.
Having an online marketing strategy is just like having a roadmap while going on a treasure hunt to achieve your goal. This strategy must consider the most significant online marketing channels depending on your business requirements. While choosing these channels you need to consider certain major key factors as listed below:
Audience:
Research and define your target audience well. This sums up knowing where they hang out the most online, what type of content they like the most, what are their likes and dislikes, and what are their interests. This will give you a gist of what type of online marketing platform will be the most appropriate to reach your target audience.
Business goals:
Along with your target audience, you also need to clearly define your business goals followed by your marketing goals. If you wish to increase revenue and want more conversion rates along with a good ROI, you may need to consider email marketing for your business. If your goal is to educate your audience, website blogs could be a really good channel.
However, on top of all this, you first need to understand your brand well and need to clarify the values that your business stands for. This ultimately helps you get the right marketing channels suitable for your business.
Budget :
The results of your marketing activities will ultimately depend on your budget. There is always some cost involved in achieving certain marketing objectives. You wisely need to consider your budget and make cost-effective decisions for the success of your online marketing strategy.
This greatly impacts your choice of online marketing channels. For initial stages, you may have budget-friendly channels and then gradually can go bigger as you build the momentum.
Effective Online Marketing Channels
Consider the below listed online marketing channels depending upon your business requirements in order to get effective results for your marketing efforts
Website:
Irrespective of the size of your business, you need to have a website up and running to express your brand’s visual story to your audience. Your website will speak for the brand and help to create a brand identity.
Using a website as one of the online marketing channels to educate and nurture your audience is among the most effective ways to accomplish your online marketing objectives like generating leads, nurturing them and converting the same by gaining loyalty.
This is possible by giving our impactful, relevant and valuable content in the form of blog posts, videos, images, infographics, etc. to your audience so that they know your brand by visiting your website every time they are looking for valuable information in your niche.
Social Media:
This channel is added to this list not only because of the growing use of social media platforms, but it is one of the effective ways to influence your potential and existing customers. It is also very effective to reach a good amount of your target audience.
This channel majorly contributes to increasing your brand awareness and can help you get engagements with your audience which will ultimately contribute to building relationships and getting highly qualified leads. Hence, social media is an effective online marketing channel when you need to build direct connections with your audience. For, instance, social media is used as a customer service tool by Apple.
Email:
A stats by Oberlo, states that there were almost 3.9 billion email users in 2020. Along with such widespread usage, this channel of online marketing gives the highest ROI. In a recent study, 73% of respondents rated email as an excellent online marketing channel, compared to 72% and 67% for SEO and paid search respectively.
Emails are one such channel that is considered to be an effective way of influencing your potential customers online by writing impactful email copies and sending personalised emails. This channel also contributes to the growth and scalability of your business with the help of advanced automation.
Hence, it becomes a perfect platform for achieving objectives like brand awareness, nurturing leads, increasing conversion rates and getting higher ROI.
Organic Search and Paid search:
It’s estimated that approximately 5.6 billion searches are processed by Google every day. With such a huge number of searches opens up huge opportunities for various businesses online.
Following best SEO practices and using appropriate keywords can help your business to get exposure to a large target audience by ranking in the top SERPs
Apart from organic search, paid ads are also such channels that can help you reach your audience by appearing on the top search results. Although you need to pay for every click, your business gets exposed to your target audience resulting in increased brand awareness.
Influencer Marketing:
Another effective channel for online marketing is spreading awareness about your business by working with influencers who endorse and promote your products or services. It has been discovered that 90% of consumers engage with influencers every week on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.
These influencers can help market a brand, product or service much the same way an advertisement does but in a far more effective way because users typically trust those they know or follow over advertisements any day.
Video Marketing:
According to 61% of marketers, video is a “very important or extremely important” component of their marketing strategy.
Be it either B2B or B2C, video marketing is for all. This channel has now become a very impactful way of increasing brand awareness.
Not only is brand awareness, but it also is significant in boosting conversions and improving ROI. With the decline in the attention span of the audiences online, videos work great to communicate ideas effectively and conveniently. Considering this channel of marketing- Facebook, Youtube and Instagram are popular platforms to engage your audience through videos.
Conclusion
Choosing the best online marketing channels is still a thing of concern if you have no clarity of what exactly your marketing requirements are depending upon your marketing objectives to be achieved and your audience.
Every channel is different from each other in many ways. However, understanding their function is key in using them properly to help you with your marketing efforts.
Having a good online marketing strategy is crucial for any business. How you reach your customers through the various online marketing channels will impact your results and conversions significantly.
Some marketing channels may work for some businesses while some may not. The best practice while choosing the most effective online marketing channels is to keep on testing them and measuring the key metrics to see what works for you and what doesn’t.
Additionally, consider future testing plans so that you can identify which channels offered the best results for your business, facilitating further marketing operations in the future.
Thank you if you have reached this end by reading through this article. Hope you have received some valuable insights.
Comment down your thoughts on the most effective online marketing channel.
