7 Digital Marketing Channels You Should Check Out
Published Sept 14, 2020
It is the year 2020, and long gone are the days when companies could brush digital marketing aside. We are at a vital point where access to potential customers is at its most convenient.
With the internet at the forefront of our culture today, digital marketing has never been more crucial. But some companies are often intimidated because of the unfamiliarity with technical terms associated with it. (e.g., CPC, PPC, SEO) Moreover, some companies fear that it will take far too much investment and adjustment to get a digital marketing campaign going. Fun fact: it doesn’t.
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all forms of electronic marketing. This includes video marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing, to name a few.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has advantages that far outnumber the disadvantages it faces. Here are just some of the benefits of applying digital marketing:
- Sustained online presence
- Provides instant and measurable results, assisting strategy formulation
- Provides a fantastic return on investment (ROI)
- More cost-effective than traditional marketing practices
- Levels the playing field with large companies
- Gives you a direct communication stream with your target audience
- Highly targetable
- Improved conversion rates
- Allows you to connect with your audience worldwide
- Highly personalized
- Reaches prospective customers early in the buyer’s journey, which is the crucial process buyers go through before making a purchase.
- Reaches your target audience where they spend their time and money
6 Proven Digital Marketing Channels
EMAIL MARKETING
Despite being the oldest channel on the list, email marketing remains one of the best channels in acquiring and retaining customers. While some people consider email marketing dead, many companies continue to value this strategy for its ability to maintain customer engagement. The most attractive feature of this strategy is its incredible return on investment (ROI).
Email marketing has proven to generate the highest ROI at a rate of 3800%! Furthermore, around 20% of companies have an even higher ROI, making about 7000% of their marketing cost!
This channel provides your potential customers with highly relevant content in a more organic way. Email marketing is a tremendously targeted marketing approach, giving you a direct communication line with potential customers. It’s a great way to engage with your customers, informing them of product offers and promotions.
CONTENT MARKETING
Creating high-quality, valuable, and relevant content for your target audience greatly benefits your brand awareness. Content will always be at the heart of every digital marketing campaign despite seeing new trends come out.
Content refers to the collection of promotional media your business delivers to its target audience. These can come in the form of blog posts, videos, case studies, and more, which generate leads like crazy. Content marketing is an excellent platform for businesses to educate and provide necessary information to their audience.
This channel is critical if you want to establish your brand’s reputation and authority in a specific field. Compared to traditional marketing, good content can generate 3x more leads at less than half the cost. Increasing your organic traffic and lead generation depends a lot on the content your pumping out.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
Search engines have become integral parts of our lives in the world today. Anytime someone needs an answer to their question or a solution to their problem, they just “Google” it. Statistics show that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine query. Furthermore, Think with Google says that 53% of people always do their research before making a purchase.
Search engine results are a clear integral cog in shaping customer experience. Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the traffic to your website by making sure your links appear high in search engine results. Your position in a search result matters, as 75% of people never even scroll past the first page! That’s insane, especially when you consider the millions of websites out there.
SEO-generated traffic has much higher conversion rates than say, ad-generated traffic. That’s because this traffic is much more organic, with people actively searching for information. This marketing tactic involves many activities like keyword research, on and off-page optimization, organic link building, and other related operations.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
You’ve probably come across businesses and brands making funny quips on Twitter and Facebook. These are all part and parcel of their marketing strategies!
Talking ROI, 20% of marketers say that social media garners the highest one out of the rest of these strategies. Additionally, only 8% of the same marketers don’t use this channel, which is the lowest among all strategies.
Social media provides a much more candid and casual way businesses engage with their customers. This is incredibly effective in establishing a brand image and personality. Building these makes your brand much more relatable, which subconsciously influences your audience.
Some of the most popular social media sites include:
- Google+
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)
People not immersed in the digital marketing space often mistake SEM with SEO. The main difference between the two is that SEO optimizes sites to get organic search results, while SEM makes use of both organic and paid search.
SEM uses both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) to generate the necessary traffic. When using the PPC strategy, search engines will show your links at the top as an ad. And from its name, you have to pay a specific amount per click. How it works is that you bid to rank for specified keywords. The order in which you rank is directly proportional to how much you bid for that search query. Using PPC allows you to target individuals based on buying behavior and demographics.
In summary, SEO falls under SEM, as SEM encompasses both SEO and PPC.
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
The last, but certainly not the least digital marketing channel is display advertising. Many people visit websites that they believe are useful or attractive to them. Digital marketers may generate traffic from their target audience by displaying ads on third-party websites. Display ads can be banners, interactive ads, video ads, and other visually attractive media linked to a landing page or website.
Display ads usually charge on cost-per-impression (CPM), which is more cost-effective than its counterpart, cost-per-click (CPC). These are the possible forms your ads could come in:
- Banner ads
- Interstitial ads
- Rich Media
- Video ads
About 41% of marketers indicate that display advertising has medium to high ROI.
Factors and other Criteria to consider
When selecting the appropriate digital marketing channels, you’ll want to align them with your company’s goals. Your business may relate to the following objectives:
Brand Awareness
Brand Awareness refers to how familiar your brand is to your target audience. When your brand is easily recognizable, people are more likely to ride its trend. For many old-timers who love crunching hard numbers, brand awareness may be a bit challenging. But let me tell you it is incredibly important not just to you but also to your customers.
Brand Awareness can be thought of as your reputation in the eyes of your target audience. The higher it is, the more they’ll trust your brand and keep coming back to it. Aside from that, it can also create an association with specific events or products. For example, when you think of photocopy machines, you think Xerox. When you think of hot tubs, you think of Jacuzzi. Associations like this are free real estate and could generate a ton of money.
If brand awareness is your goal, you’ll want to devote a lot of effort into social media marketing. Social Media gives you an excellent platform where you can interact with your target audience. Research shows that 50% of brand reputation can be attributed to online sociability. People love when brands and their social media accounts make witty quips, provide swift customer support, and so on. With that being said, there aren’t many better platforms where you can informally connect to your target audience than social media.
Sales Generation
With the world that we live in today, online stores are becoming the “new normal.” With avenues like Amazon offering same-day shipping, it’s no wonder people don’t want to leave their houses to make a purchase.
E-commerce is becoming more and more prominent in the world we live in today. The idea that you have to have a brick and mortar storefront is all but erased now, with some businesses operating purely online. For this, we recommend using display advertising and email marketing.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the process of enticing then converting strangers into someone who shows interest in your product or service. Generating leads is the first step in communicating with prospective clients and customers. Once they show organic interest in your business, their transition to a paying customer is much smoother.
Educate Prospective Customers
The beautiful thing about technology and the world, in general, is that there are always new ideas to be had. I say that because many, if not all, products came from an idea at some point. Many companies pride themselves in coming up with ingenious inventions and products, which is a great thing. However, it can get a bit difficult to purchase something you’re not quite sure of.
For that reason, your best plan should be first to educate prospective customers. You should talk about your product, and create a buzz of why more people should be using it. When you make people see that they have a problem that only you can solve, they will be sold on your idea! If you can see your business aligning with this, you’ll want to leverage content marketing here. You can do this sort of marketing by blogging and coming up with press releases raving about your product.
Generate Traffic
Many companies and businesses give out most of their content for free. You might wonder how they earn money from this sort of business model. Well, they generally make money through third-party ads running on their websites.
The appropriate digital marketing channel for this would be content marketing and SEO. Coming up with high-quality content that ranks well in search engines will generate a lot of traffic for your business.
(Related: Backlink Pyramid for SEO: What Is It and How Does It Work?)
Hire The Digital Marketing Experts
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About The Author
Judy Ponio is a professional writer and SEO specialist based in the Philippines. She works hard to cross check reputable sources to ensure her work uses accurate facts. She is the lead author for several prominent websites covering a variety of topics including law, health, nutrition, and more.
