Picking a marketing channel to run with as part of your digital marketing strategy is not the easiest task without some foundational knowledge on the topic. Here’s the quickest way to learn all the basics of different digital marketing channels. The text below will be giving you a short overview on this topic. Covering all the information you need from what each of the platforms does, how to use them, and how it will benefit you.
Marketing Channel: Social Media Marketing
The most well-known online marketing channel. You can engage your customers much more personally here as most users go on social media as part of their daily routines to stay connected with the world.
However, each social media platform does not have the same audiences and this is where you can play around with your choices depending on your ideal customers.
This platform has been around for a long time. The main audiences on this platform are usually millennials or older as younger generations tend to migrate to newer platforms.
Either way, this marketing channel alone is powerful enough to use for most businesses because of its paid ads feature which allows detailed targeting of who you want your advertisements to appear in front of by selecting their age range, gender, job industry, and interests.
As long as you know who to target and how to optimize your ad campaigns, Facebook Ads is like a machine that keeps giving.
Instagram is currently owned by Facebook. The native content of this platform is mostly visual-heavy in both image and video formats.
What matters here when promoting your Instagram profile are authentic interactions with people in the same industry and your ideal customers. Always be sure to add popular hashtags to your posts, especially when building your account.
Twitter is a “loud” platform that allows you to post multiple short-texts posts in one day without annoying your audience.
Things go viral and die out very fast and trending topics are always changing.
Twitter profiles are also great for interacting with your audience. To get more engagement, post your text post with images, gifs, or even better video content.
Retweeting reviews or relevant posts are also helpful in adding more variety to your content. Aside from this, retweeting reviews can help increase your social proof and authority as well.
TikTok
This platform had only recently been created yet Gen Zs have already made it went viral. Tiktok has a very interesting algorithm that makes it so that fills the users’ “For You” page with content that is similar to ones they have already liked.
The native content format is short-form videos where users can directly edit videos on the application before posting. This allows the younger generations to fully explore their creativity which is the essence of this platform.
As TikTok is still relatively untapped and post engagement rates here are much higher compared to any other social media platform (one random video can easily accumulate a thousand views), businesses can create short-form videos to promote their brands and more. Keep in mind, however, that the users on this platform are younger audiences and businesses catering to more mature audiences may not perform as well here.
Another highly visual social media platform, however, the majority of Pinterest’s audience are females. They usually go on Pinterest to find inspiration for their hobbies or artistic works. This platform allows users to save pins from all over the internet and form them into albums. You can easily get followers liking and “pinning” your posts or “pins” as the algorithm in this platform supports the engagement of new posts.
Therefore, if your business caters to female audiences and visual assets can be produced, consider using this platform as part of your marketing strategy to build new followings and to drive traffic to your website.
A professional social media platform, LinkedIn is great for B2B business. Not only do most decision-makers use this platform, but it is also an opportunity to showcase your company’s internal happenings to stay relevant and increase brand awareness. You’ll be able to build your brand and attract the right candidates for your job openings as well. Content on LinkedIn is similar to the ones on Facebook, you can share text posts, website links, videos, and images.
LinkedIn ads are also an option. You can boost your post for engagement, send a large number of direct messages to people you target, and more. Therefore, if your business is a B2B type, consider using this platform.
LINE
This channel is particularly popular in Thailand. However, its usage is growing in other countries all around the globe. There are options to advertise using the LINE Ads Platform. However, advertising with this requires contacting partnered marketing agencies. Marketing Guru is one of them! Aside from this, there are also free Official Accounts for businesses to create. This allows companies to text and advertise to customers who follow them via messaging apps to create more personal interactions.
Read more about LINE Ads Features here!
Marketing Channel: Google Adwords
Everyone uses Google on a daily basis. This is a powerful paid platform to advertise with. The audiences on this marketing channel are usually searching with intent. This means that they know what they are looking for.
There are a few methods to advertise with Google Ads. You can use these strategically depending on the marketing objectives you want for your business. The different types of ad campaigns you can create are:
- Search Network (text ads)
- Display Network (banner ads)
- Shopping Network (product displays)
- Video (Youtube ads)
- App (App installs and promotions)
Marketing Channel: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way to earn commissions from selling other products. This can be done through product recommendation videos on Youtube, for example. You will have to contact the company you want to be an affiliate to obtain a link or a code. This is where your sales will be tracked and you can earn a percentage off of them. This channel is great to use as an additional income source for your business.
Marketing Channel: Email Marketing
Email marketing is still effective! Once a customer opts-in to your email list, you can create content that is educational or relevant in your industry. Make sure, however, that you are answering to what they will find interesting. The most important part of a good commercial email is the subject title and the first sentence.
Marketing Channel: Search Engine Optimization
We can have a great website but without anything to attract visitors to your website, that website is practically useless.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great way to help your website be discoverable on search engines such as Google. However, the process of building your SEO well enough to rank on page one of Google can take a minimum of 3-6 months.
Marketing Channel: Content Marketing
Content is the key to all forms of digital marketing. This online marketing channel will help build brand awareness, convert customers, and build customer loyalty. Your content should be relevant to your audience and the content, whatever form it is or where you post them, will help to promote your business and who you are.
In terms of content, there are 3 main types: evergreen, topical, and ephemeral.
- Topical content provides relevant and targeted information.
- Evergreen content are ones that can still be relevant to your audience months or years from the time it is posted.
- Ephemeral content are ones that are short-lived. Like Instagram stories, for example, these last only 24 hours but they are used by many businesses to stay relevant and encourage brand recognition.
The best way to build following and engagement with this is to focus on producing content based on quality over quantity.
Marketing Channel: Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing, while it can be costly, will help you reach the type of audience who are your ideal customers. The most important factor in choosing an influencer is the type of audience that follows them and their engagement rate. Having a high engagement rate will not only give a show that their followers are real, but it also increases the likeliness of producing sales.
In this field, we separate the influencers by the number of followers they have.
There are a few main ways of using influencer marketing in your business. First, you can create a list of all the influencers you think will fit into your brand. Calculate their engagement rate with tools such as Influencer Marketing Hub’s Instagram Influencer Earnings Calculator. From here you can filter who you want for your brand.
Marketing Channel: Native Advertising
This marketing channel is similar to paid ads but instead of appearing as an ad, the content looks native to where it appears. This could be in the form of a recommended content on a website or on social media feeds. The core of native advertising is to have the advertisement appear non-disruptive and does not directly push its product or service to the audience. As a result, the form of marketing has the potential to work even better than regular advertisements.
If you are interested in implementing digital marketing into your business or adding more channels to grow your revenue, let MarketingGuru help you save time and effort from experimenting on all of these channels to figure out what works best. Get our expert’s free consultations on your digital marketing today!
