The development of online platforms has disrupted the way many companies market their products and services, creating a new industry known as Digital Marketing.
Digital marketing allows businesses to reach their target audience in a measurable way. However, it can usually be complex for beginners — digital marketing is a broad concept and includes many channels. In this article, we will have a look at the most effective ones.
What is a Digital Marketing Channel?
A digital marketing channel is a platform that lots of people pay attention to and where you can promote your products or services. The most effective digital marketing channels allow you to reach your target audience with relevant information about your business and thus grow your sales, build trust and credibility, and increase your brand awareness.
Best digital marketing channels
1. Social media marketing
Social media, with all the major platforms combined, is the biggest digital marketing channel. According to Search Engine Journal, there are estimated to be 4.89 billion social media users in 2023, which is 59.9% of the global population and 92.7% of all internet users.
There are two types of social media marketing: paid and organic.
Paid social media marketing means running ads on platforms like Facebook, TikTok, or Reddit. You can pay for impressions, clicks, or engagements. This marketing channel allows you to reach your target audience based on the data collected from the users of the social media platform, such as their age, demographics, and topics of interest.
Organic social media marketing, on the other hand, means creating content aiming to naturally attract target viewers and followers to your social media accounts.
While the paid option is much more expensive, it can deliver results very quickly. The organic option, on the other hand, requires time and consistency with publishing content.
2. SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and means applying certain changes to the pages of a website to make them rank higher on search engines and increase their traffic.
SEO has many benefits: it allows business owners to inform their potential customers about their products and services right after they have searched for them. This, in turn, increases sales and grows brand awareness. Besides, many people associate the top-ranking websites on Google as trustworthy and credible.
SEO includes conducting keyword research to determine target queries that you want to rank for and optimizing your website for a multitude of factors to maximize your chances of outranking the competition.
Although SEO is a long-term game and noticeable results can take anywhere from 3 to 24 months, the SEO work done during a few months can keep bringing results for years. Therefore, although other marketing channels like paid ads deliver results much faster, SEO is more efficient in the long run.
The first five results on the search engine results pages get most of the clicks. Therefore, your website has to outrank most competitors to get noticeable traffic from popular commercial keywords. It gets increasingly difficult to move up the rankings as you progress, requiring advanced SEO skills.
Should you outsource SEO or do it yourself? If you are a beginner and you are trying to rank for competitive keywords, you might have to lose a lot of time, money, and energy to acquire the necessary experience. Trusted SEO companies have years of trial-and-error experience in various niches and thus can save you time, money, and stress.
3. PPC
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and means buying the top positions on Google for your target keywords. In PPC, you pay every time a user clicks on your website in the search engine results page for your target keyword. (The algorithm doesn’t charge you for invalid clicks made solely to decrease your budget.)
PPC specialists work on tasks like conducting keyword research, improving click-through rates (CTR) of the ad campaign, and optimizing the landing page to maximize conversions.
PPC brings results much faster than SEO. Once you set up your campaign and it is approved, you will instantly appear on the SERPs. However, unlike SEO, you will only continue to receive visitors until you stop paying.
Think about it this way: PPC is better short term, and SEO is better long term. You can start with PPC while the organic rankings of your website are low, and once your SEO traffic starts taking off, you can stop the PPC campaign.
Besides the time and costs, sponsored search results only receive 10% of the total clicks. Even though you can rank on the top of the SERPs instantly, you are missing out on most of the traffic.
4. Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the process of sending emails to your potential customers to market your product or service. They would have to first opt in to receive emails from you.
According to Litmus, email marketing has the highest return on investment (ROI) among all marketing channels, bringing in $36 for every dollar spent on average.
According to Statista, there are over 4 billion daily email users in the world. While social media platforms like Facebook and X allow you to gather a following, they are in full control over all accounts. This means that they can remove your account at any time or restrict your certain activities.
When it comes to emails, you own the list of subscribers; no platform can take it away, and no company can go bankrupt and stop emails.
You can collect emails from your target audience by including an opt-in form on the landing page or blog posts of your website and drive traffic to the website from other marketing channels.
5. Video Marketing
Video marketing is the process of creating video content to capture the attention of your target audience. According to Sprout Social, half of the social media users prefer consuming video over other forms of content.
The biggest platforms for video marketing are YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. You have two options when using these platforms: regularly publishing videos to get attention organically or running paid video ads.
6. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing means paying famous social media personalities to promote your product or service. And these people don’t have to be very famous – perhaps they are well-known in a very specific small industry.
One of the most important parts of influencer marketing is making sure you partner with influencers whose followers mainly consist of your target audience.
7. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, also known as referral marketing, is when influencers or people with an audience promote third-party products or services and get paid per action like a sign-up or a paid subscription.
Here is how it works: once a company approves an affiliate, they provide a unique link for that partner, and each time someone clicks on that link, a cookie file that indicates the owner of the link is installed in their browser. And whenever the customer performs the required action, a flat fee or percentage of the money spent is attributed to the owner of the link.
Affiliate marketing is a low-cost marketing channel that works best if you are already successfully practicing other marketing channels and have built some brand awareness.
Conclusion
There are many forms in which you can use digital marketing channels. If you can’t decide which channel to choose, look at what your competitors or businesses in a similar industry do. It is usually best to choose at least 2 digital marketing channels. The best ones are those that allow you to reach your target audience with relevant information as efficiently as possible.
