Today, it is no question that the Internet is where your prospective customers are at.
With everyone connected to the web either through their phones, tablets, desktops, or laptops, a myriad of potential consumers are within your reach—that is, if they manage to reach your business page. Finding customers and reaching your audience through a digital and online presence is not a new concept—nor is it even considered untapped potential. Not this 2022, and definitely not in 2024.
Yet, many businesses are still falling behind their competitors simply because they do not know how to leverage their webpage’s potential. Regardless of how much your monthly advertising budget is, getting the biggest bang for your back is imperative. Similarly, ensuring that you are getting the most out of your investments in marketing campaigns is paramount. After all, maximizing return on investment (ROI) is an important goal—no matter the campaign.
That said, you should explore the digital marketing channels appropriate to your marketing strategy to ensure you get the right advertising mileage. Unfortunately, determining which marketing channels would guarantee you ROI and get you the most out of your invested time and money can be a little difficult. With so many platforms, coupled with the many changes happening in marketing, identifying the best channels might be a bit difficult for you.
Before we get into that and identify the best digital marketing channels suitable for you, it is best to explore what digital marketing channels are and understand how they work.
Understanding digital marketing channels
Simply put, digital marketing channels are platforms businesses utilize to reach their target audience. Typically, these same channels would contain information about a business’s brand, product, or service. Using these channels allows you to build a relationship with your audience and address your customers’ questions and challenges. All of that occurs while you are strategically positioning your business in a manner that gives it a better advantage in reaching your marketing goals.
There is no point in subscribing to and utilizing all digital marketing channels, as not all of them are cut out for your business objectives. While there are suitable channels for specific audiences, there are a few set up differently depending on what they are capable of doing. Knowing which digital marketing channel to use is essential to achieve your goals.
Below is a list of the top and most effective digital marketing channels and what they potentially mean for your marketing strategy.
Top digital marketing channels to utilize this 2024
1.) Website
A website is an indispensable tool for businesses. It serves to provide you with a dedicated platform where you can inform and educate your audiences about what your business is about. To be effective, however, it requires a thorough understanding of how a content marketing strategy complements your target audience. Regardless of your company size, a website is imperative as it is one of the most effective tools in giving your website an online presence that conveys or sells your brand, products, or service to prospects.
More importantly, websites are ideal channels for your content marketing campaigns. Here, you get to inform your existing or potential customers with relevant and valuable content through blog posts and announcements. Even better is the fact that the content your website can handle is versatile. Distributing various content—from articles to videos—is possible with a website’s multimedia capabilities.
How is a website beneficial?
One of the benefits a website can bring your business is lead generation. Naturally, when people visit your site, they are interested in discovering more about what you offer, making them potential customers for your business. Similarly, having a dedicated website for your business leads to an increase in organic traffic. If you regularly publish quality content, your audience will naturally gravitate to your website.
2.) Social media
Social media has changed the landscape of digital marketing in more ways than one. For that reason, it has made it to this list. With users reaching the 3.81 billion mark, social media has become so much more than a channel used to establish connections. Today, it has evolved into a channel where you can reach potential buyers by engaging them in a more authentic and personal fashion. In this regard, you can direct your efforts toward social media marketing organic as the platform was initially conceptualized to cultivate interactions and foster relationships rather than sell to prospective customers.
That said, it is imperative to dedicate time to developing relationships with your target market. In this way, you get to gain an insight into the needs and interests of your buyers. While this is known to drive sales, bear in mind that social selling is not primarily about selling. As a result, you should steer your efforts toward building a positive and strong relationship with your audience.
How is social media marketing beneficial?
Social media is a useful platform for establishing a connection with your brand followers. Apart from building a relationship with them, you can make your connection with your consumers more authentic as you can reinforce your company image by putting names to faces. As a result, you can make your brand more relatable to the public by adding that human touch. Similarly, social media marketing gives you a more comprehensive audience range. Social media posts are effortless to share, and as such, it opens opportunities for growing your audience and customer base. The best part? Having your content shared does not have to break the bank.
3.) Organic search
Search engines are forces to be reckoned with. Considering that over 75,000 Google search queries are performed every second, it would be a shame not to take advantage of this potential for customer reach. People use search engines for a myriad of reasons. Whether that may be for research, entertainment, shopping, and the like, the opportunities for business are limitless. However, it is not enough that you appear on a search page.
When prospects search for services or products, they typically rank the page first as they view it as the most relevant and authoritative. That said, you need to stand out from the competition. You need to capture new opportunities organically and drive a regular flow of leads down your sales funnel. In this regard, adopting modern SEO products, blog post optimization, keyword research, and linkable content creation, improving your search ranking, will come quickly.
How is SEO beneficial?
One of the main things you should know about searchers is that they are already interested in you, to begin with. As people primarily use search engines to look for information, products, or services, producing quality and optimized content is paramount. This will help propel you to the top of the search results. In the same way, SEO is an excellent way to build links. As you start ranking on search engine result pages, you can then expect backlinks from high-quality sites.
4.) Mobile
Today, more and more individuals are surfing the web through their phones—and it is not slowing down anytime soon. Considering the number of mobile users nowadays, it only makes sense to provide promotional content to mobile users. What makes mobile so powerful is the geo-targeting strategies you can utilize, where location information is used to recommend services and products more accurately and conveniently. As a result, customer experience can be continuously and consistently improved.
How is mobile beneficial?
As said above, most people are accessing your website from their phones, and if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are letting your competitors get ahead of you. Today, people shop with their mobile phones making mobile marketing a core strategy in the retail business. More importantly, the mobile platform allows you to create a demand for your brand/service/product while driving brand value. Remember that consumers today prefer businesses that can deliver the information they want or need immediately or in real-time, which is on their mobile devices.
5.) Email
While not exactly fresh, new or innovative, sending emails to your prospects remains one of your business’s most compelling digital marketing platforms. That said, it is quite challenging to disregard email as a channel as it is one of the failsafe ways to deliver medium to high ROI for your business. More importantly, it is one of the most versatile digital marketing channels that allows you to apply the newest and latest content marketing trends. These include personalization and automation without even making that big of a dent in your marketing budget. Email supports other marketing objectives, making it an excellent tool for driving revenue and generating leads.
How is email beneficial?
Unlike any other digital marketing channel, emails are delivered straight to a user’s inbox, making them kind of hard to miss. As a result, email is one of the ideal channels for driving conversions, leading to business growth. In the same vein, email nurtures lead. Consistently sending emails to your customers establishes a relationship and cultivates it as well. As you continuously build trust, they will eventually make a purchase from you. Lastly, statistics have shown that email remains unbeaten among all the digital marketing channels as the sole channel that generates the highest ROI among all marketing tactics.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Keep in mind that these various marketing channels work differently from one another. That said, they deliver different results. What works for one brand might not necessarily mean the same for you. That said, exploring and testing different channels with the proper strategies to see which combinations work should be a priority.
Measure your key metrics and then analyze your results. From there, determine whether you are maximizing your ROI. Continuously polish your digital marketing strategies and push them forward. Before long, you will be way ahead of your competition.
