Research can help you make informed decisions about what channels you should use and prioritize. Especially when working within the limits of a budget, marketers need to choose the channels that will cost-effectively help them to reach the set objectives. In some cases, you may only use one or two, and in others you may include multiple channels in your plan.?
So, what are the types of digital channels available to marketers today?
- Email and automation marketing: Marketing emails and automation are used for conversion and loyalty. Emails and automation aim to reach out to the customers at the right time to lead them to a conversion destination, such as a landing page. Common email objectives include raising interest, converting sales and retaining customers by providing additional value to the brand and product.
- Paid search (PPC): This channel will help you get high value traffic and clicks from an interested audience. As the audience is actively searching for keywords related to their issue, using paid search helps to bring you top of the list when customers are searching and ready to buy or take action.
- Organic search (SEO): Optimizing for organic search is a key tactic in digital marketing because it leads to discovery, awareness, interest, and conversion without paid effort. SEO makes your content visible to the audience and easily searchable on Google and other search engines without the need to pay for clicks.
- Website optimization: Optimizing your website is essential to create an environment where visitors can engage with your brand content and easily take valuable actions on your site such as buying a product or contacting your team with minimal fuss. Optimizing speed, navigation, responsiveness, content, and conversion processes will help drive more of those valuable actions and lead to better performance.
- Display advertising: Thanks to the targeting capabilities of online display, companies can target audience interests, age, gender, community, keywords, and more. So the ads shown to the audience are highly relevant, which drives higher awareness and consideration as well as traffic.
- Content marketing: Content marketing is key to the inbound strategy, which in turn is central to a digital marketing strategy. Well-developed and targeted content increases brand personality and likability. Through content, consumers discover your brand values, experience, and world, and can identify with the brand but also learn more about the product and how it solves their problems. Content strategy impacts all stages of the buyer’s journey as it is central to all points of contact, and it is the final destination for a lot of marketing tactics. Content is also key in going viral and creating word of mouth as users will share content that is impactful and humorous, or that surprises them.
- Social media marketing: Social media platforms are primary channels for creating awareness and interest through content and social engagement. Advertising can be targeted and retargeted to appeal to the conversion objective. Social channels are also important channels in the Retention stage of the buyer’s journey as the primary platform for customer to get information and updates from the company.
