Growth Channels

The Big Five Channels

There are several channels for growth available to all business, whether it is a start-up, a medium scale business or a large-scale business. The process of identifying a growth channels that match the growth strategy of the business needs to be done wisely due to its importance. Do you want to invest a lot of time, money and energy on a growth channel where you do not have customers there? No right! That is why it is very important to identify which growth channels will and are performing well for your business and which aren’t.

In this article, I will talk about the five major digital marketing channels that are available and really great for explosive growth.

1.      The first marketing channel is SEM which stands for Search Engine Marketing. Another term for it could be Pay-Per-Click (PPC). The major platforms for SEM are Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing of which google owns about 60% of the market share. So, if this is where your audience is, then you may want to focus on Google AdWords. This is a paid search that requires constant optimization to look at search trends, keyword traffic, ppc costs etc, it requires a lot of attention.

2.      The second marketing channel is SEO also known as Search Engine Optimization. This is a more organic process of improving your website’s ranking on the search engine results page in order to get more people to your site. SEO is the most qualified driver of traffic for a lot of companies.

3.      The third marketing channel is social and display ads. When you visit different websites or blogs on the internet and you see some banner ads on the side, om top or anywhere on the website, those banner ads are what is called display ads. Social ads are the ads you see on your social media timelines like on facebook, linkedin, Instagram or twitter, you see sponsored ads or pop ups as you scroll on your timeline. When it comes to social media ads, you need to really understand your audience and which social media they are using and which social media platform will work best for your type of product.

4.      The fourth marketing is Email marketing. You have probably heard a lot about email marketing and received a lot of emails from company websites you visited o online stores you bought something from. Email marketing is one of the best marketing channels and also one of the oldest digital channels. Email marketing is good for targeting new prospects, retaining and engaging existing customers on a personalized level. A good way to personalize an email to new prospective customers is sending an email from the CEO with the CEO’s phone number.

5.      The last marketing channel is Content marketing. This is done through Blogs, Forums that focus on a particular type of content for you customers. This helps with targeting a particular niche of customers who are really interested in your content. So you need to understand what your customers are reading, what websites they are looking at and what they are doing offline and online.

A company at it’s early stage or a large company may not be doing its growth marketing with all the channels at top peak performance. That is why it’s very important to understand where you customers are and what they are doing. You need to be able to identify at one to three channels that will work for you. So how do you pick the first channels to use?

• You need to study the channels that your audience is using and where they are. So, if your audience is not there, you should not start with that channel.
• Next, you need to identify the mismatch between your product and services and the audience if they are in the channel. For example, some companies like B2B companies that provide specialized softwares may most likely not be on social media channels but rather SEO. E-commerce business can use social media channels because it suits their customers, product and service.
• Lastly, avoid channels that are too expensive. SEO is a safe start.

After identifying which marketing channels to use, how do you measure the results of the channels?

A good marketing channel will have high ROI and have a high ability to scale as well while a bad or not so good marketing channel will also have high ROI but with a low ability to scale. To identify failing channels, you need to look at your data.

So how do you optimize? When you find a channel that works, you need to give it a opportunity to succeed, run several tests and campaigns. It may take a while to develop and scale, maybe weeks or months, but give it and opportunity to succeed. Then you can test new channels.

Emerging Channels

If you are a startup, one advantage you have is being able to look at what the top companies are doing and what they are not so you can play around it and experiment. Look at underutilized channels and take advantage of it. You will need to study your audience, choose a channel, test it out and then measure the results.

Myths.

There are some common myths about some marketing channels that some people often like to say. Let’s talk about some of those myths.

Myths about Social Media Marketing:

• Social media marketing is not quantifiable i.e it is hard to track of which it is quantifiable
• Social media marketing is just branding and its not used for sales or conversions or acquisition. On the contrary, you can use social media marketing to do all three.

Social media marketing is about driving demands and leads. You can track business objectives with a good social media metrics.

Myths about SEO:

• You should not waste time on SEO because it is automatic and google can crawl a site and figure it out. This is not true. Google will crawl your site faster if you have:

                                i.           Good domain authority i.e how your site compares to its peers.

                              ii.           Good page authority- how well your site is set up for success.

                            iii.           Content schedule: the frequency at which you publish new content.

                            iv.           Popularity: this is a combination of site traffic, Click through rate (CTR) and time on site.

• You have to rank No1 for a certain key word. You don’t.
• SEO is dead. on the contrary, SEO is very much alive.

Myths about Content marketing:

• Audiences don’t respond well to content marketing. When you give your audiences the right content to read, they will respond well.
• We can’t prove ROI on content marketing.

Content marketing is about building a relationship with your audience, understanding their needs and offering a solution in your products and services.

That’s it for this article, I will be posting more articles in the following weeks with more knowledge and insight about Growth Marketing.

If you want to learn more in detail about growth marketing or any other marketing course, feel free to visit CXL Institute website. They have a wide range of marketing courses and top 1% professionals in different fields of marketing that impact first class knowledge. You can also apply for their mini-degree scholarship programs just like i did.

Catch you later!