11 min read
There is an overwhelming number of different marketing channels. The problem with choosing how to bring traffic to your website is never a lack of options, but a lack of understanding of what will work best and how to effectively employ strategies.
While some marketing channels will work better in certain industries, the biggest issue is usually developing a thorough plan that properly strategizes for the best results. So, how does a successful business owner decide on the most effective marketing channels for their website?
No matter how much money you have in your marketing budget, time is never an unlimited resource. This is the importance of marketing channels that work well for your business. No company has time to waste on strategies that run them in circles. Your business needs the most effective digital marketing channels. This means methods that will attract the right customers for your business, engage with them in ways that connect with your brand, and convert.
Below, you’ll find a deeper look at a marketing channels list that works for digital marketers today. How to use this list: choose one or two strategies to really focus on at first. Putting your resources into fewer channels to get them going is a better way to focus your efforts, instead of spreading your resources thin across too many. You can add more strategies as you go.
Content Marketing: Channels and More
This list starts with content marketing because it can be tied into so many of the other online marketing channels available to you. Understanding content marketing should help you better understand how to best use some of the other marketing channels on this list.
A lot of the content on your website will be about your products or services and how your business is run. This is self-promotional content and is essential and useful to potential customers. It is also done with the intent of getting a sale. When visitors reach your sales page, they have hopefully traveled through a funnel where interest and trust have been built to get them to a place where they will convert.
Content marketing is a completely different type of content, and it isn’t just for your website. This type of content is about promoting the value of your brand through useful and relevant content.
What type of value does your brand offer to your loyal customers? Do they come to buy your products or services to have a good laugh, become educated on a specific topic, or be otherwise entertained?
Get specific about what your products and services offer of value to your customers, and then repeat that experience through your content marketing. This will promote your brand, clarify your value, and build trust with the customer.
Content Marketing: Building Trust
If you’re confused on how content marketing can build trust, you’re not alone.
Consider this example. An eCommerce store sells shoes. They write a blog post for their website that goes in-depth with tips on how to measure your foot in a way that will get you the best fit when you buy shoes online. A person looking to buy shoes online, who is unsure about fit, performs a Google search, and finds this article just when they need it most. This article has met their need right when it was most important to them. Now they associate this website as a trusted source for information on shoe sizing, a concern they had when they were considering their next online shoe purchase.
This example has provided a lot of value to that customer. At the end of the article, they find links to shoes they can purchase on the eCommerce site they’re already on. They read this call-to-action at a time when they were already considering buying shoes and are now feeling confident about that decision. Here is an example of an article that talks about measuring your shoe size. As you can see there are buttons that take you to buy shoes.
(Image Credit: Dick’s Sporting Goods )
While this customer may not buy shoes, the content has the potential to lead them there. They were unlikely to have randomly come across this particular eCommerce site before reading the article.
This is the power of content marketing. You can connect with the right type of customer for your business. You can build your brand as an educational resource (in this instance, the shop is an educational resource on wearing the right shoes). And you can build trust with a potential customer.
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A visitor to your website will always need to trust you before they’re willing to hand over payment information. This is an important note whenever you’re looking at your online marketing channels. Follow the customer experience. If they start their journey at this point, where during the process do they start to trust your brand?
A blog post is one type of content marketing. Other examples include:
- Videos
- Ebooks
- Infographics
- Every post you make on social media
- Email marketing
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Ideation and Content Creation
There is no single way to best come up with every piece of content. One consideration is what other marketing channels you will be tying your content marketing into. For example, will visitors likely be coming to this piece of content from a search result page? Social media? Both?
You may create a piece of content specifically meant to meet the interests of your social media following. This may be a post on social media or it may be a blog post on your site that includes a top 10 list you think might go viral. In these cases, you might look at your analytics on your social media account to see what types of content your audience has engaged with most in the past. Why did your audience like that content? Create new content that hits those same buttons for them. The image below shows social media marketing content. The content is there but it is still meant to bring in a consumer to their website.
(Image Credit: CoSchedule Blog)
Another way to strategically consider your next piece of content marketing is keyword research. Look at your analytics to see what keywords people are currently using to come to your website. Look at your keyword research during your SEO planning (covered more below).
Ideally, your content will have multiple distribution channels. Possibilities include posting the content to your social media, emailing it to your newsletter, and bringing in a fresh audience from the search result pages.
What makes a great piece of content marketing? It should be valuable to your audience, build brand awareness, and hopefully, develop trust. Wherever it fits, content marketing should also include calls-to-action within the content so your audience has a next step after they have just enjoyed what you’ve freely offered.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a wide topic with a lot to consider.
The basic idea is that search engines like Google want to send their users to web pages they will be happy to visit. Search engines have done studies that have shown them what users want to see. They have used this information to create algorithms. They then evaluate websites and, based on their algorithm, decide where to rank your web page.
Unfortunately, words like “optimization” and “algorithm” make this sound intimidating. This stops many business owners from properly applying search engine optimization techniques and taking advantage of what SEO can do for their websites.
That leaves more room for you to work on getting your site ranked for relevant keywords, however.
To get your website optimized to bring in traffic from the search result pages will involve content creation, building high-quality backlinks to your pages, in-depth keyword research, and the technical development of your website.
The above are just some basic areas you’ll need to consider, but there are other factors as well, like local SEO, voice search, and optimizing your website for mobile.
What Makes SEO So Effective?
For one thing, search engine optimization is inbound marketing. A user is actively searching for something when they type in keywords and then they find your web page on their own. This is in contrast with a user seeing your advertisement somewhere while they were browsing the web. They had no intention of seeing your website, so now you have to convince them. With inbound marketing, they made this choice on their own. This is a powerful mindset to catch your audience in.
With relevant keywords to your business and inbound marketing, SEO provides high-quality web traffic with high conversion potential. That makes this one of the most powerful free marketing channels available. There are SEO keyword tools to help with your research for relevant keywords, such as Rank Tracker:
(Image Credit: Search Engine Land)
Keep in mind that employing search engine optimization techniques is free. You can learn SEO, find great online tools, and get your website in excellent shape for taking advantage of this option on the marketing channels list. Many business owners may find it more time-efficient to hire a specialist. That will be a decision you’ll need to make based on your resources of time versus money.
One of the most interesting things about search engine optimization for your website is how the time investment builds over time. The more you do for search engine optimization, the more powerful each part you’ve accomplished becomes.
For example, you first spend time making sure your website is technically developed in a way that Google’s bots can read. This means well-linked pages and a solid site map. That’s a powerful piece of the optimization puzzle. You then put some strong keywords in your headers. Now that you have those keywords, your site structure and keywords work together to both become a little more powerful. Then, you create some pieces of great content, rich with keywords, and helpful to your audience. All three of these pieces work together, getting a little more power from each other.
Of the different marketing channels available for bringing traffic to your website, a strong SEO campaign has some of the strongest potential for steadily building over time.
SEM
Search engine marketing (SEM) is not to be confused with SEO.
Search engine optimization is organically bringing in traffic through search engines. Unless you hire an expert to help level-up your work, this is one of the free marketing channels available to you.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is paid advertising on the search engine result pages. Your results will show up at the top of the results page for your chosen keywords with a simple identifier stating it’s an ad. For example:
You can create your ad targeting specific keywords and locations.
This is a strong option for targeting a specific audience.
While your search engine optimization campaign to get your content appearing at the top of the results organically will take time, you can create a successful ad that shows up on the results page today.
When it comes to SEM or SEO, don’t think of it necessarily as an either-or scenario. Instead, consider how you might combine these marketing channels to work together for a stronger overall marketing campaign for your website.
We hope that you found this article useful.
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Social Media Marketing
There are a lot of social networks out there and a lot of strategies out there for you to try for your business. When considering what will be best for you, make sure you’re using up-to-date information.
For example, it used to be standard to schedule all of your social media posts and not have to think about them. Today, smart digital marketers will use schedulers, but also keep an eye on what is trending on the social network. Businesses are now part of the conversation on the network, and it’s important to be part of the tone for the day.
How are businesses today building connections with their audiences and using social media to bring more traffic to their websites?
For one thing, they’re focused on engagement and building relationships. While you ultimately want to turn your social media following into customers who have visited your website and converted, that isn’t your priority when you are on there. Successful social media marketers are sharing useful content with their audience and having meaningful conversations. They mix in a lot of posts where they give freely with only a few posts where they ask.
Those tasks can be for things like visiting a great piece of content on your website you believe they will find useful and relevant.
When posting on Social Media you want to find the right time to share. There are a few ways you can do this. One way is to use a social analytics tool, for example:
Like when choosing digital marketing channels, start with only one or two social networks. This way you can put your time toward building a following and mastering how to engage with them before adding more work.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
You have likely seen display ads while browsing the web. The big players for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in today’s market are Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager. The Facebook Ads Manager is also where you can manage ads for Instagram.
Either platform will take some time to learn. This means your initial spending on these platforms will be a lot of testing and getting to know the platform. For this reason, many may choose to hire a digital marketing agency to handle this for them, though that will also add to your costs.
With pay-per-click advertising, you have the ability to narrow down and target your audience. You can craft copy that specifically speaks to the interests of the audience you’re targeting. With Facebook and Instagram, you can also create powerful visuals.
While it works slightly differently, eCommerce sites can also take advantage of Google Shopping ads within Google Ads. These ads are based more on the products themselves instead of keywords and show up on the shopping pages but are a powerful PPC advertising option for retail. For instance:
Pay-per-click advertising has a steep learning curve. There will always be failed campaigns and a lot of testing to find the ones that get a positive ROI in the end. However, the more you learn about your audience, the stronger your PPC campaigns will become. With multiple campaigns running successfully, your traffic can grow quickly using this strategy.
While it may take some work to get successful campaigns going, running a strong campaign can bring relevant traffic to your website.
The Importance of Marketing Channels
A stable marketing channel will bring relevant traffic to your website on a day-to-day basis.
For example, while you will need to monitor your pay-per-click campaigns to keep them strong, when you have a few successful ones running, you will be able to count on that channel bringing you traffic.
An established marketing channel gives you visitors, builds your brand awareness, and helps you forecast where your business is headed.
While it is advisable to only build one or two digital marketing channels at a time, the more you have going for you, the wider your audience will become. This diversification in traffic sources will also protect your business.
For example, if one day Facebook has a major algorithm change and your campaigns are not working well for you, the search engines and social media posts will still be reliably bringing traffic to your website.
Take your time building up strong marketing that really works for your business and then add more channels as you scale and grow.
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FAQ’s
Digital marketing channels are a bit different than your traditional marketing channels. Digital includes things like: video marketing, email marketing, SEO, PPC, display ads, content marketing and mobile marketing (and more).
This is a sales channel that is primarily electronic in nature.
The main difference between these two digital marketing platforms is that SEM is a paid strategy where SEO is organic.
According to Wikipedia.com the definition for “on-line marketing”, also known as internet marketing or digital marketing, is marketing of your goods or services over the internet while direct marketing helps to communicate directly with the customers.
SEO is the strategy that you should turn to when you want to reach the top of the SERPs and stay there. This isn’t something that happens quickly, so you need to be persistent. SEO strategies have long lasting benefits.
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