When was the last time you thought about your business’s online digital marketing?
It’s easy to overlook, but online marketing is an important area that you need to stay on top of.
Below we have listed the 7 top digital marketing channels that your business should be represented in, no matter your sector or industry.
The way people research, browse, and purchase products and services has changed, and most people are now multichannel and multi-device internet users.
So, if there is no adequate representation of your prospects, you will lose out to competitors.
Here are our top 7 digital marketing channels:
Paid Search
Paid search can deliver amazing results.
It is great because it is:
- Quick and easy to implement
- Highly measurable and easy to track
- Seamless integration with analytics (Adwords and Google Analytics)
- Easy to stop and abandon
- High volumes of traffic especially from search engines
- Available on social media platforms with high traffic volumes
- Sends qualified visitors that are ready to purchase
You might have heard of Google Adwords and this is the leading paid search platform followed by Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and others.
Its primary pricing model is CPC (cost per click), which is a charge for every click through to your website and the other is CPM (cost per thousand impressions), which
has a charge rate for every 1000 impressions for your ads.
Paid search is crucial to multi-channel shopping and frequently plays a role in both the awareness and purchase stages of the purchasing process.
In order to prevent customers from turning to your competitors when they are ready to buy, you must make sure that your paid advertisements have a sufficient budget and are always active.
Organic Search
Organic search is also known as natural search, and you will see these results when you search on Google and other search engines in the main area of the page.
One of the fascinating things about organic search is that this traffic is free, and you don’t pay per click like Paid Search above.
Organic search can take a lot of effort to develop and, depending on your sector, can be tough to compete. That’s why we always recommend Paid Search to new and small businesses.
The goal with organic search is to get your site to the top of the search engines for your chosen keywords, and the technique to do this is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Organic search is important throughout all phases of the customer decision-making process (Perception of need, Information search, Evaluation of products, Purchase and Post-purchase evaluation).
So you should have keywords targeted at each stage of the buying process.
Direct
Direct traffic is significant and a step closer to the purchasing of your product or service.
Prospects will visit your website straight after conducting their research on social media, paid search engines, and organic search engines.
So while this isn’t technically a digital marketing channel, it is a crucial stage in the conversion process.
Referrals
Referrals include a wide range of sites and portals across the web and a high presence of many sites will often show referrals as being crucial to the paths that people take to completing a goal or purchase on your website.
Offering a deal to entice people to spread the word can lead to conversions that might otherwise not have happened.
Social Networks
Social networks don’t often play a big part in digital marketing channels last-click attribution models.
That’s because it is more efficient at creating awareness and interest in a brand and products and it contributes to website visitors – however, at a minimal volume compared to organic and paid traffic.
However, it is an effective channel for creating loyalty and customer retention.
Social media is also great for creating a buzz and sending out viral content related to your business.
Email is the best digital marketing channel for fostering customer and visitor loyalty.
Visitors who have subscribed to your blog or newsletter have expressed a high level of confidence and belief that you can meet their needs or wants.
It is still quite efficient at increasing sales and conversions even though it is not frequently mentioned in top channel reports for many organisations.
Display
Display is perhaps the best digital marketing channel for generating awareness for your products and brands to an audience that is not familiar with your business.
It has high impact, and although it has low click-through rate compared to search campaigns, it has a far wider reach.
