Learn Which Internet Marketing Channel is Right for You

It is an old saying that we should concentrate on a single marketing channel, and work for it till we ace it.
People in the early days used to spend thousands of dollars just to make their advertisement visible on television. This platform was used on a huge basis because advertisers knew their audience is definitely going to watch the advertisement.

Nowadays, advertisers are paying lump sum money to the TV channels just to flash their ads during the high TRP serials. All this planning and investment is done, just to reach to the audience, regardless of knowing what would be its outcome. Yes, offline marketing is just one-way communication, where you cannot understand the effects of your ads on your audience. Some other offline mediums are Radio, Newspaper, Billboard ads, etc. But not everyone chooses all the channels as the cost associated with them is high.
All these channels can be effective but not sure. That’s why most of the people are now moving towards the online channels. Similarly to offline, even online channels have different platforms where you can showcase your ads. Again the same question arises, which internet channel shall I choose?
In this article, I will try to guide you on which channel you shall choose and why to choose it.

One of my clients suggested an online marketing platform and asked me to advertise his product only on that channel. On this, I asked him, how did he land on that conclusion and why he has chosen that platform? The client answered because some of his friends are doing so, and he himself hasn’t done any research on it. Then I explained to him all the advantages and disadvantages of his decision and luckily he agreed upon it. So my friends, if you don’t know, what internet channel is right for you then I would suggest you ask about it to experts. Don’t just give a fluke which you won’t be able to afford later.

Primary Things to be Considered :

There are some factors that you need to consider before selecting any online channel. These will help you to take the right decision.

1) Your in-house talent :

Before looking out for the outside talent, you must consider the trustworthy resources available in your own organization. Following are the resources that you can look for in your employee base :

(i) Strong developers resource:  Your website or other online platforms shall change according to the ads that you are going to make. Thus, it is good to have the technical staff that is able to make changes on your website so as to support to achieve the marketing goals.

(ii) Strong creative resource:  You shall have designers, writers, artists who can come up with new ideas every-time for the new ads.

(iii) Strong research resource:  Your research marketing team can definitely find out the market needs and competitors’ move to make you ready for the battle in the huge advertising industry.

(iv) Strong Social media resources:  You should have strong social media engagement.

2) Advertisement Budget :

Once you have identified the in-house talent, the next step comes to plan your budget by considering all the factors.
Find out how much can you spend on your marketing activities. It may vary as per the channels you select. We have clients investing from $5thousand to $1million in their online advertisement.

The purpose of any type of marketing is to generate lead from it. Internet marketing has open windows of opportunities, to promote your business. B2B companies are gaining a wide range of customer base through their website, social media marketing, email marketing and paid ads.
With so many options available, you may think which channel to consider, so that further you can plot your marketing strategies accordingly.

Those marketing channels are :

1) Websites and blogs 

Your website or blog has the power to do miracles for you. They always stand as the first way of communication between you and your audience. Prospects nowadays, expect offers and coupons on your website or any kind of content that is able to answer their specific queries.

Advantages :
(i) A website helps you to boost your SEO.
(ii) It enhances your multimedia capabilities so as to distribute the content in the variety of formats.
(iii) It attracts new prospects and helps to engage with the existing customers.
(iv) Websites and blogs help you to build brand awareness, authority building, storytelling and passive sales messaging.

Tips for Website/Blog marketing :
(i) Re-create or modify your website as per the demand of the market. Update it with the latest products added, providing a piece of brief information about it.
(ii) Add call-to-action on your web pages.
(iii) Try to answer clients’ questions through your website content.
(iv) Lastly, don’t forget to publish new articles that will increase readers engagement.

2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is an organic(unpaid) way to enhance the ranking of your website on the search page results. The purpose of SEO is to rank your website higher so as to increase the visibility, authority and Alexa scores. The higher the website is ranked means that it will get more traffic, activity and conversion rates. SEO compromises of several activities like keyword research, on-page and off-page optimization, creating back-links, etc. Thus, optimizing SEO in your website content will effectively increase your search ranking, so that it becomes easy for customers to find you.

Advantages :
(i) SEO is a very cost effective method.
(ii) It can rank your business well in your chosen niche.
(iii) It supplies the flow of targeted traffic to you.
(iv) It scales up your business to get the maximum reach.

Tips for doing SEO :
(i) Find out your keywords and incorporate them to your high quality and engaging content.
(ii) Reach out to reputed websites in order to earn back-links from them.
(iii) Work as per the Google algorithm updates.

Related: SEO tutorial for Beginners in 2019

3) Pay Per Click (PPC)

Want the speedy results?
Go for PPC. It is the fastest type of marketing channels to drive a targeted audience to your web pages.
But, doing PPC isn’t that easy, you need to set the goal and aim behind your PPC campaign. Aimless investment in PPC can give you zero output, along with costing a huge number of dollars to your organization.
Your advertisement budget is in your control that enables you to spend on the basis of its duration which can be for a day, a week, or a month. Make sure that you have the guarantee about the keywords that you choose for your PPC campaign to make it more effective, also optimize your ad with valid and necessary content that circulates important information among your audience.

Advantages :
(i) You get the authority to set your maximum budget for your ads.
(ii) The competition is fair. That means, you can participate in the search ranking race, even if your current rankings are not high. This is the reason, most of the startups use PPC to give a head-start to their business.
(iii) You can test multiple ads in real time. The track of your ad campaign is visible to you, so it becomes easy for you to make changes in the parameters that aren’t working as per your expectations in the real time itself.

Tips for PPC :
(i) You need to choose the right bid strategy. Consider Target Cost Per Acquisition, Target Return on Ad Spend.
(ii) Make impression based strategies. Such as target search pages, Target Outranking, Measure Cost Per Thousands Viewable Impressions.
(iii) Your ad should be displayed at the right time on the right platform.
(iv) Target your locations carefully.

Related: 9 Reasons Why Using Paid Ads is Profitable for Your Online Business

4) Email marketing

Email marketing is the best way to maintain rapport with your potential clients that help to enrich the relationship with them. Also, sending some useful emails that help to solve your customers’ issues rather than sending the pushy sales emails, leads to gaining their trust and loyalty.

 

 

Advantages :
(i) It is a very cost-effective strategy. You can also do it for free.
(ii) You can build a strong relationship by regularly sharing a valuable piece of information.
(iii) It allows you to customize as per your buyer’s personas.
(iv) Easy to create and relatively fast to send.

Tips for Email marketing :
(i) Track your business and send the information accordingly that will educate your clients and customers.
(ii) Don’t just send vague emails. List down some of the points that need to be shared and circulate it within some of the interested clients.
(iii) Study audience behavior and try to inform them about their interesting segments.

5) Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is largely practiced in recent times. 48.98% in the globe are mobile users, 47.04% are desktop users and 3.98% are tablet users that means you should definitely go for mobile marketing. To make it an effective mobile marketing campaign, you should understand the behavior of your mobile audience, work on the designing content to make it more mobile friendly, use mobile apps and advertisements.

Advantages :
(i) It helps to speed up the sales at a faster rate
(ii) Mobile advertisements can be seen from anywhere and by anyone who has a mobile with the data connection.
(iii) It provides the data to study the views of customers

Tips for Mobile Marketing :
(i) Make the most of the features and capabilities of smartphones, such as its location data, camera and downloading of apps from play store.
(ii) Try to use more graphics and less text
(iii) Invest time studying the mobile purchase behavior of the market, so as to make sure that your work gets displayed to more people.

Formula to choose the right online marketing channel :

With the number of options available any newbie may get confused about how could they select a right channel for them.
Below formula may help you doing so:
Before plotting this formula, I want you to jot down your Budget and Company Goals.

Company Goals

Now you might have got an idea about what parameters you need to consider as per their importance to your organization.

Defining the company’s goal is as important as defining your advertisement target.
One who knows where his company stands and where he wants to take it further will always be clear about the company’s goal, mission, and vision.

Summing Up 

Online marketing is a huge tree with lots of fruitful branches. Each branch is a channel that we use for our marketing and advertisement purpose. It depends on every individual of an organization to identify the value of each channel that leads a path towards the success of an organization.