In the world of digital marketing, there are numerous channels that enable your business to increase sales and profit. Choosing the right channel depends on your business model, the resources you have, what your unique business value is, and what your product is.
Your Business Model
Whether your marketing strategy relies on a robust social media presence or includes traditional outreach like email marketing, your business model dictates the right strategy for you.
B2C
In this model, businesses sell products and/or services directly to their end users.
B2B
In B2B business models, businesses sell to and buy from each other.
C2C
Platforms like eBay and Craigslist have allowed consumers to conduct business with each other through an online marketplace.
C2B
C2B business models have recently become more popular with the rise of social media influencers and freelance work, allowing consumers to sell goods and services to companies.
Social Media Marketing
With the possibility of going viral on social media, individuals and businesses alike rely on these social platforms to spread brand and product awareness while building consumer loyalty.
As a result, social media is a prime place to implement online marketing and promote your business. Many platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok provide exclusive features for businesses to utilize that will help in their marketing efforts.
For example, you can feasibly run ad campaigns through these platforms, deciding whether you would like to pay for your campaign and reach a targeted audience, or instead run a generic standard free campaign. While a free campaign may not be targeted, with the right measures taken, you can still ensure more visibility, engagement, and conversions.
If you sell a more brand-driven product, you might want to focus on these more visual platforms. On the other hand, businesses often create a formal brand identity on business-centered platforms like LinkedIn, which also provides opportunities for your business to grow both organically and with paid campaigns.
Email Marketing
The traditional route of email marketing enables a reliable reach both internally and externally. With email marketing, you utilize visual elements with consistent outreach methods like weekly, or even daily, updates.
Organized email marketing not only drives conversions, but it also increases website traffic and creates a method of communication between your business and the consumers.
Whether you are using tools like MailChimp, SendGrid, or HubSpot, you have a variety of resources that will direct your email marketing efforts.
Advertising
There are a few different types of paid advertising, such as pay per click or display advertising. Pay per click advertising means that you will be charged your assigned price any time someone clicks on your ad for a certain targeted keyword. Display advertising is charged usually per 1,000 impressions. So every 1,000 times your ad is shown, you are billed a set amount.
Advertising also assists in making sure your business is search-engine-optimized. With the right keyword strategy, you can improve your SERP, search engine results page, ranking.
Affiliate Marketing
Social media influencers utilize the practice of affiliate marketing in which businesses give a portion of the profit made from promotional efforts by external players.
Conversions are easily tracked with embedded links and your marketing efforts are easily handled by the affiliate marketers driving revenue and traffic for your business.
Best Marketing Channels For You
You will want to consider the unit economics of your product: will it work on the channel? If you are selling $500 sneakers, it might be hard to sell that at scale on Facebook or TikTok, just because of the nature of the channel. Higher price point items might take longer to sell or require more relationship building on the brand side, as opposed to the immediacy of social channels.
There’s not one marketing channel or a list of marketing channels that will work for every business but relying on multiple marketing channels is always a good idea. Evaluating these elements - your business model, resources, unique value, and products - will help you identify the best channels to start with.
Doing market research can also help inform what your channel mix should be. Sit down with current customers or people in your target audience to better understand what motivates them, what they use your product for, where they spend time online, and how they first heard about you. These insights will help guide your marketing regardless of the channel.
Contact Aptimized today if you are unsure of where to start. Marketing does not have to be unattainable - we will make sure you are optimizing your efforts for the highest ROI possible.