- 6/5/2017 2:20:29 AM
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- Introduction to Digital Marketing Channels for Your Business
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Introduction to Digital Marketing Channels for Your Business
The transition from traditional forms of marketing to digital marketing has pretty much changed the way people market brands and businesses as well. While traditional marketing is still in practice, it is digital marketing that is changing the marketing landscape for most businesses across geographies, industries, and time zones. The digital marketing industry, therefore, has introduced various channels of digital marketing which helps marketers target the right audience and attract them towards the product or service being marketed.
It is this boom in digital marketing that necessitates the need for a brand to create a solid online presence and project an image in tandem with the platform being used as well as their vision and mission. For this reason, it is important to understand not just what digital marketing can offer your brand or business but also the scope of various digital marketing channels and how best you can utilize these channels of digital marketing. For a digital marketing campaign to be rock solid and perform as well as expected, it is important for you to recognize the digital marketing channels through which your brand or business needs to be marketed; for not every channel or digital marketing platform is relevant for businesses and brands across industries and markets.
Here, in this article, you will not only get to know more about the various digital marketing channels you can use to market your brand and business, but also the scope of these channels.
Digital Marketing Channels
Some of the digital marketing channels are listed below. A more detailed explanation of these channels will be provided later in the article.
Some of the most popular digital marketing channels include the following –
. Social Media Marketing
. Search Engine Optimization
. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
. Email Marketing
. Content Marketing
. Affiliate Marketing
. Display Advertising
. Online PR
How do you decide the right digital marketing channel?
While the aforementioned are a list of the most popularly used digital marketing channels, the channels your brand or business should adopt depends on multiple factors.
First and foremost, you need to understand the digital marketing channels and platforms that are relevant for your brand or business to be on. If you are a B2B business, it would not help much to be on all social media platforms. Similarly, for a B2C brand or business, a platform like LinkedIn might not prove to be as useful as, say, Facebook or Instagram or even Twitter. Next you need to understand where most of your target audience will be on. This helps you get your basic platforms right.
The right digital marketing channel for your brand or business also depends on your brand’s business goals. If your goal is to generate leads for your business and you’re a B2B brand, it makes more sense to use platforms that are business centric and have features that will help you generate leads.
Digital Marketing Channels Explained
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing, as the name suggests, is a digital marketing channel used to promote and market brands and businesses on various social media platforms. Some of the popular social media marketing platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on. The platform you choose depends on whether you’re B2B or B2C apart from a whole lot of other factors including your brand’s business goals.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is popularly called, is the art and science of getting websites or specific web pages to show up on search engines when specific keywords are used as search terms. SEO helps a brand gain visibility across search engines and geographies. The process of optimizing a website for search engines begins quite early, more or less at the time the website is being built. This is because the content that will ultimately go up on the website will have to be optimized for search engines, while ensuring the keywords relevant to the business and website are present in the content.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay Per Click Advertising is a type of digital marketing where the advertiser pays for every click of an ad. Here, you can create multiple ads, monitor them real-time, and optimize them as you go. The advantage of this form of advertising is the paying bit. These are more specific in nature since you get to define your audience to the T and these ads are shown specifically to those matching the parameters you’ve defined. The amount you spend on PPC ads will depend, to a large extent on the placement of ads, the type of ads (search ads/display ads), and so on.
Email Marketing
Email marketing, as the name suggests, is a digital marketing channel which is used to market brands and businesses through emails. While email marketing runs the risk of emails getting into the Spam folder, it is still a powerful means of increasing visibility of your brand or business. Email marketing is used not just as a means of brand awareness, but also to generate leads, highlight product offers, send out newsletters, and so on.
Content Marketing
Content is central to all marketing campaigns and activities. Content marketing involves marketing various pieces of content written in your niche on several digital marketing channels. What is most important for content marketing to work is high-quality, non-plagiarized content. While non-plagiarized content is important, it is also necessary for you to ensure the content you’re trying to market is relevant to your brand or business. The content you create can be in a variety of formats including blogs, infographics, and other visual and written content formats.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a channel of digital marketing which works with the help of affiliate marketers. It is a slowly catching up field in the area of digital marketing. Affiliate marketers normally work on a commission basis where they charge a certain amount as commission for every product or service they market through the process of affiliate marketing.
Display Advertising
Display advertising normally works more on the principle of placing display ads on various blogs, websites, forums, and so on. In affiliate marketing, the payment works more on a Cost Per Impression or CPM model rather than a Cost Per Click model.
Online PR
Online Public Relations is another field which, although not directly related to the concept of digital marketing, can be considered to be a part of the overall digital marketing strategy of a brand or business. It seems to connect more with Content Marketing, as a large part of PR is to do with creating content about a brand or business.
Overall, the aforementioned digital marketing channels work well if you have a solid digital marketing strategy in place for your brand or business. Each channel has to be evaluated for its relevance in your overall marketing strategy and needs to be aligned in keeping with your business goals.
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