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How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Channels

Perhaps, today only micro-business can do without Internet promotion. For example, if a barber already has clients, then they don’t need to launch context advertising, and if there is a constant flow of visitors to the bakery around the corner, then it’s hard to imagine why it needs a website. However, as soon as there is a need to scale the business or increase the cost of services, you need to launch new channels to attract an audience.

The Internet will come to the rescue. We will tell you what promotion methods exist and which marketing channels to choose depending on the needs of the business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

All sites that match the search query are ranked, in other words, carefully sorted from the most relevant to the least. If you want to get quality SEO services, be sure to select a reliable agency, SeoProfy reviews confirm that this is the right destination if you are looking for the solution for your online project promotion.

To crawl each site, a search robot visits it and evaluates the quality of the code, texts, titles, download speed, URL, and other elements. Many of these parameters can be influenced, and this is what SEO specialists do. Advantages:

• People enter queries and are interested in finding goods and services.
• Long-term effect of the advertising channel: even several months after the end of optimization in the most competitive niches, the site can maintain its position and attract visitors.
• Technical improvement of the site, speeding up its work, filling it with content.
• Increasing reach and brand awareness.
• The ability to receive visits for low-frequency and not very popular queries among the audience, for which context impressions are impossible.

Contextual Advertising

These are the advertisements that users see when they enter search terms. The main contextual advertising system is Google AdWords, but you can also set up impressions in it using third-party automation systems. The context has many formats: only with text, images in different resolutions, and video. Text ads with links are placed among the search results and are marked with the word “Advertising”.

A special type of contextual advertising is retargeting (remarketing). It is not aimed at attracting a new audience, but at the return of those who for some reason left the company’s website. For example, retargeting will help remind those who have viewed a certain number of pages on the site, studied specific products or services, or even added them to the cart but have not placed an order, to remind them about your company. Advantages:

• Ads in this marketing channel can be set up and run very quickly – in 15-20 minutes.
• Users will see ads in search engines and on hundreds of thousands of partner network sites.
• You can take into account dozens of display parameters: queries, geography, gender, age, audience interests, and others.
• There are smart algorithms that increase the effectiveness of advertising.

Targeted Advertising

These are ads that are targeted to an audience with certain parameters. The main source of data and platforms for placement are social networks. By registering in them, people fill out profiles with a lot of information about themselves (gender, age, city of residence, interests, etc.), and then they can replenish this data set by joining communities, playing games, listening to music, reading posts, and so on. Social networks use this information to help advertisers find customers. Advantages:

• High coverage at a relatively low price.
• Precise and detailed target audience settings for targeting.
• A large number of payment formats and types (per 1,000 impressions, per clicks, per app install, per product sales, etc.)
• The possibility of promotion without a website, only with a page on the social network.

Email Marketing

This is the promotion of products or services through email newsletters. If you work with your database of addresses and carefully approach the drafting of email texts, the effectiveness of this advertising channel can be very high. For example, a 2021 study showed that the conversion rate for all sent emails alone can reach 1.3%, and for those that users have opened, it is more than 15%. This is because only interested customers usually subscribe to the mailing list, they have already used the company’s products before.

When starting an email campaign, it is important to:

• send letters regularly, but not often, so as not to annoy the user;
• be sure to segment the subscriber base and write letters for each segment separately (for example, by purchase age, its amount, purchased goods, and so on);
• create non-boring content that will attract attention among a bunch of other letters in the client’s mail;
• do not make all letters commercial, but give the user useful or entertaining information;
• offer unique bonuses from time to time, such as closed webinars, unique discounts, access to limited collections, and so on.

Advantages of this method are the following:

• Relatively low price;
• High channel efficiency;
• Emails can be targeted by geography, product preferences, age, and many other parameters;
• An email can convey a lot of information, unlike an advertisement;
• You can write on any topic: from life hacks or informational ads to special offers for narrow product groups;
• Mailing list services have many additional marketing options: SMS alerts, chatbots, landing pages, newsletter subscription forms, integration with analytics systems, and more;
• The newsletter can be configured in detail depending on the user’s actions or events, for example, an order, leaving the site without a purchase, leaving a review, and others.

Content Marketing

This is a long-term strategy for producing content that is useful or interesting to the audience. Content marketing allows you to create a positive image of the company, increase the recognition of a service or product and the trust of users in it, and, as a result, increase sales. In a broad sense, content marketing for a company is the promotion of any blog. Advantages:

• It makes it possible to place links that bring an interested audience to the site, often making requests.
• It increases brand awareness and the level of literacy of users in your field and shows them the expertise of the company.
• It gives a long-term effect that lasts for many months or even years and helps to get to the top of search engines for information queries.

SMM

Social Media Marketing is the promotion of a store or brand on social networks. There you can get closer to your consumer: communicate directly with real and potential buyers, convey your offers to them and get feedback. As part of this promotion channel, brand communities are created and maintained and their publications are promoted. Each member sees community posts in their news feed. Advantages:

• The company can directly contact the interested audience and get a quick response to posts.
• Advertising looks native – messages on social networks are still often not perceived as direct advertising.
• You can achieve large coverage and attract a new audience with the given parameters: gender, age, interests, and more.

Influencer Marketing

It can also be attributed to SMM, but more and more people talk about it as an independent promotion channel. Influence marketing is the promotion of goods or services with the help of opinion leaders: bloggers, stars, and experts in various industries. Their advertising can be either explicit (from a video or post, it is clear that this is an advertisement) or hidden (when the publication does not hint at advertising integration, but it seems that the influencer uses the product). Advantages:

• Ads from favorite bloggers are perceived better than just distracting videos and have a higher conversion into orders.
• It is possible to achieve high coverage among the audience with the parameters necessary for the advertiser (age, profession, social status, income level, interests, and so on).
• Also, it allows you to increase brand awareness and trust in it.

To choose the right marketing channel for you, you should test several of them. The one that will show the highest conversion should be your main one.