Marketing your company online has become an essential part of running a successful business in this day and age. Without utilizing the internet at your disposal, you may be losing thousands of potential customers and, of course, thousands of dollars in additional sales and profit. Unfortunately, when it comes to online marketing, everything isn’t always as transparent as you may want it to be. There are hundreds of options available when it comes to promoting your business online and finding the right one is often a decision that is too difficult to make. When you hit such a crossroad, you may decide to play it safe and utilize all of the marketing channels that are available to you – the more services you use, the better exposure your business gains…. Right?
While it may seem like your business will gain the most benefits from utilizing a large variety of marketing channels at one time, you should realize that if to pull it off and to make this type of strategy successful, you need a multi-million dollar company that is able to spend thousands (and sometimes up to millions) of dollars every single month on a floor filled with marketing staff or an expensive digital agency that can perform these tasks for you. You might be wondering why you cannot do it yourself and the answer is quite simple – it simply takes up too much time. Utilizing just one single marketing channel already takes time and quite a lot of effort, so imagine having to attend to fifty marketing channels every single day. In the end, this could cost you more money than it brings in.
Which Marketing Channels Is Right for Your Business?
To make things much easier, you should first realize that targeting less marketing channels, especially when you are running your website or business alone, or if you have a small business without an adequate amount of staff that can attend to multiple channels at the same time, can be more beneficial for your business. Apart from this factor, you should also note that every marketing channel doesn’t really work for every type of business. Furthermore, it is also important to do proper research and to determine which marketing channels are worthless today and which ones are thriving. By combining these factors, you will be able to come up with a focused marketing plant that will help you engage with customers online and attract them to your business.
Quick Sprout recommends starting out with search engine optimization as the base of any business’s marketing plan. Search engine optimization refers to how well your website is optimized to outperform competitors for certain keywords in search engines, such as Google. This technique requires optimization to be done on your website, as well as back-links to be built from external websites. It is often considered to be the most valuable marketing channel as ranking for multiple high volume keywords can provide you with a lot of targeted visitors every single day.
Proven SEO, a company that specializes in influencer marketing and sponsored content, recommends utilizing some of the top social media networks as part of a marketing plan – including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Once again, not every social network will work for every type of business; thus, it is important to consider the target audience for each network and to determine which would be best suited for your specific business.
A Plan of Action
Kiss Metrics recommend setting some social networking goals for your business first, then to set up metrics that will help you monitor the efficiency of each goal. Finally, monitoring and measuring the performance of each goal will help you identify the marketing channels with the most potential – and those you need to drop. You also need to match certain types of content with certain networks, for example:
- YouTube is a video sharing platform, so you should share videos on this marketing channel. You can also utilize their video advertising program to display your video advertisement on the videos uploaded by other users.
- SoundCloud is an audio sharing platform. If you’re not going to set up podcasts, then this marketing channel will not do much for your business, so don’t try to include it in your marketing plan.
- LinkedIn is a network for professionals and not a channel that you should utilize if you’re trying to sell something to consumers, such as a diet pill or a piece of clothes. Rather turn towards Facebook and their advertising platform if you are not targeting professionals.
- SnapChat and Instagram are both image sharing platforms. The first one allows you to send images, animations and videos to contacts, and the other one allows you to post images to a profile page. If you do not run a hair studio, clothing boutique or another type of business that often takes pictures and posts them online, then you shouldn’t worry about these platforms, but rather focus on the ones your target audience is hanging out on.
Final Words
It’s 2017 and we all need to catch up to the fact that online marketing is a must for every business now – even those businesses that have been going for multiple decades have seen an increase in consumer engagement and sales after they started to make use of online marketing channels. While it may seem like a difficult task at first, setting clear goals and sticking with a smaller number of channels that suits your business best can make the task easier and even lead to more success.
