Marketing has evolved over the years and businesses can now reach their intended audience in more ways than ever. However, with so many different marketing channels available, it can become challenging to choose the right options to complement one another and help you achieve your goals.
The idea is to make sure you’re spending your time, money, and effort on the marketing channels with the most impact. Choosing the marketing channels to focus on isn’t a complicated process. All you need is to understand how each works, what kind of results to expect, and how well they can work with other channels.
Before we get to discussing how your marketing channels affect one another, let’s start with the basics.
What are marketing channels?
In simplest terms, marketing channels are outlets used by a business to reach its end customers and provide value. The strategic use of multiple marketing channels goes a long way in determining how a business delivers its products or services to customers. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to understand what each channel offers to create a solid, effective strategy.
These strategies are often referred to as multichannel or cross-channel marketing. While the primary goal here is to reach more customers based on the platforms that they frequent most, it’s also important to make it easy for them to complete desired engagements and conversions on that platform.
Why is cross-channel marketing important in today’s digital landscape?
Because it gives your prospects the luxury of choice, while also expanding your marketing reach. If as a business owner, you stick with only one marketing channel, then you’re letting tons of prospects slip by without interaction whatsoever with your brand.
Multi-channel marketing also allows you to take advantage of changing consumer trends. For instance, there was a time people saw Instagram as purely social interaction and an image-sharing platform. Today, however, Instagram has evolved into a standalone marketplace where users can discover brands and make direct purchases without leaving the platform.
Staying ahead of changing trends is always a good thing for businesses.
Most Popular Online Marketing Channels
In today’s digital marketing era, there are many channels that small businesses can take advantage of to maximize their marketing efforts and enjoy better investment returns. These channels include:
- PPC and other forms of online advertising
- Website (including SEO and content marketing)
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing — Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, etc
- Mobile marketing
- Graphic design
- Video marketing
As the years go by, it’s safe to expect this list to continue growing and existing channels to continue to evolve to meet changing consumer behavior.
How do these channels affect one another?
Well, that’s easy. Let’s start with the website. Your website contains important information about your business and unique selling points. This information is the result of a well-crafted SEO strategy, coupled with quality content marketing.
Without SEO and content, your website is just an empty platform that is taking up space on the internet. Sure you can always use just content, but without SEO, how will people find your website?
Driving Traffic
So you’ve got your website up and running. Your next concern is getting people to visit the site and interact with the awesome, optimized content that you’ve placed there. That’s where PPC, social media, email marketing, guest posting, link building, other channels come in.
By utilizing these channels, you’re not only reaching customers on those respective platforms but also driving that traffic back to your website. For instance, if you’re running a paid media ad on Google and someone clicks on it, they’ll end on your website or designated landing page. Same with when they click a link in your guest post.
Social media is also a great source of traffic, though many of them now allow direct buying on their platforms so you might as well set that up on your social accounts.
Audience Engagement
This is important because people first need to engage with your content before they buy from you. Video marketing and graphic design are great for boosting engagement since they’re ultimately much easier to consume than the written word. The better the engagement, the higher the chances of conversion.
Maintain Competitive Edge
These channels are also perfect for standing out of the competition. If your competitors are not utilizing enough marketing channels, then you automatically gain an edge over them since you can reach more customers and have them interact with your brand across multiple channels.
As you can see, multiple marketing channels are often interdependent on one another to ensure the fastest, most effective way to reach your goal(s). What’s important here is that you work with an experienced marketing agency to bring all these different channels under a cohesive marketing strategy,
Tulumi is Your Trusted Muli-Channel Marketing Partner
At Tulumi, we work with you to identify the right marketing channels for your business and maximize business growth. We’ll help you develop a tailored plan so you can direct your resources on channels that can bring about the most impact. Call us now at (800) 481-1720 for a FREE consultation.
