By ndadmin on 01/22/2018
Selecting the right marketing channels for your target audience is critical to achieving successful ROI from your digital marketing campaigns. This assumes you first know who your audience is, understanding where they can be found, and then structuring and executing campaigns to reach the right people via the right channels.
Making a mistake in your online marketing channels can be a HUGE, unprofitable expense. In this post, we cover a bit of detail behind a number of popular marketing channels and hope it's helpful for your digital marketing efforts.
Keep in mind - to invest in marketing, you first must know your audience, know your value to them, and position your company/products/services in a way that appeals to them.
What's your goal with marketing? Sales? Qualified Leads? Branding?
Assuming you've got all of that covered, we'll start with the big ones.
Popular online marketing channels:
These are the big online channels to find your target audience across both web and mobile. We'll spend a bit of time discussing some of the unique and/or special aspects of each of these.
Facebook - let's face it, everyone is on facebook, with most people on there near daily. Facebook has the most sophisticated targeting and is often the most cost-efficient way to reach your audience, typically ages 25-65 years old. Many companies and brands choose to invest their marketing dollars on campaigns that leverage facebook, in some way.
Whether your want to reach someone on desktop or mobile, Facebook is a great option that will likely get you in front of the people you want to be in front of.
LinkedIn has the credibility of a trusted network of business professionals. With that said, LinkedIn is definitely not the most broad and effective way of targeting your audience. Make sure to spend time getting your profile, your connections, and your company page up to suitable quality. From there, joining groups and publishing content is a great way to grow attention and a following. They have an umber of paid marketing channels, as well, which are good content for another post!
Google is similar to facebook with a massive reach, great ability to target/segment, and can be an extremely good way to get you in front of people with the intent of finding you. It's not often the low-cost solution, to bid on PPC, use their display network, or retarget - however can be extremely effective in targeting your audience and directing your marketing spend to the highest value audience.
Marketing channels for younger demographics:
Here we enter the younger crowds, and less of an ability to truly segment/target - however, with as popular as these platforms are with the younger demographic, it may be ideal for your business.
Youtube is the ideal video ad destination, and can be a hugely successful marketing channel for the right circumstances. You have the same targeting as google, however often times it's the younger children/siblings that are watching, so be careful here.
Instagram is great for "cool" brands and products/services. There's not a huge amount of businesses investing in Instagram, however many are and having success in a few ways. It's photo-centric and has highly engaged users.
Snapchat is the most popular messaging app for the 13-25 year old demographic. It can be a good option for brand awareness, or for geo-relevant real-time info.
Traditional marketing channels:
- TV & Radio
- Billboards / Magazines
- Referral / Lead Networks
Here we get into the old school, which is sometimes the best school. TV & Radio are push broadcast without the metrics and data to really evaluate the effectiveness. For some businesses, it's the right way to go for part of your marketing spend..for many others, it's safe to ignore completely. Many budgets are being updated to remove TV/Radio and increase spending on Internet.
Billboards and magazines are much the same story. How tight is the location/niche? Make sure this is a channel that can get you proper ROI.
It's rare to find a case where referrals and lead networks are not a good benefit for your company. The main issue with them, is that it's manual. You must show up, share, engage, follow-up, and you should be doing this anyway...
And, last in this list but certainly not least:
- Tradeshows
Tradeshows can be a huge investment, both as an attendee and an exhibitor. Typically, businesses attend or exhibit at tradeshows then manually followup to close business and grow relationships after.
Keep in mind, your investment is not limited to only the ad spend or attendance/exhibition. You must invest in messaging, content, graphics, and all assets (including human and technical) involved in the followup.
As with any investment, please make sure to measure, analyze, and leverage the data on your KPI's to drive adjustments to your strategy as you hone in on the channels that provide you the best ROI.
