ShivaniGrowing your brand and having a strong marketing channel strategy go hand in hand. The most important marketing strategy is the one that fits your brand and your target consumers – and performs best in terms of cost, effort, and impact. Choosing wisely when deciding which channels to focus on is as vital for the life of your brand as that initial domain name purchase.
What is a Marketing Channel?
Fundamentally, marketing channels are methods and spaces for connecting with and being seen by your target consumers. These can be online or offline, digital or physical, and can be paid for or free to access. They range from websites, social media, email campaigns, advertising online and on billboards, and leveraging search engine optimization.
Like choosing the right domain name purchase, choosing the right channels for your business is essential for marketing strategies that drive sales. Let’s look at the five most important marketing channel strategy to grow your brand.
Search Engine
There are two ways to push more traffic to your website – and to get your site at the top of the results page. You can pay to gain visibility by using pay-per-click options such as Google Ads, or you can opt for the cost-free approach of using SEO (search engine optimization).
SEO is very effective over the long term for driving traffic to your site and boosting your brand. But as with many free options, it works only as well as the time, thought, and effort you put in. To really boost your online visibility – for example, to ensure your .nz domain is working for your business in New Zealand – all of your content, blogs, articles, even videos and social media posts need to be optimized. In other words, they need to contain relevant terms and keywords.
There are various points to get right when optimizing for search engines. You need a clear vision of your site content. Ask yourself, what is it predominantly about? What are the main topics? This will help narrow down and focus your keywords. Make sure your content provides the kind of information your consumers want – does it inform and help? Is it good quality and engaging?
To capitalize on this marketing channel, you should also ensure your website functions well in terms of layout and accessibility. There is little to gain by driving traffic to a site where the content is arranged in a confusing or hard-to-navigate layout. SEO can only do so much. You need a great website to fully take advantage of any marketing channel.
Lastly, make sure your site is optimized for mobile as well as desktop view. Mobile is often the most convenient way for customers to engage with your brand. It’s frustrating for customers – and gives a bad impression of the brand – when a website fails to function well on a mobile phone.
Social Media
Social media is one of the best marketing platforms for any size of business. As with SEO, there are paid and more organic, free options when it comes to leveraging social media.
Brands can pay media companies to advertise or mention their products and services on social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram, but there are cost-free options too (although these do involve investments of time and planning).
The number one reason that social media is such a valuable marketing channel is its sheer visibility. The average consumer checks in with multiple social media platforms on a daily basis. Globally, we each spend roughly 151 minutes per day browsing on social media platforms. Most of this interaction is social, interest, and lifestyle based. Consumers don’t go on a social media site specifically to look at adverts, but they are frequently exposed to them on these platforms.
Understanding this is key if you are going to take advantage of social media’s power to persuade and influence. A brand that uses social media well engages and interacts with its consumer base like a friend or trusted organization. Bombarding followers with ads is not the best strategy; it’s better to cultivate a loyal following by engaging in conversations naturally and encouraging followers to interact with your business organically.
Building authentic relationships with customers is crucial, because any new consumer visiting your social media profile, having visited your website, will get a snapshot of your brand’s tone and style and how you treat your customers. This is vital for building brand trust and presence.
Influencers
Influencers are increasingly playing a role in brand promotion and building reputation. Influencers are often a well-known personality and someone whose taste, style, or opinion is valued by the public. Influencers have the advantage of not being professional marketers, but can perform a similar function.
It’s important to choose your influencer carefully. They should have a genuine connection with your product or service and be a trusted brand advocate. They should also have enough appeal in your region to boost your brand. For example, if you are based in a particular geographic location, such as the Caribbean, your domain ai might mean that a fashion influencer based in that region would be an advantage.
It’s also important to look at the number of followers and how much engagement an influencer has. You should consider how active they are, the quality and reputation of their posts, and the other products and services they feature in their posts and feeds. If you can successfully pull off working with an influencer it could be a good point to add when you’re writing a resume or a CV.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
A well-designed email marketing campaign can be extremely effective. Emails remind customers of your brand, encourage them to return, and alert consumers to offers and new products, as well as share news.
As with your website and social media content, emails need to be engaging, on-brand, and valuable to the recipient. They should always include a powerful call to action (CTA), and link to ways to buy your products.
Email has been around for longer than other marketing channels, but it’s still a very effective way of speaking directly to your consumers – and can be very cost-effective too.
Some of the best ways to utilize email as a marketing channel include creating newsletters, welcoming new customers, asking for feedback, and nudging those who have abandoned a cart in your online store.
The most effective emails are short, compelling, and have clear subject lines. It’s also best to send regular emails, in terms of frequency, but not to bombard customers’ inboxes with too many emails per month.
Ensure you track if emails are opened and find out which emails were the most popular or engaged with.
Video
Video marketing has the advantage of giving movement and voice to your content, which can otherwise tend to be very text and static-image based. Interviews, demonstrations, helpful tips, and useful information can be presented with music and a human face and voice.
The human face and voice help consumers connect emotionally to your brand. Use it to tell your company’s story, share your history, introduce team members, and showcase products. It also has the ability to reach those who are too busy, tired, or disengaged to read text. Watching a video is pleasantly passive: it can effortlessly draw you in.
Additionally, leveraging programming ads and the opportunity to promote your videos on Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms allows you to precisely target specific audience segments. You also get better insights into who views and is interested in your ads, making your marketing strategy more effective.
It’s a good idea to create videos of different styles and lengths, depending on where you will use them. Longer videos might work well on your website, but shorter videos or clips of longer videos might be more suitable on social media.
User generated content
Including User-Generated Content (UGC) in your marketing strategy is highly effective in engaging your audience and encouraging them to become brand advocates. UGC, such as customer reviews, testimonials, and social media posts, serves as social proof, building trust and authenticity for your brand. It fosters a sense of community and influences potential customers’ purchasing decisions.
Encourage customers to share their experiences using a branded hashtag, generating organic content and user engagement. Remember to seek permission and give credit. UGC allows for a dynamic and interactive marketing strategy that resonates with your target audience.
Channel the Power of Your Brand
The various marketing channels each have distinct advantages, but most brands will benefit from choosing a combination of various channels to create an effective marketing strategy.
The key to making marketing channels work for your business is to know exactly what you hope to achieve by using them and, even more importantly, to know your customers: what they want and what you can give them.
Is your aim to boost sales? Boost brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Or promote new products? The choice of marketing channels will need to match your aims.
Another important consideration is how much money and time you can dedicate to marketing your business in this way. Be realistic about what you can commit to and to choose a channel accordingly.
Lastly, marketing your business through any channel demands imagination and vision. Try things out, experiment, then assess how successful your endeavors have been. What works for one company or brand may not work for another. Learn from your competitors, but remember to be unique. Put yourself in your target customers’ shoes; what would appeal to them? How do they want to be engaged? What interests them? What do they need?
The power of your brand is in meeting these needs – and letting your customers know what you have to offer.
