Be wary of digital snake-oil salespeople that offer you one-size-fits-all solutions to your digital marketing dilemma. There isn’t a perfect template that you can graft onto your business—if there were, everyone would be doing it, right?
Start thinking like a digital marketer instead of searching for top-down solutions to your business’s marketing problems. To develop a digital marketing strategy that helps your business reach its goals, you’ll need a comprehensive marketing strategy that starts not from the top-down but rather from the bottom-up.
It Starts With Your Clients
Before you even spend a dime on Google Ads or Instagram ads, or any other marketing channel, you need first to understand who you are trying to reach out to. By understanding your target customer, you can better position your brand to naturally align with the values and identity of that target customer.
A Quick Word on the Customer-Brand Feedback Loop
If everything goes to plan, your brand and your target customers will engage in a feedback loop that will help each reinforce each other in terms of values and identity. This brand-customer feedback loop isn’t necessarily easy to develop, but you can count on brand loyalty from your customers or clients once the foundation is established.
The best example of this is Apple and the cult-like, white-collar business professionals that can’t imagine living, working, and engaging in a world without their Apple products.
A Quick Word on Branding
Once you’ve established your brand, you need to develop consistent messaging—in the form of outreach, content, videos, etc.—that engages your target customer on their level. From your website to your business card, all messaging should have this consistent branding.
You want your target customer to associate your brand with not simply a solution to their problem but precisely the only solution to their problem. It is equal parts psychology and sociology, and it requires effective use of appropriate marketing channels to perform.
This brings us to our next topic:
What Are Marketing Channels?
Traditionally, marketing channels are the parties, systems, and methods used to get a product or service to a consumer. Most businesses with an online presence focus specifically on digital marketing channels.
Several digital marketing channels can help your business, but not every business will benefit from implementing all of them. That’s why it’s essential to know about all so you can determine which channels are best for your business.
PPC
Or pay-per-click. This marketing channel is vast and covers the many complex, algorithmically-driven advertising services available to businesses. Think Google Ads, Amazon Ads, or other data-driven paid advertising.
When a person enters a query into the Google search bar—let’s use “dentists near me”—they will see many ads appear above the search results. When a potential customer clicks on an ad, the business pays for that click.
A skilled PPC marketer can geographically and demographically target keywords to help get a business out in front of potential customers. Generally, this marketing channel works well for both B2B and B2C businesses across various industries. Basically, if someone might be searching for your good or service, PPC is a useful marketing tool.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is both direct and digital marketing. It is a valuable marketing funnel that essentially forces a certain amount of engagement from your target audience. Think about it—an email will sit in an inbox until it is deleted, which means the owner of the email account must, at minimum, consider whether or not it should be read.
Successful email marketing campaigns will direct customers to your website, blog, or your social media page. It allows customers to engage with your business’s brand and consume your content. Email marketing is best for businesses that need to engage with customers regularly and want to deliver their customers the latest news, hot new deals, and fresh content.
You’ve probably gone through several emails in your personal inbox already. The best email marketing campaigns don’t even feel like an advertisement, but it’s your engagement that these types of campaigns are designed to elicit.
“Check out our latest video,” or “Listen to our most recent podcast.”
Content Marketing
You’ll need engaging content before you can hope to launch an email marketing campaign successfully. Content marketing refers to creating content—blogs, videos, flowcharts, social media posts, anything that could potentially stimulate interest in your products or services.
Expert content marketers position content along the buyer’s journey that helps to funnel them toward becoming a customer. Let’s use an orthopedic insole business as an example. This business can anticipate the types of questions people might have that could potentially lead them toward purchasing insoles.
The content strategist would plan content that answers common questions like, “Why do my feet hurt after work?” or “What is flat-footed?” Content marketers can better effectively funnel the potential customer toward the buy it now buttons by making content that addresses these questions.
This type of marketing doesn’t directly advertise a good or service, but it performs two essential functions.
- It helps establish the content creators as experts in their field
- Suggests solutions to problems, one of which would be that business’s product or service
When combined with strong keyword research, this type of marketing funnel is a powerful tool. This channel is best used by businesses that need to establish authority as part of their brand. It works well for plastic surgeons, family law attorneys, and businesses that sell niche products like an orthopedic insole company.
This channel does not work well for general e-commerce businesses (unless the blog is about running an e-commerce business) or businesses that everyday consumers wouldn’t be searching for online—think business contract lawyers or the like.
Social Media Marketing
Tik-Tok, Facebook, and Instagram can be effective marketing channels for businesses whose target customers use these platforms. Businesses often take a two-pronged approach to social media marketing—advertisements and influencer marketing.
If you run a clothing business and want to advertise your product through Tik-Tok, then paying an influencer to wear your product would be an effective use of this marketing funnel. If your business draws in leads by taking advantage of trends (in the “trending” sense), then this could be an effective marketing channel for your business.
What Marketing Channels Are Best For Your Business?
Which marketing channels are best for your business? As mentioned above, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach to digital marketing. An effective digital marketing strategy will have to be tailor-fit to your business’s brand, target customers, and budget.
Roni Davis is a writer, blogger, and content strategist who writes on behalf of the Law Offices of Stan Gregory, a worker’s compensation attorney in Cherry Hill, NJ.