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Picking the right channel is a big part of any good marketing strategy. Channels are very different, and what works perfectly on one will totally flop on another.
There are loads of digital marketing channels. All of them have different formats, different audiences, and different aims. Some are designed to build community through image and video sharing. Some are designed to keep friends and family in touch. Some put people in touch directly, like email, and some are explicitly designed to help you advertise your brand, like PPC.
Here's a quick guide to what each digital channel is and how you use it.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It isn't so much a channel as a tactic to engage with a channel. The aim is to tailor your content so that search engines send it to the top of results pages in response to relevant questions and keywords.
In the past, search engines relied heavily on keywords. This is still somewhat the case, but modern marketers can't trick search engines by stuffing poor-quality content with keywords. As search algorithms grow more sophisticated, they are better able to select for quality and relevance and to bypass lazily optimised content. So a good digital marketer needs to keep up with search trends and be prepared to modify their SEO strategy accordingly.
Voice search optimisation
Voice search optimisation is a growing subset of SEO. With the growth of voice recognition technology, people are now able to search verbally as well as by typing. This makes the web a lot more accessible for people with visual impairments, and easier to use when someone is driving or otherwise can't type or look at a screen.
The problem is that we speak and type in different ways. If you wanted to know the capital of Mexico you might type something like Capital Mexico. But asking a virtual assistant, you'd likely phrase it differently, perhaps even adding social niceties. Optimising for both typed and voice searches is an emerging challenge worth paying attention to.
PPC
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. It involves paying search engines for your advert to appear in search results, always in either a designated ad section or with a banner clarifying that it is an advert rather than an organic result.
Advertisers bid for the position they would like their ad to appear in. They do this by earmarking certain keywords, each of which will cost the brand a certain amount if the advert is clicked. The price of each keyword depends on how likely it is to generate clicks.
So if a brand picks a competitive search term, every click will cost more than a less competitive term. To be cost-effective, the trick is to word your ad so that low-cost keywords still get you those clicks. You can also purchase social media ads on a pay-per-click basis, though these are rolled out to specific audiences rather than shown in search results.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing involves teaming up with a third party affiliate. Typically, the affiliate will promote your product, or host your advert on their platform, and receive a reward based on performance, usually commission.
Say your brand makes a cooking sauce. A good affiliate here would be a cookery blogger. To promote your product, the blogger might post a recipe using your sauce, embedding your affiliate link, which is a link to your product with a tracking pixel. That pixel tells you how many customers came from your affiliate's post, and you can pay them accordingly.
Affiliates can be a great way to boost your organic reach and bring in entire new audiences. They also support your marketing team by creating and distributing content that promotes your brand.
Social media
The thing to remember about social media is that most people log into their favourite platforms for the social part. The average casual scroller isn't looking for new products. Instead, they're getting the latest news, checking in with friends and family, or killing five idle minutes.
So the challenge with social media is to grab and keep attention. The tactics you use for this depend a lot on the platform you're engaging with, the audience you want to reach, and the nature of your product. Each major platform has a distinct audience profile and skew, so it pays to check current platform data before committing budget.
Email marketing
Email is my particular area of expertise, and I'm a big advocate for it. It has offered the best ROI for many years running, and is one of the most popular and successful channels going.
The secret to successful email marketing is strategy. Email is a very personal platform, which gives you the opportunity to talk directly with customers in a way that other channels can't. But that kind of direct contact comes with responsibilities. Email marketers need to be respectful of customers' data and privacy, and must make it worth the customer's while to give us privileged access to their inbox.
In return for customers giving us their email addresses, we must be totally transparent and trustworthy in our data policy. We must also give customers the kind of content they want and need. Tactics like segmentation and personalisation work wonders here.
At all costs, avoid annoying your customers with spammy emails. That won't just send subscribers running for the door, it will also turn the ISPs against you.
Websites and ecommerce
A lot of the channels above are designed to drive traffic to your website and ecommerce listings. But these things are also channels in their own right.
Think of it like a market stall. You could have the most wonderful signs and the best sales patter in the entire market, but if your physical stall looks shabby and unappealing, you'll struggle to make any sales.
Your website and ecommerce listings need to fulfil the promise of your marketing. They need to look high quality, trustworthy, exciting, maybe even inspirational. What your customers see when they click through to your landing pages represents the final push, so make sure it's good.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a fantastic way to engage with your customers, bring in new audiences, establish your brand identity, and position yourself as an industry authority.
Put simply, it involves the creation and distribution of content: blogs, vlogs, social posts, infographics and so on. Many brands have a dedicated blog on their website to host their own content, but a good content marketing strategy will look beyond the brand. Contributing articles to leading industry sites and publications is an opportunity to get out there, make connections, and showcase expertise.
Good content marketing also segues into several of the other channels on this list. It should be created with an eye to search, it can be distributed through social media and email, affiliate marketing often involves a strong content component, it will drive traffic to your website, and it may also be part of a PR campaign.
Public relations
PR straddles the line between digital and offline marketing, as a good PR strategy usually contains elements of both.
PR involves efforts to boost your brand's image, recognition, and reputation with the general public. People tend to be aware of disaster PR, meaning trying to save face after a monumental mess up, but usually PR is about brand-building rather than brand-saving.
Often brands will hire a PR firm who are experts in strategy and know exactly how to get the brand into the spotlight. However, you don't need a specialist firm to run a good PR campaign. You can do it yourself if you have a strong grasp of strategy and good research resources.
A good PR strategy is all about understanding the current media landscape and the mood of the moment, and inserting your brand into the middle of it. It's about seizing opportunities for your brand to make its voice heard in positive ways. But be wary: if you aren't strategic about this kind of thing it can backfire, so make sure you know exactly what you're doing.
