Digital marketing has become the method of choice among businesses in reaching out to their target market and promoting their brand. This shouldn’t be surprising anymore given that many customers now prefer to engage with brands via online platforms such as social media, company websites, email, and search engines instead of traditional print and broadcast media channels.
Digital channels have many uses for your company, but individually speaking, each works differently from the other. For example, email marketing can give you higher conversion rates to as much as 60%. However, when it comes to customer engagement, social media is leading in the race, beating email in driving traffic to blogs and websites.
You can consult this infographic by Connext Digital on the best channels you can use to increase online visibility, awareness, leads, and direct sales for your brand.
1. Email
If your company is trying to generate marketing and sales leads, email may be the most helpful tool for you in this department. Statistics show that email has a 90% open rate and has a very big edge over social channels in terms of click rates.
This means that with every email you send, you can seize the attention of a large portion of your target market. You only need to drum up your email blast service with great content and attractive offers to widen your reach even more and nurture customers in their buying journey.
2. Display Advertising
In display advertising, you, as the advertiser, work with a media agency to create and publish your ads on third-party websites, social sites, or search engines.
You could tap into the power of display ads, specifically banner and image ads, to improve brand awareness and recall with your audience, as well as drive traffic to your site.
Rich media ads, on the other hand, can either be Flash- or HTML-based and allow you to include forms to help you in lead generation. Display ads on LinkedIn, for example, are useful in targeting B2B audiences.
To leverage this type of online advertising, your ads should have a good mix of visuals such as images and videos that blend well with your advertising message.
3. Mobile In-App Advertising
You could also buy advertising spot or space on mobile apps to target consumers under a cost-per-click (CPC) arrangement with your ad network.
In-app advertising on mobile has great potential in increasing your marketing metrics given that many consumers are using their smartphone in their day-to-day tasks. In fact, mobile in-app advertising or “appvertising” has taken the lead in giving marketing and sales teams higher click and conversion rates than website advertising.
In-app engagement is also high since you can use location data to track your customers’ behavior and preferences and tailor your content to these attributes.
4. Social Media
The digital marketing landscape has become more dynamic because of social media. There are a number of ways that you could leverage social media networks to educate consumers about your brand and build a positive and meaningful relationship with them.
There’s paid advertising, which puts your brand on top of the social media feeds of your target demographics. Most social platforms also allow you to post as much free content as you can, although it helps to follow the 80/20 rule in content marketing when you’re on social.
In this social media marketing strategy, you should limit posts about your products or services to only 20% and use the remaining 80% to share stories, photos, or ideas that inform, engage, or entertain your followers.
You could also utilize social media as a customer service channel by monitoring mentions and comments on your posts, and from there, provide the level of customer support that will speak highly of your brand.
5. SMS
Text messaging can be an effective lead generating and sales tool for your business as well since SMS (short message service) has a 99% open rate among the billions of smartphone and cellular phone users all over the world. It’s also worthy to note that you could use SMS marketing regardless if you’re a startup or have a large business size.
SMS is effective if you’re looking to incentivize your customers with exclusive deals or send them status updates about their purchase. You could also launch text message campaigns to build consumer awareness about a special event you’re organizing.
Regardless how you plan to use SMS in your business, you’ll be sure that your message enjoys a wide reach in your niche market.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Back in the days when internet technologies were rather new, SEO gave people and businesses a way to find information from other servers across the World Wide Web.
Today, a variety of SEO techniques – keyword optimization, link building, meta-descriptions, and paid advertising, to name a few – can help improve your company’s search rankings, establish your online presence, and increase your website traffic.
Ultimately, these outcomes mean accomplishing your marketing and sales objectives, as well as the overall goals of your business.
Summing up, the use of digital channels to perform sales and marketing tasks has become the norm across businesses and industries. The key to success is choosing the best practices from each channel and coming up with an integrated approach that you could use to address the needs of both your customers and your business.
