Yes! You have started creating a killer marketing strategy for your business. Now it’s time to make a choice. How will you put yourself out there? One of the most important of all your marketing plan components is choosing the best marketing channels. And yes, there’s a difference between your marketing strategy vs marketing plan.
Today, the list of digital marketing channels is becoming overwhelming and getting bigger. Even though the options are almost limitless, budgets—and customers’ attention spans are not. As a business owner, it is important to educate yourself on the options available so you can pinpoint the most effective platforms for the highest engagement opportunities.
To make things easier, we’ve broken it down into what we in the digital marketing world consider the most effective marketing channels for business:
Top 8 Digital Marketing Plan Components
1. SEO Website
What is it?
Using Search Engine Optimization to improve your website so that it ranks highly in search engine results for the keywords and phrases related to your business.
Elements:
Important on-page SEO elements:
- Image optimization
- Keyword usage
- Quality outbound links
- Search intent
- Well targeted content
Important off-page SEO elements:
- Backlinks
- Guest posting
- Social signals
- Press releases
- Forum posting/commenting
Important technical SEO elements:
- Canonical URLs
- Crawlability and indexability
- Metadata: Meta description, heading and title tags
- Responsive web design
- Site architecture
- Structured data
- Website speed
- XML Sitemaps
Pros:
Over 80% of consumers do their product research online and when doing so, at least half of those users discover a new company or product. When researching, consumers tend to go with whoever ranks higher. So, standing out from the competition means new prospect opportunities and a consistent flow of leads to your sales funnel. Here we’ve discussed on-page, off-page and technical SEO elements for your website, but don’t overlook the impact of implementing a solid SEO branding strategy as well.
Examples of SEO:
Keyword usage
Organic SEO
2. Social Media Marketing
What is it?
SMM stands for “Social Media Marketing”. It targets platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for things like brand promotion, targeting audience growth, driving website traffic, and increasing sales.
Elements:
- Creative — graphic design, photography, writing, video
- Editorial —marketing messages, brand voice, editing, SEO
- Analytical — conversion tracking, reach/engagement, link tracking, optimization
- Operational — platform management, posting management, audience management, post timing
Pros:
Perfect for small budgets, building custom audiences, increasing ROI, building a strong relationship with customers, and increasing brand presence/awareness.
Examples of Social Media Marketing:
3. Search Engine Marketing
What is it?
SEM stands for “Search Engine Marketing”. This is a broad term that refers to any way you can promote your company or website through search engines.
PPC stands for “Pay-Per-Click” advertising. This term addresses paid search, but can include different kinds of advertising, like social media. Basically, anytime you are paying for your clicks, it falls into the world of PPC.
Elements:
- Keyword relevance — lifeblood of both SEM and PPC
- Landing Page — content needs to be relevant and interesting
- Quality score — applicable mostly for Google and based on things like content relevance, proper usage of keywords, good user experience.
Pros:
Can track your goals with tools like Google Analytics, have nearly immediate exposure, help you reach your target audience, allows you to become more competitive.
Examples of SEM/PPC:
4. Content Marketing
What is it?
Content communicates the “what” in your digital marketing strategy. Your content marketing strategy focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing things like articles or blogs, videos, infographics, or photos.
Elements:
- Strategy — must be clear on your goals
- Creation — prep work, creating the content, post-work
- Distribution — sharing, sending, and promoting
- Evaluation — using analytics to measure its performance
- Maintenance — keeping your content evergreen and aligned with your goals
Pros:
Drives conversions, builds brand awareness, builds trust, credibility, and authority, improves SEO and online visibility, cost-effective, high ROI.
Best for: Most companies, regardless of their size, can benefit from the use of content to drive their marketing efforts.
Examples of Content Marketing:
5. Email Marketing
What is it?
Using email within your marketing efforts to promote your business’s products and services and create customer loyalty.
Elements:
- Strong email subject line
- Short and simple
- Responsive design
- Sense of urgency
- CTA
- Customization and branding
- Timing
- Incentives
Pros:
Creating an email marketing strategy is one of the most cost-effective channels, relationship builder, drives traffic to your blog, social media, or wherever else you would like them to go, can segment your audience and provide different messages by demographic, able to run A/B tests of subject lines and CTAs.
Example of Email Marketing:
6. Landing Page
What is it?
A landing page is a standalone web page in which visitors can “land” on when they click through from an email, ad, or other digital location.
Elements:
- Attention grabbing graphics, imagery and video
- The problem, your promise, the solution
- Trust indicators: testimonials and social proof
- Compelling call to action: CTA button
- Lead capture form
Pros:
Boost your credibility, increase conversions, reinforce your brand, generate data and insights, and grow your email list.
Landing Page Examples:
7. Mobile Marketing
What is it?
Mobile marketing is any advertising activity that uses mobile devices (e.g., text promos and apps via push notifications).
Elements:
- SMS and MMS marketing
- Push notifications
- Social media marketing
- QR Code Marketing
- Location-based mobile advertising
- Mobile optimized webpages
- Mobile advertising
- App-based marketing
- Email marketing
Pros:
Instant results, affordable, build customer relationships, reach target audience, easy to track user response.
Examples of Mobile Marketing:
8. Affiliate marketing
What is it?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement where an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. As a business owner, you can offer an affiliate program to other website owners who are interested in promoting your products and services in exchange for a commission.
Elements:
- Awareness of the competition
- Acquiring the right affiliate partners
- Tracking incoming data from affiliate websites
- Maintaining the program by continually correcting issues and abuses
Pros:
Zero/minimal investment, easy to start, flexibility of options, market-ready audience, high ROI.
Affiliate Marketing Examples:
The Best Marketing Channels for Your Business
With all of the marketing channel options out there, it is important to educate yourself. Knowing the basics of each channel will help you identify which would be the best for you and your marketing efforts—and dollars.
We can help you make sure you are doing the most with your resources to get the highest ROI possible. We offer custom-made marketing strategies perfect for your business. You can start here with our FREE 1-PG Marketing Plan.
Klever Strategies helps small business owners gain clarity on their business goals. We help with the implementation of digital marketing strategies, including SEO-focused website design, and fine-tune these strategies to replicate what works year after year.
