Are You Using The Right Digital Marketing Channels?

Effective digital marketing strategy coincides with a versatile marketing mix. In other words, the more places you advertise, the more potential impressions. Ideally, your business could spend as much as it wants on every channel of communication and reap the optimal ROI. Realistically, however, maximizing the return on your marketing dollars means choosing the right digital marketing channels to progress your strategy. 

Choosing The Right Digital Marketing Channels

First and foremost, your business website serves as the main point of contact for your digital presence. A good website maintains heavy volume, ranks highly on search engines, and provides a user-friendly experience for visitors. If you’re going to invest in one digital marketing channel, it should be your website. At the very least, keep it free of bugs or errors, take the time to optimize the site for SEO, and keep the content fresh and informative. 

Apart from your website, there are numerous channels of communication: email marketing, social media, SEO/SEM, PPC, and more. All have different average rates of return, but more importantly, all differ in effectiveness depending on the nature of the industry. For instance, a retail business might have more success with email marketing and PPC than a media-based site that sources its revenue from ad dollars. 

Choosing the right digital marketing channels also means tapping into the KPIs on your existing strategy. If you’re not seeing the results you want, it’s an indication to tweak your strategy. As an example, you might want a solid social media presence, but if your spending outweighs the visible return on business, it could be smarter to choose organic social media over paid social media ads. 

Which Channels Are The Most Effective

Far and away, email marketing has the highest average ROI, returning, on average, over $40 for every $1 spent. Even SEO and PPC, which can both net average ROIs well over 500%, pale in comparison to the efficiency of a solid email marketing campaign. Essentially, email marketing works because unlike social media or SEO, it maintains a line of communication exclusively with folks who are either customers or very close to becoming customers. And while other forms of marketing focus on awareness, email marketing focuses on the most important stages of the customer journey: desire and action. 

In other words, a compelling subject line and informative content will drive your customer to take the action you intend. Compare that with the copy and graphics of a social media ad or the keyword optimization of SEO and the end result just isn’t close. Far and away, email marketing is the most effective digital marketing channel. Furthermore, it’s effective because a good email can link to your site and incentivize the recipient to make additional purchases!

Next to email marketing, choosing the right channels means focusing on where your customers are. For the most part, that means social media-where the average person spends more than 3 hours a day, and search engines-where more than 90% of web visits start. More specifically, choosing the right social media channels means selecting the platform(s) with the best conversion rate. While you might be getting lots of impressions, if you’re not getting conversions, the strategy may not be worth it. 

Let ROI Be Your Guide

Essentially, the guide to determining which channels to invest in is your return on investment. You should be keeping regular tabs on the execution of your strategy. You should also be monitoring the important KPIs and making adjustments as necessary. The same principle should apply to your marketing spend. Where ads are most effective in maximizing reach, clicks, and revenue, more investment should be made. Where you’re not reaching people or convincing anyone to buy, invest less or eliminate altogether. 

At the end of the day, efficient marketing strategy relies on an effective marketing mix. Only using email marketing, for example, means you’re missing out on an important swath of both current and potential customers. Reach your customers where it counts and maximize your revenue by choosing the right digital marketing channels.