Choosing the right digital channel for your small business will greatly improve the likelihood of successfully reaching your audience. A new infographic from Connext Digital provides a guide to choosing the digital channel that is right for you.
“A Guide To Choosing The Best Digital Channel For Your Business” looks to help businesses maximize their marketing dollar so they can get the best ROI.
How to Choose a Digital Marketing Channel
Achieving the best ROI is especially important for small businesses with limited marketing budgets. But the wonderful thing about the digital ecosystem is there are ways to maximize your marketing efforts no matter what free, DYI or paid tools are at your disposal.
Rob Fitzgerald, the Founder and CEO of Connext Digital says, “The digital channel you choose should largely depend on the type of your business, the kinds of customers you’re targeting, and your overall business goals. Before picking the channel that fits your business best, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the various digital marketing channels available.”
With returns on investment of up to 4,300 percent, email is a digital channel used regularly by all demographics at different levels. Once you begin engaging with your customers using email, you can improve conversion rates and sales, identify better-quality leads, lower marketing costs and integrate your efforts with other channels.
Display Ads
When properly deployed, display ads can deliver great returns. Native ads with rich media like images or videos can drive up to 60 percent more conversions than those without. With 64 percent of respondents saying ads are annoying or intrusive, you have to be selective.
Mobile In-App Advertising
Mobile ad spend is growing at a very fast rate, and in-app advertising is one way to get your message out. Whether through gaming, video, images, social media or blogs, you can use apps to place ads strategically without being too obtrusive or with the consent of users.
Social Media Marketing
With billions of global users, marketing on social media can yield great returns. The key according to Fitzgerald, is to target customers with interests related to your business.
SMS
With open rates as high as 98 percent, SMS can be used to inform, update and market to your audience affordably. It can be used to direct customers to your digital or brick and mortar outlets.
SEO
According to Context Digital, 93 percent of digital experiences begin with a search on Google, Bing or another search engine. So implementing SEO techniques to make your business easy to find on the major search engines makes sense. By optimizing your online presence with SEO, you can get more clicks to your website, store, blog or other digital channel.
Using these digital channels for your business will deliver results, but according to Fitzgerald, they have to go hand in hand with other considerations. These include setting clear business objectives, being aware of your brand, accurately targeting your audience, knowing the limitations of your budget and understanding the capabilities of the talent you have available, to name a few.
You can take a look at the infographic below for more details.
Images: Connext Digital
I would add good ol’ fashion PPC (search-based) to the mix here. No need to pass on advertising where potential clients are literally looking for a solution right at that moment.
Aira Bongco
It is all about where your market is. If they are in a particular social channel, you should aim to go there.
Nearly every business goes down the digital path at some point, even if it’s just adding your organization’s address to Google Business!
I found your article very informative, and you’re right Michael, the most important thing to consider is target audience. I’ve already started to think about the best digital marketing channel for our Website Brokerage Business, so thank you.
Michael Guta
Hi Darryl,
You are welcome.
Good luck with your marketing.