Your approach to investing in marketing channels can both promote and drown your business. It sounds like an obvious statement, but many people do not think about it seriously. Oftentimes, marketers worry about making sure them being present everywhere, that is to say, on any available marketplace. Of course, it is very important to invest in the channels that will ultimately ensure long-term growth for the business. The question is how to choose such channels to make the most profit from it.
Content marketing
It is directly related to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media and many other channels. The tasks of content marketing include the creation and distribution of content that gives the users useful or simply entertaining information. Many companies and projects have found success primarily through content marketing since they create banner ads with the help of graphic design software.
Content marketing is not suitable for every business, although in most cases it benefits those companies that do it competently. It is especially effective for those companies that provide services or any products to other marketers.
While content can attract leads, the main benefit comes from reputation. High-quality and regular content can create a company’s image of a leader in its field, making it easier to build partnerships with other companies, attract an audience and make work with other marketing channels more effective.
Paid advertising
It is simple — you have traffic, and I pay you for placing my ads for your audience to see. There are two options, and they are often used simultaneously:
- SEM — Search Engine Marketing
- Social and display advertising
SEM allows you to show the audience those ads that are relevant to your keywords. Businesses spend huge amounts of money on contextual advertising on Google and Yandex, with Google taking up the majority of this market. Search engine advertising is so effective because you attract the consumer exactly when they are trying to find a solution to their problem — this combination often gives the highest traffic of all options.
Paid advertising is a marketing channel that can be scaled without restrictions. The value of the customer attracted in this way is high, while the advertising costs are relatively low. If this is your case, and the cost of the client significantly exceeds the cost of acquiring them, you should continue to allocate the budget in favour of this channel.
Search Engine Optimisation
Google receives about 63000 searches per second, which translates to 5.6 billion searches per day. Some of the users submitting these requests can be turned into your customers, right?
For a certain business with a large number of specific queries (for example – Yelp, Airbnb, HeadHunter, etc.), SEO may be the preferred channel for promotion.
The advantage of SEO is that even if you stop doing it at some point, you will continue to receive traffic. With paid advertising, the opposite is true — as soon as you stop investing in it, the flow of users will dry up. SEO is a tool that can generate long-term user flow that will benefit any business. However, because of the delayed effect, SEO is harder to experiment with and also difficult to predict if SEO measures will work in the short term.
Email Marketing
It is hard to find a business that does not use email for promotion — everyone uses this channel in one form or another (but not everyone uses it right). Email marketing is a natural addition to any other marketing channel and is a critical tool for engaging and retaining users.
Email marketing is still one of the best channels for converting new users and retaining existing customers. Its effectiveness is associated with a high level of personalisation, using which the marketer can achieve impressive results.
How to choose channels that are effective for your business?
First, determine what channels your target audience uses. For example, SEO works great as a starting point for promoting various businesses. Search engine optimization is effective when there is an audience ready to purchase your product, or when you have the opportunity to grab some of your competitors’ traffic.
You can determine the appropriateness of using SEO by examining the keywords. If your segment has a high volume of search queries (and at the same time these are low-frequency queries), SEO can become your main promotion channel, showing excellent results.
Similar preliminary research needs to be done for each of the marketing channels. Use common sense. Find out where your ideal customers are spending their time and promote your brand or product there. You can also discover suitable channels by observing competitors and what they are doing.
It is vital to find a balance between short-term and long-term development strategies. If you focus all your resources on non-scalable marketing methods, you will inevitably hit the ceiling and your business will slow down. Many startups faced such a fate, the traction of which was almost entirely associated with mentions in the press.
