The Internet is a wide-open landscape when it comes to making sales for your business. There are a wide variety of channels you can deploy to reach your ideal customers, and with finite resources and time available, it is important to prioritise your efforts and money towards the most appropriate and lucrative channels for your business.
By doing so, you can save time, money, and effort while achieving better marketing results. In this article, we'll explore the different digital marketing channels and how to identify and prioritise the most profitable ones for your business.
What Digital Sales & Marketing Channels Are Available To SMEs?
So, what options do you have when choosing the right digital sales and marketing channels to promote your business and reach your customers? Here are some of the most common ones:
- Social Media Marketing: Use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your business, engage with your audience, drive traffic to your website, and/or make sales directly.
- Email Marketing: Send promotional emails to potential customers, existing customers, and subscribers through an opted-in email list, in order to build relationships, and drive revenue.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Optimise your website and content to improve your search engine ranking and drive organic traffic to your website through search engines.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Pay for advertising space on search engines, social media platforms, and other websites to increase traffic, generate leads, build your email list, and make short-term sales.
- Content Marketing: Create and publish relevant and valuable content on various online channels (your website, YouTube, business blog, social media, guest blog channels etc) to attract and engage your target audience and drive conversions.
- Influencer Marketing: Partner with influencers on social media, or an authoritative figure in your industry, to promote your product or service to their followers.
- Affiliate Marketing: Partner with other businesses or individuals (e.g. influencers) to promote your product or service and share the profits with commissions gained through affiliate links.
How To Identify The Right Channels For Your Business
These channels are all well and good, but not many small business owners have time to devote equal resources to promoting their business through each medium, and it is usually not necessary to do so, either. Smart marketing involves identifying the right channels for your business to achieve the desired results, in the shortest time, and at the lowest cost. The first step is to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and where they spend their time online. For example, it is not cost-effective to spend money on a campaign on Facebook if your target customers spend 90% of their social media time on LinkedIn.
Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience and their browsing and research habits, consider which channels they’re most likely to engage with when researching solutions such as yours, and which ones are most likely to drive traffic and conversions to your website.
For instance, even though your target customers might regularly use LinkedIn to network with existing suppliers and recruit talent to their organisation, Google may be the first point of call when researching potential solutions to their challenges and pain points, so they may not appreciate a sales approach through LinkedIn. In this case, your marketing budget is better spent on Google PPC and SEO to improve your visibility for their search queries, rather than going all in on LinkedIn.
Next, identify the channels your competitors are using and the ones that are working best for them as this will give you crucial and free market insights into whether competitors are targeting the same people as you. Look at their social media accounts, pay attention to the ads they’re running online, and monitor their email marketing campaigns.
Finally, examine your own historic sales and marketing data by using Google Analytics or Hubspot to track website traffic, user behaviour, and conversions. This data can help you identify which channels are driving the most revenues for your business.
How To Prioritise Which Channels To Use
You’ve identified the right channels to use to reach your customers, but how do you know which approaches to prioritise first? The answer is to prioritise digital sales and marketing channels based on your business's short-term and long-term goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase your website traffic and generate conversions quickly, you may prioritise PPC advertising, as it often yields faster results than organic social media marketing and SEO.
However, if your goal is to build stronger brand awareness and develop a long-term organic traffic channel, SEO and content marketing may be your best bet. Whatever the case, it's crucial to track and analyse the metrics and output from each channel consistently to determine where to allocate your resources most efficiently and make changes when necessary.
Tips For Maximising The Profitability Of Your Digital Sales & Marketing Channels
To maximise the profitability of your digital sales and marketing channels, here are some simple best practices to keep in mind:
- Create clear and measurable business goals based on metrics and let this guide your identification of the best channels for you.
- Set realistic timelines and budgets.
- Test and experiment with different messaging, content formats, and audience segments to optimise your campaigns continually, by means of a good sales CRM.
- Track and measure metrics such as conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), and customer lifetime value (LTV) to optimise your expenditure and maximise your ROI.
Next Steps
At JDR Group, we provide a range of digital marketing and sales services to help small businesses optimise their online channels for the best results and ROI. To find out more about how we can help you identify the right channels for your business, please get in touch with one of our inbound marketing specialists today by contacting us today.
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