If there’s something fledgling businesses and multinational corporations have in common, it’s the fact that a thought-out digital presence is instrumental to their survival. Frustratingly, you can commit time, passion, and resources to spreading the word about your company yet remain unnoticed. Focusing on the wrong marketing channels is a likely culprit.

This article serves as a primer on choosing the best marketing channel(s) for your business. It gives general advice as well as a quick overview that lists the pros and cons of each channel and examples of enterprises they’re the most suitable for.

General Considerations

There are some general things each business needs to account for, regardless of its niche and appetites.

The first is having an in-depth understanding of your audience. Who are your sales efforts targeting? What kind of content do they consume? Where on the internet do they hang out? Are they more inclined to believe an influencer or a blog post on an authoritative site? Developing your buyer personas will help narrow down choices and not waste resources on less effective channels.

Next, you’ll want to define which marketing efforts you’re pursuing. Focus your efforts on tangible and trackable results rather than the vagueness of growth and profit. Businesses selling regulated products like vapes, for instance, might prioritize channels that ensure compliance with age-verification laws while engaging their target demographic.

Generating X leads, signups, or social media shares, improving your ROI by X%, or establishing yourself as an authority on a subject are all actionable goals the right channel will help you work toward.

Which channels are your competitors using, and which aren’t they using but should? Competitive intelligence is a legal and indispensable prerequisite to creating any successful digital marketing campaign, so make use of it.

A modest budget can constrain choices, especially for startups and small businesses. You’ll have to master balancing between costly yet immediately effective channels on the one hand and ones that require more work and contribute overtime on the other.

Combining the channels that are appropriate for your situation will be the most effective. This means signups for yet more accounts whose login credentials you’ll need to keep safe.

Since associated services like CRMs, social media, etc., will need to handle vulnerable customer and company data, restricting and protecting access to them is paramount. One way to protect such data is to use the best VPNs on the market. These handy tools encrypt your network connection so that malicious actors cannot intercept it and steal data.

Another precaution in restricting access to services and accounts is to use a tool that manages credentials. A password manager for businesses, for example, helps you effortlessly create one-of-a-kind credentials for each account and person who accesses it. Further, remember to secure them further with multi-factor authentication.

Which Marketing Channels are Right for You?

That depends on the type of your business, your budgetary constraints, long-term goals, and a host of other factors. Here’s a quick rundown of the most important channels and why you might choose them.

Content marketing

The channel you can’t go wrong with. Content is king for establishing you as an authority, providing useful advice to customers beyond mere sales pitches, and cultivating a long-term loyal following.

Good content takes effort and can be expensive to produce. Consistently putting out quality content is even more challenging. While you can write a blog post once and have it generate traffic for months, it needs time and supportive activities like social media promotion to gain traction.

Search Engine Optimization

Another universal, SEO is content marketing’s perfect companion since it ensures that visitors actually discover the content you put so much work into organically. It’s especially effective for local businesses, relatively cheap to maintain, and consistently ranking high in the SERPs guarantees authority buildup.

However, ranking for the best keywords – especially in oversaturated areas like health and finance – can be difficult. Search engines are notoriously whimsical with algorithm changes, so SEO is time-sensitive and requires constant effort.

Email marketing

With its titanic ROI potential and room for experimentation, email marketing remains a staple. It’s a favorite among B2B, SaaS, and e-commerce companies, yet you can make it work for any venture, provided it isn’t a single mom-and-pop store.

Email marketing is consent-based, meaning you can get excellent insights into your audience but must also attract them through freebies and promotions. Your emails need to get through spam filters first and be engaging enough for audiences to want to read them over the dozens of other daily messages in their inboxes.

Social media marketing

Social media is among the most versatile marketing channels. It lets you foster a community and grow your brand organically or harvest a great deal of data on leads to create highly targeted and successful ad campaigns. It’s the ideal venue for lifestyle brands, entertainment companies, and local businesses.

You’ll have to align your social media presence with your audience. Maintaining accounts on multiple platforms and actively responding to followers is also time-consuming. If you go the ad route, costs can quickly mount.

PPC

Pay-per-click is an excellent solution if you need quick exposure for your e-commerce business or accountancy firm and have money to spend. It’s possible to tailor PPC campaigns and expand or contract them quickly. They’re also highly trackable, allowing you to pivot if you’re not getting the ROI you anticipated.

Conversely, PPC only remains effective while you supply the funds and may not build a sufficiently engaged customer base without support from other channels.

Affiliate marketing

Allying with others in your or an adjacent niche can have many benefits. You can lean on their clout until you develop your own, and you can easily adjust the number of affiliates to suit your budget and growth trajectory. It’s the go-to channel for companies making use of large online retailers and SaaS companies wishing to spread the word on tech-related sites.

You’ll have to vet your affiliates and can’t be sure they won’t go off script when representing your brand. Paying for the privilege of using affiliates as digital billboards will also eat into your profits.

Conclusion

Identifying and investing in the proper marketing channels can spell the difference between success and obscurity. Take this guide as your first step towards understanding these channels, learning all you can about each, and developing a winning blend that will propel your business to new heights.