Globally, businesses spend $1 trillion on marketing. But how much of this money actually pays off? The returns on your marketing investment are directly proportional to the strength of your marketing plan and the amount of time you’ve spent extensively studying your target demographic. In addition to these, you must grasp the most successful marketing channels that may help you implement your strategy flawlessly.

Marketing channels are the various methods and platforms that allow you to communicate with or be seen by your target audience. Using the correct channel can help you get in front of people who will connect with your brand, attract new consumers, and engage and keep current ones.

There are numerous marketing channels you may incorporate into your company’s growth strategy. Marketing channels include social media marketing, email marketing, digital advertising, offline promotions such as billboards and in-store displays, and television ads.

Each of these different marketing channels serves a different purpose. For example, a store display might serve to raise awareness of a sale or attract people to the store, whereas an emailer might be used to engage existing customers and be more focused on building brand loyalty. 

Now, let’s get to our list of marketing channels.

1. Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the fastest-growing channels of marketing, and arguably has the most potential today. Video can boost conversions, generate leads, improve ROI, and establish a stronger emotional connection between your brand and audience than any other medium. In fact, video is the top format that marketers use today – and customers resonate with this! 72 percent said they’d rather learn about a product through video than anything else. 

When creating videos though, you want to keep them short and super engaging to cater to the shorter attention spans on social media platforms, while still providing a ton of value. Short-form video content is a great way to advertise your products, raise brand awareness and help potential customers learn how to use your products. 

Shorter videos work best on platforms like Instagram and TikTok so if you’re using these channel types make sure you create a ton of quick videos that will get your audience excited and coming back for more.

But this doesn’t mean that you should leave out long-form videos entirely! Longer form videos are a great way to keep your audiences engaged and position yourself as an expert in your industry. Longer videos are excellent if you want to share in-depth expertise, talk about your brand’s journey, post how-to videos, recipes, listicles and more! These types of videos work best on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. 

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of video marketing: 

– Create video content consistently and ensure that it is of high quality and delivers value with every minute!

– Make sure you share a mix of value-based video content alongside promotional content to keep customers engaged. A good rule is the 80-20 principle where 80% of your content is a value add while the other 20% is promotional.

– Don’t be afraid to repurpose your videos across your social media accounts. You can create shorter clips from long-form videos and share these on platforms where short content performs better. Or break up a long video into a 3-part series! Just remember to also tweak the flow and structure for the platform instead of just posting a clip you’ve cut out. You can also repurpose your blogs by converting your written content into videos.

2. Social Media Advertising 

Social media advertising is probably one of the most effective channels you can use to market your products and services today. Top social media channels have an audience of close to 5 billion people, with millions visiting and interacting on these platforms every single day, making social media one of the biggest sources of brand discovery and engagement. 

For example, more than 200 million Instagram users visit a business profile at least once a day, and 81 percent of them use it to learn about new products from brands. 

From creating brand awareness to selling products, social media marketing is useful at every stage of the buyer journey, so developing and maintaining a social media presence is crucial to your digital marketing strategy. Social media advertising is also relatively inexpensive which makes it especially powerful for smaller brands and businesses, who can easily find and establish their niche. 

What makes social media advertising so unique is the ability to target users based on a large variety of categories. Social platforms utilize vast user data to the benefit of advertisers to connect with target audiences and new audiences. You can select audiences based on their geography, demographic, age, gender and interests. For example in the ad above, the brand could have targeted women, over the age of 21, based in the US – if that’s where they were selling. 

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your social media advertising: 

– Design your offer to fit your target audience. Some of your ads might be ineffective because of how they are designed, and some will fail because the offer turns out to be unattractive. Ads that fail are learning experiences – and you won’t know what works best until you experiment with a variety of offers and ads.

– Test, test, test! After designing your ad campaigns, test to see which ones are doing well and learn what works best for your intended audience.

– Make sure your landing page delivers on what the ad promises. If your landing page doesn’t work properly or you mislead your audiences you might get clicks on your ad – but you won’t get many conversions and might turn people off your brand completely.

– Use direct selling options whenever possible to reduce friction and make your ad experience seamless. For example, Instagram shops let you sell to your audience directly on the app, eliminating the traditional way of advertising that makes users switch to a different site or app.

– Don’t just post ads, but participate in conversations. Ads will lead new and potential customers to your social pages, so make sure you stay active and position yourself as an authority in your space.

– Use remarketing to target users who have shown previous interest in your business. Most social media platforms have specialized retargeting tags for audiences who clicked through to your website or abandoned their shopping carts. For example, on Facebook, having the pixel installed on your website enables you to collect valuable data for later use for advertising.

3. Email Marketing 

Email marketing is one of the oldest types of marketing channels out there – and it’s not going anywhere! Why, you ask? Not only is email one of the most effective marketing channels for communicating directly with people, it also has one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) of any of the channels of marketing. To compare, email marketing has an ROI of $38, more than four times higher than social media, direct mail and paid search.

Read Also: What Type of Ecommerce is Best?

Email also remains unaffected by third-party developments like social media algorithms and reaches 85 percent of the people you send it to. Over 22 percent open emails on average – miles beyond the engagement rate of 0.6 percent that the Big 3 of social media (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) share. 

Add to this the fact that over 91 percent of American internet users have an email account, and you can’t ignore email as one of your main channels to market. 

There are tons of different types of email marketing campaigns you can use to grow your business:

– Create newsletters to share relevant information or educate audiences 
– Follow-up emails to remind website visitors of abandoned items in their carts or acknowledge their purchases with receipts 
– Welcome emails for new customers
– Send promotional content announcing new launches, special events, discounts or giveaways
– Ask for reviews and get feedback

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of email marketing as a promotion channel: 

– Be straight about the purpose of your email list when asking for signups. If you say you’ll send them great articles and tips but only advertise your products, you’re likely going to experience a quick drop in subscribers.

– Write a compelling subject line that will get subscribers to open your email. Make sure it accurately reflects what’s inside the email and if you’re running a sale or promotion – highlight this in your subject!

– The best emails are short, to the point and easily scannable. Break your text up into easy readable chunks and include some images. Include only what customers absolutely need to see and nothing else.

– Create short videos to include in your emails. This will make your emails stand out and keep engagement rates high. You can do this by creating short video snippets with InVideo and converting these videos to GIFs (since you can’t embed a video directly onto an email).

– Don’t send emails too frequently because you’ll risk annoying your customers. The best thing is to have a consistent schedule and send emails out every two weeks, monthly or quarterly.

– Use email segmentation to group subscribers and send them more personalized or relevant emails. For example, if you’re selling vitamins, then you could segment your list according to those who purchased specific vitamins (and advertise for those) or those who make regular purchases and send them special promotions.

– Track your email opens, clicks and other engagements to understand what your subscribers like best and replicate the content with the most engagements. You could also use A/B testing to send different emails to the same group of people to see which worked better with your audience.

– Use automation to easily send welcome, thank you emails or receipts after subscribers have purchased something from your store.

– Create a compelling lead magnet to get your website viewers to subscribe to your email list. You can offer a discount or free gift or premium content to subscribers. Jewelry brand Biko offers their website visitors $15 off their first order for signing up!

4. Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing is a super effective advertising channel that gets your products in front of a highly engaged target market. But what makes it so effective?

Influencer marketing uses what we call ‘social proof’ to get people to buy into products and services. That is, people are more likely to make purchase decisions when hearing about it from someone they trust. Influencers usually have a large following of loyal and engaged followers who trust them implicitly, will listen to their opinions, and act on their recommendations. 

When you engage with influencers to market your brand, you’re really leveraging that trust that influencers have built. 

There are six key ways in which you can use influencer marketing to benefit your brand:

– Ask influencers to do a sponsored video or post on their promotion channels 
– Launch collaborative products or content 
– Solicit reviews by sending influencers freebies 
– Run competitions and giveaways – and advertise these through influencers or add your products to their giveaway contest 
– Get an influencer to “takeover” your social platforms
– Engage influencers as long-term brand ambassadors

Influencers can make your brand feel more approachable and relatable, help you gain new high-quality followers and communicate your brand message effectively. 

While high profile influencers can get you a lot of visibility. Huge follower counts aren’t the only thing that matters when it comes to using influencers as an advertising channel.

Just because someone has a million followers doesn’t mean a million people are paying attention – or that they’re the right audience for you!

So here are a few tips on how you can select and work with influencers that best suit your brand: 

– When selecting an influencer, research their expertise, reach, and audience demographics. Make sure they are authentic and their followers are the right target group for your product or service.

– Pay close attention to their engagement rates, the people commenting on their posts and the type of comments they make! This will help you learn how engaged their followers are and therefore how likely it is that your sponsored posts will get traction

– Choose an influencer who shares the same values or beliefs as your brand represents. For example, if one of your brand’s core beliefs is body positivity, you shouldn’t engage with someone who is hyper-focused on thinness. Your influencers should be people who would also normally use and benefit from your product or service. This will also make their posts seem more authentic.

– Give influencers the freedom to create their own content – you’re banking on their content to get your brand more attention, so let them do what they’re good at. Your job is to guide, not control how they create content.

– If you have smaller budgets, you could also work with nano or micro-influencers – who have between 1,000 -10,000 followers. Influencers with smaller followings tend to be super niche but are usually more engaged, don’t demand large fees and have strong followings which leads to more meaningful interactions. In fact, even brands with huge budgets often engage with micro-influencers to draw some of their highly engaged audiences to their pages. Collective Bias found that only 3 percent of shoppers are influenced by celebrity endorsements, while a massive 30 percent of consumers are likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity blogger.

5. Content Marketing 

Content marketing is one of those marketing channels that can impact all the others and form the base of all your promotion channels. 

Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and distributing content to attract and engage your target audience. By creating content that delivers value and solves your customer’s problems you can establish yourself as an authority in your field and reach new customers in the funnel. 

One study found that it can cost 62 percent less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads. Companies use content marketing to build or position a brand, generate leads, retain customers, increase sales, support SEO and establish their reputation. 

There are tons of different types of content that you can create to attract a specific segment of the market. These include:

– Videos
– Blog posts
– Images and GIFs
– Infographics
– Case studies
– Ebooks and white papers
– Podcasts

6. Search Engine Optimization

Successful optimization can bring in traffic and increase conversions by positioning you as an authority. All your web content needs search engine optimization. That includes your YouTube channels, Google business profile, and even podcast episodes should be optimized using target keywords. To build a thriving organic presence online, consider implementing the pillar-cluster model into your blog (35% of B2B and 59% of B2C marketers report it as an effective strategy).

By doing this, you’ll create a single pillar page that provides a high-level overview of a topic and hyperlinks to cluster pages that delve into the topic’s subtopics, signaling to Google that your pillar page is an authority on the topic. Additional SEO tactics that marketers effectively use include search insights reports, optimizing photos or videos for visual search engines, and optimizing load speed.