The Top 15 Online Marketing Channels.
What Is An Online Marketing Channel?
An online marketing channel is a digital platform you can use to reach and connect with your target audience.
An online marketing channel is synonymous with a digital marketing channel.
Different online marketing channels serve different purposes.
For instance, social media is conducive to customer engagement and a friendly/communicative environment…
…whereas Google is a place where people go to get information and frequently asked questions answered.
Small business owners need to determine which online marketing channel their target audience spends the most time on and invest their efforts there.
So, in this ultimate guide, we’re breaking down the top 15 online marketing channels to help you make that decision.
Let’s get started!
Top 15 Online Marketing Channels
Social media is a term that encompasses several different individual social networks.
These include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and more.
Again, each platform has its different nuances and primary demographic, but social media as a whole is a place where users gather to interact through a news feed with friends, family, brands, and influencers.
It gives customers direct access to brands and vice versa.
Social media has facilitated customer relationship management like nothing else has before.
Organic social media marketing, meaning unpaid social media marketing, is a great tool to garner brand loyalty, brand awareness and stir up conversations in the comments with your audience.
You’ll want to perform research to determine which of the social media platforms for business makes the most sense given your specific target market, and plug into that platform.
This can look like going live on that platform, posting Stories, responding to comments, etc.
The goal of any social media channel should be to foster a positive and ongoing relationship between your brand and your target audience.
Social media advertising is the paid side of social media marketing. Every social media platform has its own advertising platform built in.
Facebook and Instagram have Facebook Ads Manager, Twitter has Twitter Ads, TikTok has TikTok Ads, and so on.
While most social media advertising channels are similar, it’s important to note that they’re not the same.
They have different targeting capabilities, different campaign objectives options, and so on. As a result, they have different pros and cons.
You’ll first need to weigh the benefits of the varying platforms as they relate to your ultimate goal and determine if they will help you reach your desired outcome from social media marketing.
Overall, social media advertising lets you put your valuable content creation directly in front of your audience to nudge them towards your call to action.
Social media advertising will drive traffic, leads, and sales that you often can’t get from organic social media marketing.
The downside is that it requires an ad budget to fuel these basic tasks, unlike organic social media marketing.
That’s why you’ll want to perform the research upfront to determine which social media channel is going to be the most fruitful for you to advertise on.
You don’t want to waste your ad budget or time on a platform that doesn’t hold much of your target market.
3. Email Marketing
If all of the social media giants like Facebook and Instagram were to crash and “go down” today, would you still have a customer base to market to?
A lot of small business owners make the mistake of relying on their following on external platforms to have access to their potential customers.
You need to own your customer list so that if push comes to shove, you still have access to your customers. Email marketing is the way to do that.
Email marketing is the process of sending emails to your leads and customers regularly to move them further down your sales funnel.
Whether you need to turn a follower into a lead or a lead into a customer, email marketing is the bridge that fills that gap.
There are two main types of email marketing you can perform: manual, weekly newsletters, and automated drip campaigns.
Manual, weekly newsletters are exactly what they sound like. They’re relevant, topical emails that you type up and send to your email list on a daily basis.
Automated drip campaigns serve as marketing automation tools. They are emails that you set up in advance with conditions in place…
…so that the email marketing software can continue to send those emails for you on its own after that.
For instance, you don’t want to sit down and manually send out an order confirmation email every time a purchase is made, right? Of course not!
An automated email sequence can take care of that for you. The important part of automated emails is that they go way beyond simple logistic emails.
The real magic in email marketing happens when you set conditions that say if a customer opens email A, send them email B. If not, send them email C, and so on.
You’re creating a smart, personalized, and strategic email sequence that sends on its own! It can work while you’re sleeping.
Email marketing is (still) one of the best business online marketing channels available to help nurture leads and convert prospects into customers.
4. SEO
Is the product or service you offer something that your audience often searches for on Google when they need it? If so, SEO is for you.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a great online marketing channel for businesses whose nature is to be searched.
Off-page SEO refers to the process of actions that are taken outside of your website. They effect your rankings within SERPS (search engine results pages).
SEO is the organic process of helping your website rank in the Google search results- or technically any search engine results.
Your page speed for SEO should be up to three seconds or less.
You can perform SEO on any search engine including Bing or DuckDuckGo, but Google is the most popular search engine and therefore it’s where most business owners start.
If someone types in a search query, or keyword, into the Google search bar that is related to the product or service you offer…
you want your website to be the first result that appears at the top of landing page 1.
SEO is the process that helps you accomplish that.
There are hundreds of ranking factors that Google looks at and considers when deciding which websites are going to rank in which order.
As a result, there are hundreds of things you can do to optimize your website for SEO, including on-site SEO vs off-site SEO and more.
If you need help putting an SEO strategy together, check out that blog.
5. SEM
SEM, Search Engine Marketing, is the paid version of SEO. SEM is also sometimes referred to as PPC advertising which stands for Pay-Per-Click advertising.
SEM is the process of ranking in the top paid spots in the search engine results. Take a look at this photo again to see the difference.
You pay Google for the top spot in the search results, giving you tons of exposure and relevant clicks.
The difference between SEM vs SEO is that SEM only works for you as long as you’re feeding it an advertising budget. Soon as the budget is cut off, you will no longer rank in the top spot.
SEO takes a lot more time and work, but the results last longer and don’t depend on an unlimited ad budget.
On average, the first five results on a search engine results page get more than 67% of all clicks for any given search query.
That means you’ll want your business to appear in those top five results building your online presence, let alone on page 1! SEM and SEO are both methods to achieve that goal.
If you want to learn more about the two online marketing channels to determine which would be better suited for your business, check out our blog on SEO vs SEM.
6. Display Ads
Display ads are a type of Google ad that are visual. They are a form of paid ads.
Instead of having a text ad at the top of the search results, you have a graphic without separate text or a caption that appears across Google’s Display Network.
Display ads can appear across millions of websites, apps, and other Google-owned properties like Gmail and YouTube.
The idea with display ads is that you retarget your website visitors and follow them all across the web, putting your brand in front of them again and again until they convert.
Most people do not purchase upon the first click, the second, or the third. The average person needs to be retargeted seven times before they’re compelled to take action.
This is especially true when they’re seeing advertisements from small businesses they’ve never heard of before.
Display ads give you the reach and opportunity to retarget your website traffic across the world wide web as opposed to just any one platform.
7. Google Shopping Ads
Google Shopping Ads are a great online marketing channel for eCommerce store owners in particular.
Shopping ads are where the right people see product listings in the search results for certain search queries.
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