Although digital marketing offers numerous channels to promote your business, not all channels are a good fit for your needs. Every channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and while one channel might work for some businesses, it might not work for you. Follow these steps to determine the best digital marketing channels for your small business.
Step 1: Assess Your Priorities
Before you can plan a marketing campaign strategy, you must first consider your objectives. After all, businesses that set goals are 376% more likely to succeed than those that don’t. What are your priorities? Do you want to boost sales? Establish yourself as an industry expert? Raise brand awareness? Once you know what goals you’re trying to reach, you can analyze the various digital marketing channels to choose the ones that will effectively help you achieve your objectives.
Step 2: Know Your Audience
Once you know what your needs are, you should learn the needs of your audience. For a marketing campaign to be successful, you have to deliver the right message to the right people through the channels they use. Learn where your audience spends their time online. Find out what kind of content attracts them and resonates. Discover how they prefer to receive content and who they follow online. All of this insight can help you choose the digital marketing channels that will be most effective for the people you want to reach.
Step 3: Set Your Budget
Before you can map out a solid plan and choose your digital marketing channels, you need to know how much money you can spend. Different channels are available at different price points. Social media marketing is essentially free if you do it yourself, but paid ads or purchasing a content marketing strategy can be more costly. Businesses typically allot 10% of company revenue for marketing. Set your budget, then find out what each digital marketing channel costs. Prioritize your efforts and choose which channels to use now and which to try in the future.
Some digital marketing strategies for businesses on a budget include:
Social media marketing: Accounts and posts are free. If you want usage of this application to boost a post for a nominal fee, you can set specific parameters to ensure you stay under budget.
Blog posts (SEO): It costs virtually nothing to post a high-quality article on a regular basis. You could pay experts to post on your blog to build more authority for your brand, but it isn’t a necessity.
Page content (products, categories or services - SEO): Again, it costs virtually nothing to ensure your pages have descriptive content.
Email marketing: Unless you’re using a paid service, email marketing only costs you the time of creating the email and sending it to your contact base.
As you weigh your options, remember to consider ROI and your channels' impact on your long-term marketing success. Using only a free channel may not yield as positive results as a daily blog or actual SEO. In many cases, the more you put into your marketing campaign, the more quickly you’ll see results. Starting small and working your way up could take longer and may not be worth the savings.