List of All Digital Marketing Channels
List of All Digital Marketing Channels
Table of Contents
As a business owner or marketing leader, it’s important to understand that digital marketing channels can be grouped into two fundamental categories:
- Short-term focused digital marketing channels
- Long-term focused digital marketing channels
These are then further subdivided into paid advertising and free organic digital marketing channels. Irrespective of which digital marketing channel(s) you decide to invest in, you need to clarify with your marketing team or agency whether these channels are short term or long term because this will help you understand how much is being wasted on marketing.
Free Digital Marketing Channels
Digital marketing channels classed as ‘free’ are not actually free, because you still need to invest in hiring the right staff to manage these channels, as well as investing in marketing software tools. The results you get from ‘free’ digital marketing channels are more long-term focused and require patience because it takes time to get traction and ROI on investment in these marketing channels.
Paid Digital Marketing Channels
Paid digital marketing channels will get you instant results from a traffic acquisition perspective but ROI is not guaranteed unless you are targeting the right customer using the right keyword terms. I have seen companies spend as much as £5 million pounds on paid advertising without getting any tangible results because they lacked a focused marketing plan and clear KPIs.
Types of Digital Marketing Channels
The primary purpose of digital marketing channels is to get traffic to your website or encourage customers to visit branches of your physical store locations to buy or pick-up orders. Digital marketing channels come in different shapes and sizes. Here are some of the important strategies and digital marketing channels from a traffic acquisition, retention and conversion perspective:
- Content Marketing (production and distribution)
- Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others)
- Search Engines (Google Ads, Display Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation – SEO)
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Offline Marketing
- Brand Equity (Direct Traffic)
The foundation of getting traffic from digital channels is content production but you see a lot of marketing ‘gurus’ classifying content marketing as a marketing channel. However, content production is actually the foundation of all your digital marketing channels from an acquisition, conversion and retention standpoint. The effectiveness of your marketing strategy depends on the quality, consistency, targeting and distribution of your content across and tailored to digital marketing channels. I will explain this further in the next sections of the article.
Social Media as a Digital Marketing Channel
You can acquire website traffic and build brand awareness from the following social media channels:
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- Medium
- Twitch
- Quora
- Meetup
- Flickr
- Vimeo
You can achieve your customer acquisition, engagement and conversion objectives using different social media platforms but it’s important to understand your customers’ behaviours on these platforms in order to avoid wasting your marketing budget. Business executives often complain that “we tried Facebook and Twitter but didn’t get any conversion”.
On the other extreme you see successful ecommerce businesses making huge profit from using social media platforms. You need to understand your customers and how to connect with them on social media if you want to increase business results using social media platforms.
Some social media platforms like LinkedIn will bring customers to your website that are more business-oriented, while platforms like Facebook will generate less B2B oriented traffic. Whatever your business venture, you want to identify the best social media platforms that align with your target customer, business objectives because that’s the channel that will generate high converting customers.
Another important digital marketing channel is the search engine which is unarguably the highest source of traffic to your website. Google search is the most effective engine and the platform also owns YouTube, which is the second largest global search engine. Listed below are some of the most popular search engines:
As a digital marketing channel, search engines send traffic to your website in two fundamental ways:
- Paid search traffic also known as Google Ads
- Organic search traffic which you can manage through SEO or search engine optimisation.
Paid search is when you pay search engines like Google to get customers to your website. This is a pay-as-you-go approach because you will only get what you pay for and Google will stop sending traffic to your website if you are not able to afford that traffic. The same applies to YouTube, you can invariably pay to get traffic from YouTube videos to your website.
Paid search as a digital marketing channel is very expensive but also very effective if you have the budget for it. Make sure you are targeting the right keywords and also that you are sending the traffic to the correct landing pages.
SEO is another effective and cost-efficient digital marketing channel that is important if you are keen on reducing your customer cost per acquisition. To get traffic to your website from search engines without spending a lot of money on Google ads, you need to create very good content which will get picked up by those search engines and then be shown to your target customer. This is how you get free traffic to your website through SEO.
Affiliate Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel
Affiliate marketing is just someone else doing your marketing for you, but you pay them a commission if you make a sale. So it’s basically getting other people to create content or do whatever they can to push traffic to your website, but you then have a tracking code that whenever the traffic they send to your website converts into a sale, you pay them a commission – a percentage of the sale. That’s affiliate marketing.
Email Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel
Another digital marketing channel is email marketing, which is very, very effective for customer retention. Although you can use email marketing for customer acquisition, you will want to focus your email marketing on retaining your existing customers by engaging them with content.
Email marketing is very unique because when people go on social media platforms, Google search, or whatever, they’re presented with different options. But with email marketing, you can really target your customer. It’s a form of one-to-one conversation, so there’s less distraction. That’s what makes email marketing very, very effective to retain existing customer and bring down your customer acquisition costs.
Offline Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel
Another important marketing channel that you should consider embedding in your marketing strategy is offline marketing. You can embed and include in your offline marketing materials your website address, your email and details of other online channels you are using, which can bring people back to your website.
You should consider various combinations of these channels when you’re looking to start utilising and optimising your digital marketing to get the best result.
There is no one best channel, but the decision on the mix of channels you will be using will likely make or break your business. If you choose the wrong mix of channels, you’re bound to waste your marketing budget. But if you choose the right channel mix that aligns with your target customer, then you’re bound to make more money and ensure the long-term sustainability of your business.
