You want the most bang for your marketing buck, whether you run your business from your couch or you have a staff in the triple digits.
Here’s the problem: if you’re not a marketer, you may not know what to prioritize.
The good news is that you already have several marketing channels at your disposal. Here are a few that should be the highest on your priority list.
1. YOUR WEBSITE
The first is one that you’re already intimately familiar with: your website.
A lot of businesses don’t think of their website as a marketing channel. Instead, they think of it as a kind of digital stand-in for YellowPages. But the truth is, your website is one of the most valuable marketing channels you have?
Why? Because your website is entirely under your control.
You get to decide every detail of your site, which means that you have a unique power to manage every aspect of your marketing message. Plus, your site allows you to reach a wider audience with minimal effort.
So if you’re not already analyzing and optimizing your site, now is the time to start. A tool like SEMRush can audit your site and give you an idea of where you could improve.
2. YOUR BLOG
Blogs get more attention than websites because they’re a cornerstone of online content marketing. However, many business owners don’t know how to run their own blogs.
They just know that they need a blog, for some reason.
A blog is a huge benefit to your marketing effort. It helps drive traffic to your site (and convert that traffic into leads). It establishes your business as a subject-matter expert. It can even be used as an avenue to test marketing efforts on a small-scale before you launch them out into the wild.
The trick is knowing how to write for the web. Online visitors are notoriously impatient and often visit from their phones–they aren’t going to dedicate a huge swath of their time to read a blog post.
3. YOUR EMAIL LIST
Emails don’t get as much attention these days as social media. That’s a real shame because email lists are one of your few remaining opportunities to directly engage with your customer, almost as if you’re writing an email to them personally.
Think about it.
When someone subscribes to your email list, they’ve agreed to receive direct communication from you. They’re excited about your product or service and they want to hear more about what you have to offer.
Why not take advantage of it?
That said, email marketing is an art and a science. You have to be just as deliberate as any other marketing effort.
A good place to start is to try to be as personalized as possible. Users like to feel that they’re directly engaging with you, so use your emails as a chance to foster that personal connection. But keep it short–email readers, like web surfers, have short attention spans. Get to the point and get to it fast so you can grab their attention.
4. YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA
You didn’t really think you were going to make it through this post without any mention of social media, did you?
Love it or hate it, the fact is that social media is here to stay, and it has incredible marketing power. Over 3.2 billion people use social media globally, spending an average of two hours and 23 minutes per day, though the usage numbers are much higher among teenagers.
Better still for businesses, 95% of young people follow at least one brand on social media.
Users are going online for information, and they’re going online to buy. Marketing your brand through social media is a way to directly interact with this audience.
You can show them your brand personality. You can build trust. You can connect with them to build their confidence. You can showcase your business’s values that align with your customers.
So, why aren’t you using social media yet?
5. CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing isn’t a marketing channel so much as a technique, but it informs every other marketing channel you use.
Content marketing is a technique focused on distributing high-value content to your customers. This content should be relevant to your customers and should be delivered consistently.
This is different than traditional pitching seen in old-school marketing. You’re not selling something, at least not overtly. Instead, you’re addressing real problems that a customer has (and subtly offering your product or service as a solution to those problems).
6. SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art and science of getting your business noticed by search engines.
Search engines are used to answer questions for consumers. Basically, they’re a tool that allows customers to find the most relevant solution to their problem without needing to know a specific website URL.
But in order to present the best possible search results from the whole Internet, search engines have to index sites so that they know what sites are relevant to specific searches. This is where SEO comes into play.
Since search engines don’t read a site like a human, you have to give them certain clues to know what’s happening on your site. SEO is basically your way of waving a neon flag for search engines to find.
It’s an incredibly complicated process and it evolves every day. Here’s the good news: you can use a lot of the same basic SEO principles on multiple marketing channels.
First and foremost, good SEO relies on good content. From there, you can learn how to optimize your content so that users can find it.
STRENGTHENING YOUR MARKETING CHANNELS EVERY DAY
Your marketing channels are about so much more than selling something. They’re a way to build a real connection with your customers and show your business value.
Of course, sales are still a cornerstone of marketing. And if you want to make sales, you have to manage your channels successfully. That’s where we come in.
We offer the tools you need to effectively manage your marketing channels all in one place. That way, you can stop fighting with your system and focus on what matters: converting leads.
Ready to get started? Click here to learn more.
