Introduction
What are the best online marketing channels?
There isn’t a straightforward answer to this question. Every business is different.
But, there are certain channels that tend to be more cost-effective and provide higher conversion rates.
If you are looking for a way to stretch your online marketing budget, then explore the most cost effective online marketing channels.
Here’s a quick overview of the online marketing channels that’ll be covered:
Email marketing
Pay-per-click advertising
Social media advertising
Blogging
Email Marketing
For some reason, many entrepreneurs and business owners believe that email marketing is outdated or ineffective.
This is simply not true. Email marketing remains the most cost-effective way to increase conversion rates and boost sales if you do it properly.
Don’t just bombard your subscribers with your offers. They will soon switch off, and probably opt-out. You need to send them emails with useful, and entertaining content, and links to other peoples posts if you believe they will add value for your subscribers.
Compared to all other online marketing channels, email marketing offers the lowest cost per lead.
While social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have millions of users, everyone you send emails to has an email address.
As long as you’re smart about your email marketing strategy, you will get positive results.
Make sure that your emails encourage your subscribers to take action. This could include visiting your website or purchasing a product or service.
You should also create a sense of urgency in your emails.
Warning: don’t ever purchase an email list. You should always build your own list using opt-in forms and other methods.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another marketing channel that is thought by some as being past its prime.
Again, this simply isn’t true. PPC is affordable and effective. You just need to optimize your PPC campaign.
Before you put your campaign together, you need to perform thorough keyword research. The key to an effective PPC campaign is choosing the right keywords or audience.
Using the free Google AdWords Keyword Planner to research keywords and find phrases with low competition and medium search volume is surprisingly effective, and has become more powerful in the last 12 months.
Along with keyword research, you need to have a title and description that grabs attention.
On most PPC platforms, you have limited space available. Your title and description used in your PPC advertisement shouldn’t be vague. It should be clear and direct.
By having a clear message in your PPC ad, you’ll naturally attract higher conversion rates. Focus on a specific relevant demographic and speak directly to the customer.
Social Media Advertising
While email marketing and PPC advertising have been around since the beginning of online marketing, social media marketing is relatively new by comparison.
There are two elements to using social media as a part of your online marketing strategy – regular activity and advertising.
First, you should be active on social media. Create a schedule for sending out new posts or tweets. This helps you build your subscriber or follower base.
Along with regular activity, you should include social media advertising in your marketing strategy.
This could include Facebook Ads, promoted Tweets on Twitter, and advertisements on LinkedIn (if that is where your target audience hangs out).
As with PPC advertising, you’ll need to optimize these advertisements to increase conversion rates. Again, you can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool to find the most effective keywords.
Focus on a niche category, as high level keywords (e.g. make money online, work from home, internet marketing) will be more expensive and less effective; because the people clicking them will probably have a multitude of different agendas, or be at an early stage of their research-in which case they will be less likely to buy.
Blogging
Here’s one more online marketing channel to include in your overall strategy – blogging.
Blogging is extremely cost effective. You just need to start adding regular blog posts to your website.
Blogging is a long-term strategy as you need to build an audience of regular and loyal supporters who have grown to know, like and trust you based on their experience over a period of time.
Blog posts can also be shared on social media, linked to your website from advertisements, and (again, done well) are incredibly beneficial from an SEO standpoint.
Blog about topics relevant to your products or services, using carefully research and selective relevant keywords.
You should also create a schedule for your blog posts. With a regular schedule, visitors will know when to come back for more posts.
This increases repeat traffic and allows you to develop a loyal group of followers while also establishing yourself as a voice of authority in your niche market.
Conclusion
As you start developing and refining your online marketing strategy, consider using the marketing channels described above. To begin with, choose just one or two channels. Once you have tested them and become competent and successful at them, you can try others to compare your results.
Along with these tips, be sure to check out my simple lead generation system.
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