Digital Marketing channels have revolutionized the way we promote products and services to our audience. With more than 4 billion active internet users around the globe, business owners can showcase their brands with a powerful online presence.
The digital marketing industry in India has grown at a staggering rate since 2011:
Image source: Statista
However, the ever-increasing online clutter is making it more and more difficult for businesses to maintain the spotlight on their brand. Every online strategy needs to be meticulously planned to reach the desired results.
Before we dive into understanding different digital marketing channels, here’s an overview to make it simpler.
Digital Marketing Channels
Digital marketing channels are various platforms that businesses can utilize to increase their outreach and brand awareness as well as promote their brand’s story, products, and services.
The main focus of digital marketing strategies revolves around generating leads, increasing website traffic, improving brand recognition, maximizing conversions, and more.
You need to understand every digital marketing channel to shortlist the ones applicable to your brand’s position and needs.
That’s why our digital marketing experts have encapsulated the details of the top 7 digital marketing channels for 2024.
Have a look!
Top 7 Digital Marketing Channels That Make a Difference
There are countless digital marketing channels to choose from, but only a few can provide you with a satisfactory return on investment. Some channels are effective for increasing brand awareness, while others are focused on driving sales. Choose the ones that align with your digital marketing needs.
Here’s a list of digital marketing channels that we’ll discuss in detail:
1. Content Marketing (Websites)
Website is not just an option for businesses anymore, it is a necessity. It is the digital face of your brand that lets you form a brand image and personality to connect with your audience.
It is a platform where you can inform your consumers about your brand’s story, services, products, workforce, etc. But a powerful online presence requires a deep insight into your consumer’s behaviour and preferences as well as a carefully structured content marketing strategy.
Regardless of the size or type of your business, you need a website to deliver content. Whether you sell products directly or sell them to other businesses, you need a platform to share the details of your brand and its uses.
Add source: Dragon360
61% of buying decisions are influenced by custom content, which says a lot.
This digital marketing channel lets you provide a wide range of information to your existing and potential audience through different types of content like announcements, blog posts, case studies, portfolios, customer testimonials and so on. Address different pain points of your specific audience in an attempt to solve them with your products or services, gaining customer trust and loyalty.
With different types of content, you can share multimedia articles with various infographics and videos. This will help attract more attention towards your brand’s website, subsequently increasing and maintaining a steady flow of organic traffic.
Here’s an example of our website with different types of content like services, about us, career options, blogs, case studies, newsletters and more:
How content marketing aids your business?
This digital marketing channel increases the value of your website with increased traffic, consequently enhancing your brand’s value. Consumers are attracted to content that strikes a decent balance between visual appeal and insightful information.
However that’s not all, a well-structured content marketing strategy does not just increase traffic but improves your conversion rate. Content makes your audience intrigued and curious about your products, which eventually leads to lead generation and a high return on investment.
How to use content marketing?
You must form a digital channel strategy with different types of content to unlock its full potential.
For example, a new audience should be informed about your brand’s message and story before pushing products on me. And product videos should be put in front of the segment of consumers who are already considering buying from your brand.
Consult professionals, perfectly place your content where it needs to be and watch the conversion rate go through the roof.
Email marketing and social media marketing are two of the most effective ways to promote your website’s content.
Let’s understand what is email marketing.
2. Email Marketing
Many people believed that email marketing will be obsolete in the digital era, but it continues to thrive.
It is one of the most versatile forms of digital marketing channels with an impressive return on investment. It may not be included among the latest technologies, but email marketing has been an invaluable part of digital marketing since the inception of the digital era.
Email marketing enables you to integrate the latest digital marketing trends into your digital marketing mix, allowing you to deliver personalized content for your audience.
On average, email marketing gives you a return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent. Also, 89% of marketers claim that email is the main digital marketing channel for lead generation. That’s why understanding how to use email as a marketing tool is pivotal to success for any business.
As a business owner, you can use the power of email marketing to share new offers, send newsletters to monthly subscribers, deliver news, wish your loyal customers on their birthdays, and so on…
Here’s an example of email marketing as an effective digital marketing channel by Starbucks:
How does email marketing boost your digital channel strategy?
Reach your consumers directly and deliver quality content relevant to your audience and your brand, boosting conversion and brand awareness at the same time. Additionally, build trust and brand loyalty by staying connected with your consumers, gaining leads and increasing revenue as a result.
How to use email marketing effectively?
One of the best ways to use this digital marketing channel is by sending time-locked discounts and offers. Gently nudge your audience towards conversion before the end of the specific offers.
Understand your audience and reflect their preferences and personality in the email content. Meticulously plan the email with personalized content like free trials, promoting specific products, enticing call to action, etc.
Always be open to feedback for your customers and provide seamless customer service. Monitor user satisfaction along the way and constantly improve your content accordingly.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media is unequivocally one of the most consequential digital marketing channels. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn are designed to share, communicate and connect with other people.
It opens up an ocean of opportunities for businesses to tap into. From brand recognition to lead generation, you can use social media to propel your brand to new heights to fame and fortune.
Many brands have already realised the potential of social media and developed a brand personality that is firmly ingrained into their consumers’ minds. With proper guidance from professional social media marketers, you can also use these platforms to cultivate a brand image that not only steals the spotlight but creates a long-term relationship with your consumers.
There are nearly 4.5 billion social media users around the globe and 79% of marketers claim that they have purchased paid ads on social media.
Here are some examples of social media marketing posts for different clients by Communication Crafts:
How does social media marketing improve your digital marketing strategy?
Social media simply increases user engagement, allowing you to keep your brand connected with its followers. The more followers you get for your brand, the more views you get for your social media posts, ultimately driving more traffic and potential leads to your brand’s website.
This digital marketing channel also lets you study your competitors’ activities and your customers’ reactions towards your brand and its content. Widen your audience and enhance brand recognition with appealing and relevant social media content.
How to use social media marketing for optimum results?
Keep your brand authentic and try to align your content with your audience. Solve pain points and challenges that your users face with your products/services. Also, use branded hashtags to increase outreach.
Creativity and research must be at the forefront of your digital channel strategy to gain effective results.
Here are some types of social media content that brands can use:
- Product promotion: Directly market your products or services to the audience;
- Product reveal: Instigate curiosity and anticipation among your followers;
- User-generated content: Repost your followers’ content and tag them for maximum user engagement;
- Sponsored ads: Purchase and share paid ads to maximize your brand’s outreach;
- Influencer marketing: Promote your brand through influencers with a massive number of followers;
- Multimedia content: Use different types of content like images, texts, videos, infographics, etc.
4. Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) plays a significant role in your digital channel strategy. It is responsible for the quality of your brand’s online visibility. This digital marketing channel lets you keep your brand visible where it should be.
63k search queries are generated every second on Google, emphasizing the importance of Search Engine Marketing.
Search Engine Marketing has two distinct parts- SEO and PPC.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your website rank higher on SERPs and Pay Per Click (PPC) lets you purchase paid ads to display at the top of SERPs. Let’s discuss each in detail.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
People use search engines for a wide range of purposes- entertainment, research, shopping, random information, etc. This creates a pool of opportunities for businesses, enabling an online space to die for.
This is an example of successful SEO marketing for Vasant Masala by Communication Crafts. The brand website is ranking at the top of the first page Google for the key phrase “best spice manufacturers in Gujarat”
68% of online experiences are initiated by a search engine, so why not make it lead towards your brand?
How does SEO improve your online visibility?
Various segments of the audience use Google to search for products and services, and they gravitate towards the websites that rank higher. Maintaining SEO not only improves the rank but attracts a steady flow of organic traffic to your brand’s website.
An SEO-centric website invites a massive surge of traffic as well as backlinks from reputable websites.
How to use SEO effectively?
There’s a considerable learning curve to mastering the art of SEO as Google uses 200 factors to rank your website on its search pages.
You can optimize your website in two ways:
1. On-page optimization: This method includes practices like choosing the right keywords, using quality meta descriptions, providing value to your users, etc.
2. Off-page optimization: This method includes practices like backlinking, guest posting, etc.
Pay Per Click (PPC):
As opposed to SEO, where users stumble upon the website organically, PPC is a way of attracting customers through paid ads that costs you for each click.
Regardless of your website ranking and your online content, paid search ad keeps your promotion at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), ultimately maximising your brand’s outreach and enhancing online visibility.
This is how PPC ads are displayed at the top of SERPs.
93% of marketers are inclined towards paid search ads and 75% of consumers claim that paid ads help them find the desired results.
With PPC services, you have a chance to showcase your brand above the organic search results, keeping your business literally on top.
How do Paid Search Ads improve your online visibility?
If your brand is visible at the top of Google search results, your business gains maximum exposure and outreach instantly.
Similar to Search Engine Optimization, you can use PPC to gain leads, drive conversion and enhance ROI by cleverly placing paid ads based on demographics, target audience, sales funnel, etc.
How to use PPC ads effectively?
The success of your PPC campaign depends on two things-
1. Ad Copies: These are the text ads that get displayed on SERPs. Address your target audience, make an appealing offer, use selected keywords and use an ad copy that reflects your landing page.
2. Landing Pages: The text ads will redirect your audience to your landing pages. Use powerful headlines, integrate seamless navigation and an appealing layout, facilitate conversions through attractive CTAs and mirror your landing page content with the ad copy.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically used to connect merchants and affiliate marketers for enhancing the promotion of products and services via referrals. Affiliate links and sponsored posts are used to promote brands and businesses.
This digital marketing channel is highly efficient in driving sales and generating leads. Affiliate marketing helps you create a sales funnel that attracts the target audience in their online journey.
94% of publishers use multiple affiliate marketing networks and`79% of marketers utilise this channel for engaging existing customers.
This attempt at affiliate marketing by Wirecutter generated 642 backlinks and 1100 shares.
How does affiliate marketing aid your business?
This digital marketing channel increases your brand’s market reach with the online space used by the publishers. As a result, your brand gets connected to a wider network of consumers through social media, blogs, newsletters, etc.
Influence buying decisions by using the influence of affiliate marketers, increasing the opportunity of gaining quality leads.
How to use affiliate marketing effectively?
Select affiliate partners that are trusted in the industry and relevant to your brand. This allows your brand to get recommended by powerful influencers, providing long-term value to your brand and its products.
Keep a consistent connection with the selected affiliates. Sale cycles tend to go on for a long time, that’s why maintaining a healthy network with your affiliates lead to effective digital marketing.
6. Video Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, video content is king!
This type of content lets you create a perfect balance between engagement, entertainment and education. You can inform your audience about your brand and entertain them through the video simultaneously.
It is a proven fact that video content yields much more information retention when compared to other types of content like text or image.
54% of consumers prefer video content and 86% of businesses already use video marketing in their digital channel strategy.
This is an example of a video created for Nutrabox by Communication Crafts.
How does video marketing enhance your marketing strategy?
Along with retention, video content increases user engagement to a great extent. It can be easily shared through different social media channels and remarketed over and over for high conversion and ROI.
Video content also boosts your web page’s SEO, maximising online visibility on SERPs and driving traffic with ease.
How to utilise video marketing effectively?
Understand your target audience and recognise your video marketing goals, this will help you decide the type of video you want to deliver.
There are many types of video that you can adopt for your brand- About us videos, whiteboard animation videos, explainer videos, product reveal videos, product demonstration videos, case study videos, testimonial videos, event videos and so on…
Share your brand’s story or promote a product, it all boils down to your specific branding needs.
7. Mobile Marketing
Online shopping has been gaining traction over the years, proving its advantages over traditional shopping in physical stores. The ever-changing consumer behaviour is demanding more and more convenience, and mobile commerce is being preferred now more than ever.
Delivering your promotional content directly to your consumers’ mobile phones can benefit your brand in unimaginable ways. Mobile applications and mobile responsive web applications are the heart and soul of businesses in the advancing digital era.
There are already 6.4 billion smartphone users and 69% of the internet users prefer shopping apps on mobile devices.
Needless to say, this is a huge opportunity for businesses of all types and sizes.
This is a great example of mobile marketing by Burger King. They integrated Augmented Reality tech through mobile cameras in the Burger King app to form a creatively effective ad campaign. Users were asked to digitally burn posters of McDonalds for availing of unique offers and discounts.
How can mobile marketing help your brand?
Directly promote your brand on your users’ mobile screens to drive sales, making it a boon for online retail businesses. Also, keep your brand visible at all times because most of the time spent on the internet by consumers is via mobile phones.
How to use mobile marketing effectively?
Integrate modern technologies like Augmented Reality, Machine Learning, Geo-Fencing and more to build extremely effective and lucrative digital marketing campaigns.
Enable push notifications and SMS marketing to directly reach your audience’s notification bar.
Build a web application and mobile application that delivers a seamless online retail experience for your customers.
Every digital marketing channel is different with unique benefits that fit unique requirements. We hope this blog will help you in making better business decisions in the future.
And if you require further assistance in digital marketing, feel free to contact us.
Communication Crafts is an experience-led and result-driven company that provides meticulously strategized digital marketing services to empower your brand’s growth and prosperity. With a transparent work process, our experts can deliver future-proof digital marketing solutions custom-tailored to your needs and requirements.
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