Which Digital Marketing Channels Should You Be On?

When first looking at Digital Marketing it can be hard knowing which channels your business should be on and there’s usually some expert in each channel shouting why theirs is the best for all businesses. Put on top of that new channels being introduced at regular intervals, knowing what to do and what not to do becomes even harder.

Understand Your Resources

Before you start any marketing campaigns one of the first things you need to understand is what resources you have available. This will help you understand realistically how many channels you should actually be on and may rule out some of the more resource heavy channels out.

We often see business owners skip this step which leads them to trying everything at once. What this usually leads to is a lot of channels done poorly. What you should be aiming for is to do a limited number of channels as well as possible.

Where Is Your Audience?

One of the next questions to ask is where your audience actually is. If your target audience isn’t on a channel then there’s likely to be little point of your business being there, especially if it’s going to affect the efforts you can put into other channels where your audience can be found.

You should therefore choose your primary marketing channels around where your audience actually is.

Test and Adjust

It’s important that the digital marketing channels you choose aren’t just decided and then that’s what you stick to. Instead you should be constantly testing and making adjustments so that your marketing budget is assigned to where it can be most effective and to help meet your business goals.

With that in mind you should try and set some marketing budget aside to test different channels. You never know, this could lead to you to find the next best channel for your business!

As you run the different channels you should find out what your core channels are, these are the ones which are performing consistently and bringing results. Most small businesses will have 2-3 core channels and around 60-80% of efforts should be spent on these. The rest should be spent on testing different channels to try and find more channels which work for your business. As your business grows you’ll then be able to add more core channels to your business. It will also help to understand which channels don’t work for your business and should therefore be avoided.

When you are testing different channels it’s important to assign enough resources to it. An under resourced channel is likely to perform worse than it would otherwise and may lead to you stop using what could be a great marketing channel for your business.