7 Digital Marketing Channels Your Business Needs

Owning a website isn’t enough anymore.

Your website needs to attract a decent traffic to generate the amount of business your company needs to succeed. In today’s fast-paced, highly competitive market, digital marketing channels will boost your traffic. As a consequence, more and more companies are turning to digital marketing firms to find creative ways to boost their businesses.

Do you know what methods your competitors are using? These are the seven most commonly used digital marketing channels your company should be using.

Web Design and Development

Don’t be one of the 49 percent of small businesses struggling to survive without a website. It’s bad for your health. You can’t do much of anything without a website. Sure, you could make one yourself, but who has time for that? Leave it to the digital marketing professionals to create an easily navigable and engaging website that will keep visitors coming back.

Change is a good thing. More and more companies are discovering this hourly. If you’ve already got a website, giving it a fresh face feels good every once in a while and keeps visitors intrigued and engaged.

Social Media Marketing

Once you have a website, it’s time to start building social media profiles to promote your business. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn…they’re all constantly updating, switching things up on users practically daily. So how can you be sure you’re always reaching the right audience at the right time?

Facebook is the most widely used social media platform, with an average of 1.09 billion users active every day, 989 million of whom accessed Facebook from mobile devices in March 2016 alone. And these users aren’t just members of younger generations anymore.

With 75 percent of people reporting that they’d use social media in the future as part of their consumer experience (IBM study), more and more businesses need people who can properly manage their online presence.

Digital marketing companies often have teams specifically dedicated to managing social media accounts. Forget about the hassle of keeping up with the latest changes and trying to figure out the best ways to reach your target audience. Leave it up to the social media masters.

Paid Online Advertising

As competition becomes increasingly tighter, companies are pushing harder and harder to get to the top, to outshine their competitors in the eyes of their target audiences. That includes investing in paid advertising tactics like AdWords, pay per click (PPC), and display marketing.

Now companies can even invest in ads to broadcast on digital radio systems, like Pandora and Spotify, reaching thousands more potential customers.

As the easiest digital marketing tactic to measure, paid marketing is one of the most insightful and ROI effective lead generating techniques in history.

SEO

Google is man’s technologically advanced best friend (if his company can get ranked number one in search results, of course). We use Google for everything. If members of your target audience need your service but don’t know what company to turn to, they rely on search engines like Google to point them in the right direction.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of being found in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Digital marketing firms don’t only create websites; they optimize them, as well. Owning an optimized website helps you improve your search engine rank. It plays a large role in the health of your business. The closer to the top you appear, the more visitors you’ll gain, increasing your sales and moving your business forward.

Online PR and Content Marketing

You’re the best public speaker in your industry. You know your stuff. But how’s your writing? Believe it or not, you can lose visitors just by posting poorly written content on your website.

Content marketing is one of the most important digital marketing services you should be using for your website and social media channels. A few misplaced commas and apostrophes can change your message—and your readers’ minds—instantly. Creating and sharing content helps boost your online presence and build your company’s reputation.

Online PR is the process of working with media outlets to get content (blog posts, press releases, etc.) published on reputable sites in order to drive more traffic to your own website.

Email Marketing

Once your site has been optimized and promoted through social media and paid marketing, you’ll experience an increase in traffic.

This is the ideal time to capture your visitors’ email addresses through contact forms, lead generating forms, subscription lists, and more.The ROI for email marketing is unbeatable. Every dollar spent can generate over $40 in sales when your email marketing campaign is done right.

Based on ROI alone, the decision to invest in at least some of these services is a no-brainer. As we speed through 2016, more of your competitors are taking advantage of these highly demanded digital marketing services. Can you really afford not to improve your online presence?

Author Bio:

In his role as Vice President of Web Talent Marketing, Matt Self is tasked with ensuring the Web Talent team is executing cutting edge digital marketing strategies that are leading to increased sales and/or lead generation for their clients. He believes that success in an online marketing campaign is achieved only when a strong ROI is achieved.