Choosing the right
digital marketing channel

The ever-expansive options of digital marketing strategies can befuddle business owners looking to promote their product. Digitalisation has introduced new platforms and technologies, radically shifting customers’ expectations for interacting with businesses.

Tempting as it may be, effective marketing does not necessarily mean you have to be active on every digital platform available. To maintain effectiveness for greater success, you should kick off your digital marketing campaign with the right selection of digital channels.

How then do you know what are the right channels for you? Read on to find out.

"Know yourself and know your enemy and you will win 100 battles." – Sun Tzu’s Art of War

Before you get to the selection of channels, you need to know who you’re reaching out to.

It is over-simplistic to categorise your target audience based on demographics, such as age, gender, geographical location, etc. What has been found to be more effective is to reach out to a range of audiences – known as the trio of consumers, financers and influencers.

Using a tuition centre as an example, the consumer is the student attending the tuition class, the financer is the parent paying for the class and the influencer could be a classmate or a teacher.

Targeting across these three audience groups will enable you to promote your product in a more effective manner.

Next, it is critical that you are aware of the value that your product delivers for your target audience, and build your strategy around it.

As years passed, marketing activities focused on product features have been found to be less effective. Your customers are not won over by product specifications, but by how they can benefit from the product.

A deep understanding of your product provides you with better insights to who your product is suitable for and how its features addresses a pain point of your audience.

Tap on this information to provide the respective audience groups with triggers that would increase their propensity to consider your service or product.

After forming its foundation, you can now plan your digital channel strategy. Digital channel strategy is a balance between the mode of delivery and its relevance to the audience you are reaching out to. Here are the main types of digital channels available today:

In Singapore, 96% of internet users have at least one social media account and spend an average of 2.5 hours on social media per day.

Besides being a channel for online presence and outreach, these ubiquitous platforms create an opportunity for you to engage with your customers in real time – providing a personal touch and generating more leads for your business.

The most popular platforms for social media marketing today are Facebook and Instagram – highly effective in targeting ‘top of the funnel’ consumers who have searched for similar products or services without a clear intention to make a purchase. These methods are widely used by fashion labels or beauty salons, offering discounted rates to seal the deal and beat the competition.

Newer capabilities on these platforms – such as using Instagram Stories to launch products and organise Q&A sessions or even product giveaways – enable you to actively engage with your audience and garner interest of their peers through word-of-mouth sharing.

By getting your customers to sign up to your mailing list, you can utilise EDMs to pique their curiosity with a constant flow of information about your new products and promotional events.

EDMs are most effective when backed by a robust targeting strategy, in order to build rapport and gain the trust of your subscribers. You can personalise the content of your EDMs to generate greater value for them.

Another best practice you should adopt is to include a call to action – a prompt for your customers to take an action that brings them to the next phase of the purchase funnel.

SEM is a popular avenue for marketers to raise awareness for new products or services. Being the most common bidding platform, Google AdWords boasts a 64.4% click rate when a consumer is looking to purchase a product or service.

In this mode of marketing, you can bid for an advertisement placement that appears when users search for a specific term or ‘keyword’.

A note of caution, however – SEM is typically not recommended to be deployed as a long-term marketing strategy, since you are charged for each click. This subjects you to false leads or even abuse through accidental clicks and ill-intentioned clicks from competitors.

On the other hand, an SEO campaign is often designed for the long term. Crucially, SEO can generate organic leads for you at no cost.

Using complex algorithms for ranking pages in search results, SEO relies greatly on the creation of relevant content – text (not pictures or videos) that the search engine deems useful to the user based on what keywords were searched for. To maximise SEO for your business, you should also build back-links from highly ranked pages (i.e. links to your website from highly ranked pages) to improve your own ranking.

While being a fundamental part of SEO, content marketing is also a digital strategy on its own. This mode of marketing seeks to create useful, engaging or entertaining content that will intrigue your customers, as opposed to the dreary advertisements people are accustomed to seeing and ignoring.

By providing content of such value to them, your customers will be more receptive to your brand and perceive it in a positive light – allowing you to develop strong customer relationships and loyalty.

Display advertisements are effective in targeting ‘bottom of the funnel’ consumers who previously showed interest in your product or service.

You can deploy this advertising technique as ‘reminders’ to your customers, pushing them towards considering a purchase again. This strategy is beneficial especially if your website experiences high traffic, enabling the re-marketing of products to consumers who are already aware of your presence.

The plethora of digital channels available each serve a different need and purpose. By having laser focus on who you are targeting and what marketing objectives you want to achieve, you can craft your campaign around a package of channels that will work together to great effect in driving your business.