With limited time and resources, you have to choose your marketing channels carefully. You want to identify the strategies that help you connect with the right audience and give you the best ROI. With an ever-expanding number of choices, it’s not always easy to know where to focus your efforts. The following are some key tips to help you find the most effective B2C marketing channels.
In general, digital marketing is the best area to invest your marketing dollars. According to a report by Forrester, US businesses will spend more than $100 billion in the 2014-2019 period. This includes social media, email, digital advertising, and search marketing. This amount far exceeds traditional advertising methods such as TV, radio, and print media advertising.
While digital marketing is going to dominate both B2B and B2C marketing, it’s important to understand the distinction. In many ways, B2C is simpler because your message is aimed at a broad audience (with B2B you often need to target a specific person, such as the CEO, buyer, or manager of a department). On the other hand, B2C consumers are more fickle because it’s easier for them to switch brands based on price, special deals, and changes in service. You have to constantly woo your customers and make sure you’re offering them the best deal right now. Fortunately, digital marketing gives you plenty of options for agile marketing that’s ideal for B2C.
In order to identify the best marketing channels for your business, you need to know your customers as thoroughly as possible. Here are some guidelines to help you do this.
One of the biggest differences between traditional outbound marketing such as print and TV advertising and inbound marketing is engagement. Website visitors and social media followers shouldn’t be seen as passive viewers but as active participants. When you elicit feedback from people, you make them feel more connected to your brand. You can also use engagement as a metric to determine which channels are most advantageous for your marketing. Use your website and social media pages to create an online community. In addition to posting informative content, encourage your readers and viewers to participate. Here are some community-building and engagement tactics:
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Whichever channels you use in your marketing, it’s essential these days to implement an integrated approach. While some campaigns will prove more effective than others, you have to recognize that your customers are now using multiple devices and channels.
To accurately measure your results, however, you have to keep your objectives in mind. Certain efforts, such as blogging and building an email list, don’t always produce immediate sales but are good for building your authority and brand recognition. Social media can be useful for engaging with people, educating them about your products, and providing customer service. In order to know how well you’re doing in any given area, you need clear objectives to measure your results against.
All of the above guidelines are designed to help you create a successful multichannel approach to digital marketing. You need to constantly track your results and determine which platforms are bringing you the most traffic, engagement, and sales. With tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and various paid tools and services, you can identify which channels are providing you the best results.
Always be open to testing new options for reaching a wider audience. For example, you may find that podcasts, webinars, or live stream videos are a valuable addition to your marketing repertoire. Businesses today need to reach out and meet their customers wherever they are spending time. By constantly testing, engaging, and adapting you can develop a strategy that makes the most of your most effective channels.
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