No matter how good your business is, if your target customers don’t know you exist – you’ll never get off the ground. That’s why marketing is vital for companies of all sizes in every industry.
Ultimately, the aim of marketing is to get your message out to your potential customers and let them know why your service or product is exactly what they need.
However, deciding on a marketing strategy isn’t always easy. You need to consider how best to reach your audience, what they need to hear from you, and which channels provide enough ROI to make them viable.
Here, we’ll talk about the marketing channels available and how to choose the right ones for your retail, hospitality or medical business.
Website
This one’s non-negotiable; you simply cannot afford not to have a user-friendly, high performing website. Once you have an optimised website set up, you can work on driving customers to it via your other marketing channels.
But a word of warning. Getting users onto your website is one thing, but your marketing efforts are wasted if traffic doesn’t convert to sales because your website falls short. We strongly recommend getting your website functioning well before focusing on any other marketing strategy.
Social Media
Businesses can feel immense pressure to be visible on every social media channel, but it’s not always necessary in reality. Companies that seem to be everywhere online typically employ teams of people to maintain that level of presence.
The key to social media marketing is to choose your channels wisely and invest your time and money into doing well on these channels, rather than spreading yourself thinly across every platform. Once you’ve built up a good presence on a select few channels, you can decide whether to extend your reach in other places.
Popular social media platforms for business marketing include Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok. These channels vary significantly in content type, audience and user experience.
YouTube sits in two camps: social media platform and search engine. YouTube results often show near the top of Google search results pages (they’re owned by the same company), so it pulls in customers from within its own platform and from internet searches. Bear this in mind when planning your strategy.
Our advice for choosing the right social media platforms for your business is:
- Go to where your audience is hanging out.
- Learn how to optimise those channels to maximise ROI.
- Get established on those platforms before branching out to others.
Paid Ads
Organic content can be effective at getting your name out there, but most online platforms limit reach in an attempt to get you to spend money on ads.
Search engines (like Google, Yahoo and Bing) display your website as one of the first suggestions on their results page if you pay (read more about Google Ads here).
Social media platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, show your posts to more people if you put money behind them.
Paid ads can be a highly effective marketing tool for any kind of business.
- You can choose your budget and adjust it as necessary, depending on the results.
- You can test and refine a campaign as you go to make sure it’s performing as well as possible.
- If you choose the right channels, the platform identifies and targets your exact customer profile for you.
- When done well, paid ads offer excellent ROI.
Email marketing
Email is one of the most effective ways to get your customers’ attention. Email marketing allows you to bypass all the noise on social media and the fight for a top spot on a search results page. It delivers tailored content straight to your customer’s inbox for free (or for the cost of your email provider).
Email marketing can work for any type of business and provides a higher ROI than many other marketing strategies. We are big fans! Read more about why we love email as a marketing method here.
Should you use them all?
Probably not, no. Using every marketing method can be overwhelming, and you are unlikely to see good results if you’re dipping in and out of multiple channels. Once you’ve got your website optimised and functioning at a high level, we’d advise a solid email marketing strategy followed by a social media plan. Figure out where your customers spend time online and go from there.
Want some help? Book a call with us to talk about the best marketing channels to get you up and running or how to maintain your current marketing channels.
