11/05/2023

5 digital marketing channels that will help you increase conversions

Why use digital marketing channels?

The internet has become a key source of information for people, so it is crucial for any business to utilize digital marketing channels to reach its target audience. Today, the internet is one of the most important ways in which people become aware of the latest news and products available on the market.

Digital marketing channels should be considered as the most cost-effective way of reaching out to consumers since it is cheaper than traditional marketing methods such as print ads, TV, radio, etc. and the return on investment can usually be better estimated and attributed to a specific campaign or action than on traditional channels.

Our top 5 digital marketing channels to increase conversions

1. SEM / PPC

One of the most effective digital marketing channels for increasing conversions is SEM or search engine marketing. SEM drives traffic to your website and helps you grow your audience through campaigns based around specific keywords, which are the terms that people search on Google when looking for a service or product that you offer.

The main difference with other marketing channels is that you know what the users are looking for here (you even can know the terms they just introduced in the search engine). So, make sure that your ads are relevant to what they want. This way, you will reduce the cost of acquiring customers since Google makes it cheaper for more relevant ads to get the click.

PPC refers to Pay Per Click advertising, which most people use as a synonym with SEM, even when you could be paying per click not coming from searches in search engines. For example, you could pay for a click coming from an app or websites that are using display ads to monetize their work.

Google Ads

Google Ads is the most popular Search Ads and PPC platform. It started as Google Adwords, a way to advertise for keywords on Google Search. As you may know, Google is the most used search engine, with a market share of more than 90% in most countries (China, Russia and South Korea being the only important markets where Google is not the most used search engine). With time, Adwords (now Google Ads) also included Display campaigns (where you can place image or text ads in any of the websites that belong to the Google Display Network), Shopping Campaigns, and Video Campaigns.

Google Ads is a huge platform with lots of features and a somewhat challenging interface. To help you make the most of its most powerful features, you can use 3rd party integrations, such as OrbitalAds, the NLP and AI-powered platform that helps you manage complex Search campaigns, making complicated processes such as structuring your campaigns, finding new keywords, or improving your quality score, a breeze.

Microsoft Advertising

Microsoft Advertising is the platform that lets you reach the audience of the Bing search engine. Bing is second in popularity only to Google in a large number of countries, and advertising on Bing may be a cost-effective way to reach a large number of users. Microsoft Advertising offers some automation capabilities that are on par with those provided by Google Ads. Here at OrbitalAds, we are one of the leading 3rd party integrations for applying automation to your Microsoft campaigns, no matter how big.

2. SEO

Search engines send traffic to websites in two ways: paid clicks (which is what we just covered in SEM) and organic traffic. Organic means that you are not paying for the placement or the click itself, but instead, it was the search engine algorithm that decided that your website was relevant to the search performed by the user. To ensure that you rank as high as possible for all those search queries relevant to your business, there is a whole marketing specialty called Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO), whose practitioners stay on top of the latest changes and best practices enforced by Google and other search engines.

SEO is not easy, it’s very changing by nature, and the most important thing to know about it is that the traffic you get today is not guaranteed. Google could make a major core update to its algorithms, and your organic traffic could drop 60% (it’s happened many times, one of the last and most talked about being the Medic Update in August 2018).

Content marketing

Content Marketing is the practice of creating and publishing content in your website that is useful for the audience you want to reach, such as guides and how-tos, with the hope it will attract traffic from search engines, social networks, word of mouth, etc. Instead of reaching out yourself to potential buyers, you let the buyers come to you.

Like SEO, it takes time. If not done right, it has one major flaw compared to more direct advertising: conversion rates may be quite low, as not everybody interested in knowing about something will be a potential buyer. It’s easy to attract traffic to the top of your funnel, but not so much to the bottom of it.

3. Email marketing

Email marketing requires consent; you can’t email many people who don’t know you and don’t trust you, as your emails will go straight to the spam folder and you may risk being labeled a spammer by most email servers. For this reason, email marketing is a very powerful channel for further engaging your users once they’ve visited your website at least once and trying to move them down the funnel. If you combine SEM or SEO / Content Marketing with an effective Email Marketing strategy, you could easily have a winning marketing mix.

4. Social media marketing

Social media, like search engines, offer two ways of reaching your potential customers: paid and organic.

Organic social media means trying to get your customer’s attention by showing up in their social feeds (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, or whatever the latest social frenzy is). Unluckily, most social networks have limited the organic reach of publication by brands, as they ned brands to invest in their paid marketing services.

Paid social media means using Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or Linkedin Ads to pay for clicks, engagement, or even impressions in your target audience’s feeds. Some of them may have an extensive reach and lots of segmenting options, but remember, you never impact your audience when they’re looking for whatever you offer (as it’s the case in search engine marketing). Instead, you are interrupting your audience in the middle of their leisure time or when they’re trying to talk to their friends and family.

5. Video marketing

Video marketing means using video platforms for reaching your audience (YouTube being the most popular platform, and Twitch being the trendy option for reaching younger audiences). As with any social network, you may decide to gain visibility organically by creating your channel and publishing content compelling for your audience, or you may use paid options to ride on the popularity of existing channels and videos.