[powerpress]
There are dozens of different channels to choose from. And online channels are fragmenting each year, creating endless ways for you to reach your customers.
Here’s a few of your digital options:
- Paid Search (Google PPC, Bing, LinkedIn ads, Amazon etc etc)
- Dispaly Ads (adbrite, clicksor, rightmedia, double click)
- Organic Search (SEO)
- Blogs
- Affiliates
- Tumblr
- Youtube
- iTunes Podcasts
- Stumble Upon
- Webinars
- White Papers
Every year, this list gets longer. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Out of all these options, are you marketing in the right one?
Here’s how to pick the right marketing channel..
[powerpress]
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photo credit: x-ray delta one
Where To Advertise Online
There are dozens of different channels to choose from. And online channels are fragmenting each year, creating endless ways for you to reach your customers.
Here’s a few of your digital options:
- Paid Search (Google PPC, Bing, LinkedIn ads, Amazon etc etc)
- Dispaly Ads (adbrite, clicksor, rightmedia, double click)
- Organic Search (SEO)
- Blogs
- Affiliates
- Tumblr
- Youtube
- iTunes Podcasts
- Stumble Upon
- Webinars
- White Papers
Every year, this list gets longer. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Out of all these options, are you marketing in the right one?
Many online marketers will tell you “Hey man, you need to be on the BLEEDING edge of Social Media (latest fad)!! It’s a gold rush! Jump on XYZ site before you DIE!”
Tell these guys to stuff it. Not everyone needs to be on the latest and greatest social media network. In fact, you can safely ignore the majority of channels. You just need to pick the right ones.
How to Pick the Right Marketing Channel
It’s simple: use the channel that your customers use. It’s that simple. Different customers use different channels which makes them a great way to target your ideal buyer.
Now figuring out which customers use which channels is the tricky part.
Let’s run through this with a real example. Take my mum. She’s 60 years old and hates computers. Other then sending email through AOL, she can’t do anything else.
How do we reach her with our marketing? Well, we can immediately cross off every social media platform from our list. And every other online channel while we’re at it.
That limits us to options like these:
- Direct mail (catalogs or sales letters)
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- Television Ads
She watches a little television, subscribes to Gardeners World, and gets the local free newspaper. But you know what she pays a great deal of attention to?
You guessed it, her catalogues. It doesn’t event matter if she’s familiar with the brand, she flips through each and every one. To see what’s new and exciting, she opens the most recent catalog. No blogs, no BBC news, no tweets, just a catalogue.
She even circles products and folds the corners so she can quickly remember what grabbed her attention the first time she looked through it.
And she’s not unique. If you’re looking to get in front of a rural, elderly market, catalogues are by far the most efficient way to do so.
But would catalogues work on someone younger? Probably not. They certainly wouldn’t work well enough to turn a profit. If you went after a mid-twenties market with catalogues, you should just light all of your cash on fire. You’ll have a lot more fun than you will mailing catalogs.
Enter SoLoMo
SOLOMO is the horrid abbreviation people are using for marketing that combines social, mobile, and local experiences. Think Groupon and younger markets.
To dominate this space, you need a social media team that can react instantly 24/7, a great mobile website that encourages user engagement, and a plan to personalise everything depending on the user’s location. This is the new world of marketing that we all hear so much about.
Narrow You Options Over Lunch
Instead of committing a great deal of cash in either direation and merely hoping for the best, follow these steps:
- Put together a list of the channels that you think your target market uses (the best way is to profile them or just ask them)
- Find people in that market and take them out to lunch
- Confirm your assumptions and update your list
Now you’ll know what kind of channels your target market uses. Every market is different and will skew towards different channels. Guessing usually doesn’t work so make sure you confirm your assumptions.
For the cost of a few lunches, you’ll have better market data than an overpriced MBA (I have MBA envy ;)) will be able to give you. And you can accomplish this within a week.
Once you know your market and where to find them, pick the channels that make the most sense. Don’t go anywhere near the one’s that don’t.
Bottom Line
You can reach your target market simply by choosing the right channel. Different groups of people consume media in different ways and you’ll waste a great deal of money if you don’t plan accordingly.
So if a social media pundit demands that you create a social media account, make sure your target market is USING social media before you do so. If you’re targeting rural baby boomers for instance, stay away from Facebook and Twitter.
Not sure how to see what channel your customers use?
Then why not get us to look after this for you, we’ll start by profiling all your current customers to build a perfect customer profile showing you who they are and where to find them, then we’ll use the right channel to find you lots lots more perfect customers to market to.
Check out our full list of services here
Neil
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