How do I choose which channels are best for my business?

Transcript

– So another question that we’re often asked is which channel should I be advertising on? Should I be on Facebook? Should I be on Snapchat? Should I be doing Google Search? Should I be doing Bing Ads? There’s a lot of different platforms available out there to advertisers and there’s often confusion as to which one marketers and brands should be using to market themselves on. When choosing the right channel to advertise your business on, you have to think what demographic are my customers and what platforms are they using. To be really honest with you, what I see from time to time is someone would of gone to a talk and then the talk would be about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever. And the managing director marketing manager would go away and they’ll go all-in on all those platforms and that really is the wrong thing to do. My biggest advice for you, if you’re looking at taking digital marketing and marketing a bit more seriously is choose a few platforms, maybe one or two platforms that you go all-in on, because if you’re doing four, five, six different tasks all at once, your time will be watered down massively across the board. And when you water your time down, what you’re essentially doing is watering down your expertise and watering down the results. So there’s different ways that you can choose which channels would be best to market your business through. Obviously, I have most experience with paid search on Google and Bing as well. But you can use certain tools online, such as Google Analytics to see what traffic is coming through to your site already and where they’re coming from and use that to pinpoint which areas you can use to market your business more. When looking at which platform you should be advertising on, what you’ve got to ask yourself is, is are people going to be searching for my product or do I have to educate them on what my product is? So for markets which are already existing and already prosperous, search advertising might be the one for you because people are already searching for what it is that you sell. They’re already established to the idea of buying what you sell, they’re just not necessarily established with buying it from you. For markets which aren’t established, maybe you’ve got a new product in a new market that didn’t exist before, there’s not going to be anyone searching for that because they don’t have the knowledge, the education to know that’s something that they need or want. So because of that, you’ve got to push outbound advertising to then generate that desire, generate that need, generate those searches, which you can then sweep up at the other end. So when considering whether to do inbound or outbound advertising, which type of churners should be on, ask yourself, is this something that people are going to search for? If so, consider more inbound-based channels. If not, then you’ve got to be going for those outbound-based channels. I’d always recommend saving kind of 10, 20% of your budgets back to maybe try out a new platform, those kinds of safe ones, where you know your customers are there and they’re sort of ready for the picking are the ones for you. For instance, if you already have a very visible Facebook presence or Instagram presence, maybe it would be best to put some resources into advertising on there. But equally don’t just jump into a marketing strategy because you’ve heard all these buzz words about it and you think that would be best. Do your research and find out what would be best for you. The thing you have to be doing is making sure you’re putting enough time, becoming an expert in those few areas and go all-in on them. You see, if you put all your time into Facebook, I guarantee you become a Facebook expert. But if you put your time into Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok and the other dozen social platforms and opportunities out there, you’d be pretty crap at all of them. So make sure you’re focusing, making sure you’re becoming an expert. And then once you become an expert and you’ve understood the area, then you can move on to the next one.