Identifying and amplifying growth channels
When starting your business, you cannot rely on luck of the draw. Having your fingers on your audience’s pulse helps you know what they’re looking for and equip you to deliver the right stuffs to them.
The best way to achieve this is through utilising growth channels, which are SEM, SEO, social and display ads, email marketing, and content marketing. Most of these channels use common platforms Facebook, Twitter, linked in Instagram, etc.
To do growth tactics deliberately, the trick is to approach these avenues quantitatively, tracking key performance indicators and utilising particular channel-specific strategy.
Through this article I will cover the 5 main growth channels that can amplify your business growth, how to choose which channel to focus on. You will also learn the marketing and SEO myths to burst. You will learn messaging strategies and the best way to optimize your social media channels for conversions. The most important SEO tactics and which KPIs to monitor for success. How to make pay per click (PPC) work for you. Finally, you will learn about content marketing strategies and where to focus your energy for distribution, and how new channels like mobile devices, and virtual reality systems are changing the marketing industry.
There are five available digital marketing channels that are great for exploding growth for your business. The first one is SEM (Search Engine Marketing) also known us PPC (Pay per Click). In this context Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing, the channels online marketers spend millions of dollars to advertise per day. Although google owns 60% market share of the PPC channel. Paid search requires constant optimisation to look at keyword traffic, search trends and fluctuation of PPC cost. Given enough attention it can drive a lot of success.
The second channel for growth is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is a process of improving your website’s ranking on the search engine results page in order to get more people on your website. In a study done by CXL they found out that 30% click-through rates went to the first position on the results page. 12% of the click-through rates went to the third positions. And for the lower position at the bottom of the page they only got 1–2% clicks. If your site appears on the second page know there your website is going to die.
The third popular growth channel is Social and Display Ads. Display Ads are the banner you see on display all over the internet and Social Ads are the ads you see on social likes, e.g. on your Facebook timeline. Social gives you access to demographic data to hone on your target audience as well.
The fourth growth channel is Email Marketing. It is a very good channel for engaging and retaining existing customers when it is personalised through the funnel. A good tip to reach out to new prospective customers, is sending an email from the CEO Including you phone number makes it more personalized, is a way to show your customers that you care.
The last growth cannel is Content Marketing. This is done through blogs and forums.
Before you chose a growth channel to use, you need to understand where you customers are and what they are doing. The best way to pick your first channel is by going through all the channels and find out where you audience is active and engaging. Be able to identify channels that ae clear mismatch for you, also try to avoid channels that are too competitive.
When you are a startup, it’s always good to explore the under-utilized channels since you hardly see large companies using them. If you are new entrant in the market, most likely you have competitors. You need to take a look at what they are doing, what their keywords are, take a look at the articles they have written, blogposts, content marketing also take a look at keywords they are using to leverage the attraction they’ve already built. Mobile, Augment reality and VR are channels to consider when planning for you growth marketing. In a nutshell you should study your audience, choose a channel, once identified, test it out and then measure the results.
There are couple of myths about social media marketing. The first is that social media marketing ROI is difficult to track in other words it’s not quantifiable. The truth is you can track the response of different social media campaigns and see which re more successful at moving users throughout your site as well as tracking specific conversions. And now almost all major social media sites provide on platform analytics.
Another myth is that social media marketing is just fluffy impressions and branding and that it’s not actually used for sales or conversions or acquisitions. This is not true. SMM can not only help you generate new leads, but also allows you to build and create and engage deeper relationships with your existing customers. So social media marketing should be treated as any other channel that you can still track for the first touch point to LTV and take a look at exactly what your users are doing throughout the journey.
It’s important to develop a coherent messaging strategy on social media. You should text messaging strategy on social media by testing the time to message your audience, test the content you share whether its videos, gifs, photos, texts, vine, slideshare to see the one that best converts for you.
Another test is changing the CTA of the link in your twitter profile, Instagram link. You can as well test the link of the posts whether it's long or short and see what users will click on. Test your offers whether it’s a white paper, free download or a demo or maybe quick tips and tricks to see what resonates with your audience.
Common myths about SEO is that you shouldn’t waste time on SEO, since its automatic. For Google to craw you site faster you need consider the following:
1. Domain authority; this is how your site compares against other sites in your industry;
2. Your page authority is how well site is setup for success;
3. For crawling, a content schedule: this is the frequency at which you update and add new content to you website.
4. Popularity: a combination of site traffic, CTR, and time on site.
SEO is one of the biggest traffic drivers, its advisable you make sure that all the traffic is qualified and performing the best they offer for your business.
Pay per Click also known us Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is normally perceived as an expensive channel. When considering PPC you should ensure you have a high click through rate and a lower cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead(CPL) and a higher conversion. A best practice strategy to do this is to ensure that you keyword and you language messaging in your ad words, is tied to the keywords and language on your landing page.
Some of the PPC campaigns that you can set withing your Adwords account are: Awareness campaigns and Lead Generation Campaigns. When considering PPC channels to invest in, don’t look further than Google Adwords, Bing, Display, Facebook and Remarketing.
It’s always good to look at the different channels in order to test your messaging, assets, content, call to action, and offers and see what performs best for you. Google owns around 60% of the PPC but if you can think out of the box by considering opportunities that appear outside online marketing like product placement on a movie, or buying space on a TShirt.
A majority of audience prefer knowing a brand through well written articles rather than through ads. This approach makes people feel like they know since they are engaging you on a conversation with them, since you are giving them useful information about a product before they even they consider buying from you.
The advantages of investing in content marketing become your outright industrial influencer. So Content Marketing is all about building a relationship with your audience, understanding their needs, and offering a solution in you products and services. Content marketing is central to all the other channels from PPC, SEO, Social, PR, and email. Meaning if you are able to create great content, you will be create growth.
