What’s the Best Digital Marketing Channel for Small Businesses?

As a small business owner, there are many ways to use digital marketing to increase revenue. To optimize your investment, it’s so important to choose the best digital marketing channel(s), but it can be tricky. Here are some tips for getting started:

Define a Target Audience

The first step in determining the best digital marketing channel for your small business is to define the target audience of your campaign. Of course, this means understanding the usual audience demographics info such as age, gender, location, and interests. But many marketers use another set of criteria for determining a campaign’s target audience – audience type. Do you want to reach the consumer of your product? The payer? Or the influencer?

For example, let’s say we’re marketing for a local swimming pool company and want to target families with children. The influencers are the children in the family who want a new swimming pool. The payer is likely the parents, and the consumer would be the entire family. Understanding your audience type is a key element in choosing the correct digital marketing channel.

Determine the Most Effective Digital Marketing Channel

Digital marketing is finding customers online. So, it’s your website, social media, content marketing, e-mail marketing, SEO, SEM, and anything else that may come along in the digital world. It’s a lot. That’s why it’s so important to understand the location of your audience and what they respond to.

To answer these questions we need to ask ourselves a few questions:

1. Are there influencers, payers, and/or consumers using this digital channel on a regular basis?
2. Can you plan and execute a digital campaign on the platform to market your business?

If the answer to both of these questions is “yes,” it’s worth marketing with that channel and you’re ready to begin testing.

Milk Street Marketing offers small business packages that bundle many of our services into an affordable monthly payment. We offer an integrated, multi-channel marketing solution backed by a team of marketing professionals.