You’re a business owner operating a small or medium scale business. You’re trying to generate more revenues and a faster return for your marketing investments – but you can’t seem to get the results you want. The problem may lie in how you properly diversify your digital marketing efforts. Just take a comprehensive look at your current marketing campaign and check for yourself how many tools or channels you are using to market your content.
If you’re using only a couple, or worst, only one digital marketing channel to promote your brand, products or services, then you will definitely not get the marketing mileage and results you want. You may believe that you have found the right basket in the current digital marketing channel you are using since it generates a certain level of favorable results. However, it would be a poor business tactic to rely only on a single digital marketing channel – and the following reasons to diversify will explain why you should not do so.
The infographic: (click to zoom)
1. To Use the Right Digital Marketing Channel for Your Targeted Audience
Every business owner and digital marketer should know and fully understand that there are no one-size-fits-all digital marketing channel that can deliver the kind of favorable results you would want. The strategy used for a paid Pay-Per-Click advertising channel may not be applicable for use in social media marketing. This principle holds true even within the same digital marketing channel, like in the case of social media were different networks exist catering to different types of users and audiences.
In the example above, B2B marketers who target professionals and other business owners will get more favorable results, leads, or even sales when they make use of LinkedIn more than other social media network. But from the chart above, other channels will also generate some results so it would be to the business owner’s greatest advantage to allocate some marketing resources on these channels too.
2. To Continuously Provide Fresh Content
Your targeted audiences belong to the huge online market that spend up to 23% of their total time online looking for fresh content that would interest them or provide answers or solutions to a current problem or need. 33% find what they are looking for from social media and the rest do so using other digital marketing channels. So, it is important not only to diversify your efforts but also to provide fresh, informative, relevant and entertaining content that your targeted audiences will love.
Digital Marketing Philippines provide many articles on how you can leverage content marketing for your business. There are many ways of how you can continuously generate fresh content through innovative means and you can find them in these pages. It is important though to take notice that a particular content will work best in a particular digital marketing channel – so make sure you are using the right one for your content.
3. To Make Your Business Not Dependent on Marketing Channels
Many marketers, offline or digital, depend on what third-party programs and advertising channels make available for their use. Whether you are using paid advertising through Google Adwords or Bing Ads, or make use of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, you are still using a third party provider – and will be subject to the rules and restrictions they set.
Google continuously change their search algorithms, even on the way on how they make search 100% more secure, removing the “referrer” keyword data and resulting to the “Not Provided” fever that affected many digital marketers. Google gave the reason for this:
“We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. We’re now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in.”
Since you don’t own the marketing channel you are using, you are under their whims – whatever they would like to do or implement in their network. The same is true not only with search engines but in social media channels as well. Facebook has also made some changes in their system, limiting how posts reach your targeted audiences in a bid to force digital marketers to make use of paid Facebook ads. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed:
“We’re getting to a place where because more people are sharing more things, the best way to get your stuff seen if you’re a business is to pay for it,”
The graph and trend above is what many digital marketers experienced when these changes were implemented. Diversifying your digital marketing efforts to include both third-party providers and channels that you control, like your websites and self-hosted blogs, will prepare your campaign from incidents and trends like these.
4. To Capture the Attention of Targeted Audiences Looking at Various Marketing Channels
The popularity of online channels push it more and more towards the mainstream. They are so popular and more widely used that up to 80% of consumers today make a lot of research online first before they finally decide on what products to buy or what service to avail. They make use of several digital marketing channels to do their research, so if you don’t have an online presence in these channels – you’ll miss out the opportunity of reaching out to these targeted audiences.
The use of multiple channels has been a practice even during the height of traditional media. Brands, products and services make use of different marketing and advertising channels like television, radio, print ads, newspapers, magazines and other traditional media to reach their audiences. Each of these channels have its own set of users that marketers can reach out to open new markets.
The same holds true for digital marketing channels. Various online users are spread out throughout the whole digital marketing sphere – blogs, forums, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, chat-rooms, etc – that making use of only one seems like wasting really good marketing mileage. Diversifying your mix of digital marketing tools will allow you to capture the attention of users frequenting these channels – opening for you new doors of opportunity to reach out to new and more potential customers.
5. To Diversify Link Building and Generate More Traffic
Traffic to a particular website comes from different sources. Up to 70% or even 80% of traffic are generated by organic or natural means using search engines, while the remaining 20% to 30% are generated by paid advertising and other marketing channels. The natural tendency of business owners and digital marketers, particularly those with limited marketing budgets, would be to go to low-cost or free marketing channels. Or they would start using and focusing solely on SEO for building their rankings because of the traffic it generates.
But link building and generating traffic should not focus only on one channel. You might be getting a good percentage from a particular channel but you will be missing out on a big potential for generating even more valuable links and generate traffic if you fail to use other channels to your advantage. There are lot of channels to choose from, ranging from discussion threads in forums and blogs to writing articles on ezine sites and posting them on social media networks.
6. To Free Yourself from Cost Fluctuations in Digital Marketing Channels
Diversifying your marketing channels will free you from a financial perspective in terms of the cost you are investing. The prices of paid advertising may fluctuate depending on trends in the market, leaving your paid advertising campaign at the mercy of what these providers will implement in terms of cost and pricing. You will be forced to invest more if the demand of these channels require you to pay more.
If you have a diverse set of digital marketing channels or, if we’re going more into the details, a diverse set of paid advertising options and alternatives, then price increases will not affect you as you can easily make adjustments in your campaign as necessarily. Create your online presence in various digital marketing alternatives so you don’t need to build up your reach and start from scratch – as what you will expect if you just suddenly shift from one channel to another. Be prepared.
7. To Prepare Your Business for Future Market Changes
The business arena has changed from what it once was 30 years ago and more. More dynamic changes however occurred in recent years, with the advancements in online technologies providing business owners and digital marketers a very diverse and extensive array of marketing channels they can use. The marketplace is expected to continuously change in the coming months and years, so it would be to your greatest advantage to prepare for this change by making use of a diverse set of digital marketing tools and channels.
8. To Generate Better Results by Cross Pollinating Your Digital Marketing Channels
Cross pollinating your digital marketing channel, or making use of one channel and integrating its use with another, will actually deliver better and faster results. These channels actually are interconnected and interact with one another, making them much more effective when used a synergistic bundle instead of using them alone or in single use. Many brands, products and services are already making use of these strategy, with the level of overlap in their use varying across industries as shown in the chart below.
Companies making use of these synergistic strategies for digital marketing are actually generating better results, just like what this study from Bright Oak concluded when their test results yielded a 25% increase in clicks and a 27% increase in profits when they integrated PPC with organic SEO. Integration and diversification is so effective that it can result in up to 200% in conversion rates which is far better than making use of a single digital marketing channel alone.
9. To Establish Your Digital Marketing Equity
Establishing a strong online presence, your online brand equity, would be a lot faster if you make use of diverse digital marketing channels to create awareness for your brand, products or services. A strong online brand equity and online presence will generate marketing mileage for you even if you have not infused more paid resources and more marketing efforts. It would be like a campaign that markets itself because of a strong online presence.
The key to digital marketing success is for targeted audiences to get to know more about your brand and products, and have these knowledge retained in their psyche strong enough for them to want to avail of what you have to offer – and do it regularly. You cannot establish that using only one channel as you need to reach out to a wider audience base which you can only establish with a diverse marketing strategy.
10. To Always be Doing Something More in Your Digital Marketing
Just like consumers getting bored with a digital marketing channel that publishes the same old content and types of content, you as a business owner or digital marketer will eventually lose your enthusiasm – your eagerness to market – if you are using the same old channel day in and day out. You also need diversity to keep the fire of your marketing eagerness glowing by giving you more options to choose from.
There are many channels and many options that can generate leads, targeted audiences, and sales for your brand and business. Using only one channel for your marketing channel is wasting the opportunity for bigger business potentials from all the targeted leads you can generate from other marketing channels. A wise business owner and digital owner will get the best results from diversification – and so should you.
Jomer B. Gregorio is a well-rounded expert when it comes digital marketing. Jomer is also known as a semantic SEO evangelist and practitioner. Check out our Digital Marketing Services today and let us help you in achieving positive and profitable results for your business.