Digital Marketing Channels

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Hello there!

Today we will be talking about what is a digital marketing channel, why are they important in digital marketing and which are the main digital marketing channels. We will provide a short explanation of each digital marketing channel and some final thoughts about it. Additional, we will provide information about the extra resources that you can get to obtain more knowledge regarding this fundamental digital marketing topic.

What is a Digital Marketing Channel?

As previously defined in "Begin learning about Digital Marketing with Alberto" a digital marketing channel is a communication path through digital technologies which helps marketers target the right audience and attract them towards the products or services being marketed. 

Another good definition is the one provided by the official Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM); "The methods used by a company to communicate and interact with its customers".

What is the importance of digital channels in marketing?

A digital channel is a vehicle that gets us to our target market and allows us to communicate and interact with our customers. Non-digital channels or offline channels examples are billboards, flyers, telemarketing, postcards, TV, radio, newspaper, etc. 

The great importance of digital marketing channels lies in the fact that they can easily reach specialized and or massive markets. 

For example, digital marketing channels like forums (which are Niche Social Media) allow us to reach and engage with very specific target audiences.

What are different Digital Marketing Channels?

If you search in any search engine like google or bing you will notice different lists of digital marketing channels, some of those lists share many similarities.

Here I will provide an ultimate exhaustive list of digital marketing channels (updated in April 2020) so you don't have to look any further.

According to the book Digital Marketing Planning: 2020 edition, by Emiliano Giovannoni, these are the digital marketing channels:

1. SEO.
2. Display Advertising.
3. Affiliate Marketing.
4. PPC Advertising.
5. Location-based advertising.
6. Social Media.
7. Email & Marketing Automation.

For our purposes, these are the official digital marketing channels:

1. Organic Search
2. Display Advertising
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Referral Marketing
5. Paid Search
6. Location-based Marketing
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Email Marketing

1-Organic Search.

Organic Search is a digital marketing channel that includes all website traffic that comes from search engines. 

Organic search is a method for entering one or several search terms as a single string of text into a search engine. Organic search results appear as paginated lists, are based on relevance to the search terms, and exclude advertisements.

Other terms that refer to Organic Search Channel are SEO  or Search Engine Optimization Marketing.

Organic search or SEO is possibly the king of digital marketing channels, says Emiliano Giovannoni. "Holding the number one place on the list of priorities for digital marketers for the last twenty years, and justifiably so. SEO is defined as the process of improving a website’s ranking in Google and other search engines through a range of different techniques, he continues.

Tips: 

• SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. When referring to digital marketing channels, SEO and Organic search are synonyms.
• Learning more about this topic is easily done by searching the term in any search engine like google, bing, etc.

2- Display Advertising.

Digital display advertising channel is graphic advertising on Internet websites, apps or social media through banners or other advertising formats made of text, images, flash, video, and audio.

According to Emiliano Giovannoni, "the benefits and impact of display advertising, including programmatic buying, are seen at scale. For this reason, it only really makes sense to consider this channel if your business has a reasonable budget to invest in it".

Tips: 

• Display Advertising is frequently referred to as Display ads.
• Learning more about this topic is easily done by searching the term in any search engine like google, bing, etc.

3- Affiliate Marketing.

From the affiliates or publisher viewpoint, an affiliate marketing program is the process of earning a commission or benefit by promoting other people's (or company's) products.

Four different parties are involved in affiliate marketing; the merchant, the network, the publisher, and the customer. 

Tips: 

• Affiliate marketing and referral marketing are sometimes under the same category but here we see them as two different digital marketing channels.
• In order to learn more about the basics of affiliate marketing, we suggest NeilPatel.com. You can also easily find more information on many other websites and articles.

4- Referral Marketing.

Referral marketing is a strategy to encourage passionate customers and advocates to directly refer their network to your business.

A referral program gives current customers and users incentives each time a friend they refer successfully signs up or acquire the service or product offered. The key participant of a referral program is a customer while in an affiliate program the ket participant (the publisher) is not a customer but has relationships or an audience that relates to the program’s target customer.

Tips: 

• Referral marketing and affiliate marketing are sometimes under the same category but here we see them as two different digital marketing channels.
• In order to learn more about the basics of referral marketing, we suggest this article by ReferralRock.com You can also easily find more information on many other websites and articles.

5- Paid Search.

According to the book Digital Marketing Planning: 2020 edition, by Emiliano Giovannoni, Paid Search Digital Marketing Channel is one of the most popular forms of online advertising. It allows companies to bid for ad placements in sponsored links when someone searches for a keyword that is related to their business or product. Paid Search is an inbound form of marketing, and as such, it relies heavily on precise behavioural targeting.

Tips: 

• Paid Search Digital Marketing Channel is also called Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, CPC advertising or search engine marketing (SEM).
• In order to learn more about the basics of Paid Search, we suggest NeilPatel.com. You can also easily find more information on many other websites and articles.

6- Location-Based Marketing (Mobile Advertising).

Emiliano Giovannoni, in his book Digital Marketing Planning: 2020 edition, said, "One way to look at mobile advertising is simply as a specific targeting setting within PPC or display advertising".

In other words, technically, 

And then he continues to say, "However, I think that from a marketing and business perspective (rather than a technical implementation point of view), it is worth considering this medium separately from PPC or display due to its capability. E-commerce sales on mobile devices have now surpassed e-commerce transactions on desktop devices".

In other words, technically, location-based marketing or mobile advertising should be simply part of both Paid Advertising channel and Display Advertising channel, but only as a setting within these channels. Nevertheless, due to its great potential and current capabilities, location-based marketing is considered as a digital channel itself.

The Digital Marketing Institute defined mobile marketing as the sharing of a brand or business in a way that is optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices throughout apps, social media channels, and websites. As a marketing strategy, mobile marketing allows a business to reach a larger audience than they would by focusing solely on desktop digital marketing processes.

Tips: 

• Location-Based Marketing is also known as Mobile Marketing channel.
• For more basic information about Location-Based Marketing visit digitalmarketinginstitute.com

7- Social Media Marketing.

A good explanatory definition for social media marketing is found in Buffer.com where they wrote, "social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic".

They continue to say, "This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements". Although, for the purposes of this blog, running social media advertising is part of the Display Advertising Digital Marketing Channel. 

As mentioned in the book Digital Marketing Planning: 2020 edition, "Social media marketing needs organic content, to begin with, and, if it has to be defined as social, it needs to include communication with a group of customers". Emiliano Giovannoni continues, "Simply posting content on our social media account without interacting in a meaningful way with other users (customers) is not social media marketing. It is blogging. We post, you read—if you want".

A key term here is "Organic Content", which is fundamental in most digital marketing channels, but especially important for Social Media Marketing as a digital marketing channel.

Let's define Organic and Content marketing.

Organic Marketing

On the website, OnDemandCMO.com they say, "Organic marketing refers to the act of getting your customers to come to you naturally over time, rather than ‘artificially’ via paid links or boosted posts. Paid tools, such as artificial paid link-ads, are considered inorganic marketing".

Content Marketing

As Neil Patel points, content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.

Good examples of social media that are part of the extensive number of platforms within this digital marketing channel are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube.

According to Emiliano Giovannoni, "A good social media strategy may involve publishing content across a multitude of media, including microblogging (like Twitter), social networks, commenting and Q&A sites (like Quora), photo sharing (like Instagram), slides-presentation sharing (like Slideshare) and more. Consequently, this means creating content in different formats, such as video, written, photographic and so on. If there ever were a risk of dispersing marketing efforts too thinly and losing sight of the end goal, social media content marketing provides the perfect environment to do just this".

Tips: 

• There are hundreds of social platforms available for Social Media Marketing, pick the few that better serve the goals of your Digital Marketing Plan, making sure you or your company can correctly manage along with the rest of responsibilities that you or they already have.
• We put Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing as the same digital marketing channel.

8- Email Marketing.

Susan Ward at thebalancesmb.com wrote, "In its most basic sense, email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services. But a better email marketing definition is the use of email to develop relationships with potential customers or clients".

For almost two decades, email marketing has been one of the most important digital marketing channels and is a crucial marketing communication tactic for many companies and businesses.

Some of the latest technologies that have provided a boost in effectiveness to email marketing are; email automation (drip email marketing), mobile phones usage (53% of emails are opened on mobile devices according to Campaign Monitor) and personalization technologies (email marketing provides incredible flexibility when it comes to personal targeting).

Wrapping up

There are 8 Digital Marketing Channels available. These digital marketing channels are communication path through digital technologies available for digital marketers to target the right audience and attract them towards the products or services being marketed. 

Each of the above mentioned digital marketing channels are broad categories and some of those are composed but dozens of platforms (e.g. Social Media Marketing). 

Sometimes one platform can be part of two different channels simultaneously, for example, Facebook is a great platform for both, social media through organic content and paid search through Facebook ads.

Not all channels or platforms are always suggested. The convenience of one or another channel and platforms will vary depending on your company's sector, product and services, location, target market and other elements considered in your digital marketing plan and target market.

Final thoughts.

As you browse the internet, you will find people mentioning other digital marketing channels different from the ones we discussed in this article. 

Be aware of the definitions they provide since they will equal or even be only a setting, platform or strategy within the digital marketing channels we described today.

For example, PPC (pay-per-click) is a term that equals Paid Search. Same case with CPC advertising (Cost Per Click advertising and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

In some cases, Content Marketing is seen as a digital marketing channel but in reality, content marketing consists in making available high-quality content to your target audience through different digital marketing channels like organic search, email marketing and the social media marketing channel.

Chat, text and push notifications are sometimes mentioned as a digital marketing channel, but in reality, they are different concepts:

• Chat belongs to the social media marketing channel and is held through chat platforms like Tawk.to, Messenger, WhatsApp and many other examples.  
• Text, on the other hand, is only a vehicle. A vehicle is the shape that the content will have. Examples of vehicles are; text, image&text, photography, audio, video, tables (organized text), animation (Gifs), and graphics.
• A push notification is a message that pops up on a mobile device. Push notifications are a marketing tool that helps you stay in contact with your users. Push notifications are very similar to text messages but it is important to be aware of its differences.

Other non-digital marketing channels that are often mentioned are Online PR (Online Public Relations) and Digital Marketing Intermediaries also known as aggregators.

Online PR.

Online public relations is also known as Digital PR or simply E-PR. It refers to the use of the internet to communicate with both potential and current customers in the public realm. E-PR is a digital marketing strategy, not a digital marketing channel, and it can take many forms like publishing online articles, networking with journalists to gain backlinks, influencer marketing to gain mentions, affiliate programmes, etc. 

Digital Marketing Intermediaries.

Emiliano Giovannoni defines digital marketing intermediaries as "any business that aggregates supply of a given product or service to simplify the research and selection process for end-users'.

There are many business models tor intermediaries, and l have subdivided the intermediaries into eight main categories, Emiliano Giovannoni aggregates;

1) Marketplaces

2) Price comparison

3) Product reviews

4) Human resources

5) Classifieds

6) Lead generation

7) Reservation

8) Private membership

Three characteristics define intermediaries: their product range, their geographic reach and their billing model and examples of digital marketing intermediaries are Amazon, Pricegrabber, Gumtree and booking.com

Additional resources.

We have briefly described the 8 digital marketing channels and provided some useful insights and definitions about them. Nevertheless, this information is far from being enough, which is why we want to suggest the following resources where you can explore and learn more about digital marketing channels:

Books like: 

Digital Marketing Planning: 2020 edition, by Emiliano Giovannoni.

Websites like: 

https://neilpatel.com/blog/

https://referralrock.com/blog/

And explore searching in google.com or your favourite search engine using the basic knowledge we provided within this article!

Please comment down below. Every opinion on how to improve the content of this blog will allow me to make adjustments on the go with the objective of providing better and more accurate information for you.