Major Growth Channels Review
This week in the CXL Institute, the topic discussed was Major Growth Marketing Channels. There are five growth marketing channels available — Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social and Display Ads, Email Marketing, and Content Marketing.
Major Growth Marketing Channels:
1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Social and Display Ads
4. Email Marketing
5. Content Marketing
Search Engine Marketing — (SEM)
Another term for search engine marketing is pay per click (PPC). Platforms that excel with this growth channel are Google, AdWorks, Bing, and online marketers. More than $10,000 are spent on advertising per day. Google uses 60% of it. Paid search engine requires constant optimization to look at keyword traffic, search trends, and fluctuation on PPC cost. One example of a company who has utilized this very well before their competitors is KAYAK, which is a travel searching service.
Search Engine Optimization — (SEO)
Google handles at least 2 trillion searches per year. SEO is the main driver of most traffic as well as the most qualified. The audience is intent focused. SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking on the search engine results page in order to get more views on your site. The first page is where most click-rates go. The second page is where “websites go to die.” In a study, it was found that, 30% of click-through rates went to the first position on the results page. 12% went to the 3rd position and anything lower received 2% of click-through rates. Examples of companies that are utilizing SEO very well are Wikipedia and Yelp.
Social and Display Ads
Display ads are the banner ads that you see on social media sites when you are scrolling, and ads pop up. A company who has done this very well is the Dollar Shave Club. Over 50% of adults have more than one social media account today, so it’s important to really get to know your audience and where they are and what social media channels they are using. Social Ads give you access to demographic data to home in on the target audience. It may be time consuming, so apps, software, and hiring managers are good choices to use. Some apps and software are able to do scheduled posts ahead of time for you and these include Hootsuite and Buffer. Facebook and LinkedIn are good for business to customer. Instagram is a greatly growing platform as well.
Email Marketing
One of the oldest and best ways for growth and converts very well is email marketing. It is a great way to retain and engage existing customers when it’s personalized. A good example for this channel is Groupon. Groupon sends out deals that are local to your area. Another good example is eBay because they let you know if you are outbid and the status of your bids and sales, which causes you to login and interact with their site. Another good way to see growth is by including an email from the CEO and even having your phone number to show how personalized and open the message is. This has a ton of engagement and shows your customers that you care.
Content Marketing
This is done through blogs and forums. Codeacademy and Reddit got their start from targeting blogs. Again, it is important to know your customers, know your audience, know where they are at, know what they are doing online and offline, and understand what websites they are looking at, and to see what those websites are advertising on.
It is rare for a company to be utilizing all these channels at an early stage and rare as well to see a larger company to use all of these at their later stage, which is why it is important to understand the above details on your customers. You want to be able to utilize at least one to three of these for your company.
So, the question is, “How do you choose and experiment with a marketing channel?”
Well, first we want to look at all the channels. Is your audience active and are they engaging on those channels? If they are not, then you wouldn’t want to start with that. You want to be able to identify the mismatch between your product, your services, and your audience, and if they are in the channel. You don’t want to choose a completely unresponsive channel and you don’t want to choose the most competitive channel when you start. A safe one to start with would be SEO. SEO is a great channel to start because you have to get it done anyways when you launch your company. You don’t want to spend high amounts testing out if the channel is right, but maybe something like $20 a day would be a good start to see if the channel is right for you.
The next question to ask yourself is, “how do we measure the results of the channels?” well, this depends what your metrics of success are defined as. Great marketers have to look at which channels have great return on investments and can scale compare to channels that have a higher return on investment but have no ability to scale.
“How do you know when your channel has failed and should be ignored?
To answer this question, you would want to look at your own data and don’t look at what other people are doing. What’s working for them may not work for you business. You will know when a channel has failed if you notice that the channel isn’t producing revenue or return on investment for your business and it doesn’t meet your standards. When the return on investment is low, there is no chance to scale.
In summary, you cannot focus on all 5 channels at once. We want to be able to assess which channels are and are not working for us. We want to know how much time we should devote to each channel and when to cut our losses.
