How to Choose Marketing Channels

It sometimes seems that there can be an infinite number of marketing channels available. But don’t worry – marketing is all about making choices; not every marketing channel may be right for your product or business.

While some marketing channels may be obvious to all of us – TV advertising, email advertising, social media advertising – there is a huge list of different channels available.

Most marketers use a different mix of these channels. Some of the core groups that marketing channels tend to belong to are:

• Advertising (sometimes called “above the line”)
• Content Marketing
• Digital Marketing
• Direct Marketing (sometimes called “below the line”)
• Email
• Events
• Mobile Marketing
• Partnership Marketing
• Print Marketing
• Public Relations
• Retail Marketing
• Social Marketing
• Search Marketing (paid search or PPC)
• Telemarketing
• TV

This can feel a very daunting list. But luckily choosing marketing channels is all about the outcomes you want to see rather than the channel itself.

You’ve already created personas of your customers. These include the ways your customer gets information or the media they consume. So this helps you make choices about marketing channels.

If your target customer is spending their time on social media and watching very little TV, it might be more effective to spend money targeting them there. If you have a very broad customer base, where you need to reach a large volume of people with a message that suits a large number of them, then TV is a good choice.

If your audience are into a particular niche – say cycling – then specialist cycling magazines could be a good bet. If most people are searching for your product on Google, then search marketing would be a good way to market to them.

Your budget also affects the marketing channels you use. Some channels are much more expensive to buy than others. It can take a lot of resources to make TV advertising and you may need a media agency or an in-house media team to buy it. Search marketing through Google is likely to be less expensive or simpler to implement.

If you want to know more about using the different marketing channels in more detail, Advertising Week also runs courses on core areas such as content marketing, audio marketing, social media and branding.

But for your marketing strategy, we are going to move onto how to set our marketing objectives for channels, budgeting and measuring return on investment.

Which marketing channels have you used? Join the discussion below about the marketing channels you’ve found most effective!