12 Marketing Channels to Promote Your Business

A marketing channel is a conduit to get your brand's message to potential customers. Traditional marketing channels include media like television, radio, print advertising, and direct mail. Digital marketing channels include email marketing, social media influencer marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns.

A marketing mix is a blend of different channels, typically drawing from both traditional and digital marketing conduits. Multi-channel marketing gives you more ways to showcase a new product or build brand awareness within a target market. Even if a potential customer does not engage with certain marketing channels, they may be able to discover your brand and your products through other channels.

Marketing channels are the media that connect your business to your customers. Some types of marketing channels involve intermediaries—like social media influencers or podcast hosts—to help spread the word about your business and build brand awareness. Other marketing channels connect you directly to customers with the goal of increasing lead generation, e-commerce sales, or physical retail sales. How to best use various marketing channels depends on your budget, business model, and objectives.

Consider twelve highly effective marketing channels to include as part of your overall marketing mix.

1. 1. Pay-per-click (PPC) digital ads: It’s common for brands to purchase PPC display ads from either Google or Meta Platforms (which powers Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and more). These ads contain a small amount of text and sometimes a visual. They lead to your website's landing page or an e-commerce platform.
2. 2. Social media marketing: It’s common for businesses to have a presence on social media platforms. Consider posting regularly to inform potential customers about new products and services or to promote a sale. You can also solicit testimonials from social media influencers, who will tell their audiences about your great products.
3. 3. Search engine optimization (SEO): You can drive organic traffic to your website if your site routinely turns up on search engine results pages (SERPs). Strong SEO marketing efforts involve keyword research and rankings, substantive website content, and (when possible) backlinks on other websites that direct toward your own site.
4. 4. Content marketing: Content marketing is another way to drive organic traffic to your online platforms. Websites that contain useful blog posts, podcasts, or videos typically turn up more often in organic searches. You can also invest in content marketing on video and podcast platforms. In this iteration of content marketing, you provide a target audience with valuable content that in turn increases their awareness of your brand and may turn them into customers down the line.
5. 5. Affiliate marketing: In affiliate marketing, you incentivize other people to promote your brand. Affiliates can be social media influencers, other companies in your industry, or publications like magazines and websites. You give affiliates a referral code (often a custom URL) that steers people to your website and gives your affiliate a cut of the purchases made using their code. Sometimes the customers get their own incentive to go through an affiliate—like getting a special price if they use the affiliate's referral code.
6. 6. Word-of-mouth marketing: Word-of-mouth marketing steers potential customers to your site based upon testimonials from existing customers. Word-of-mouth marketing can occur online—particularly via customer reviews on retail sites and on listing sites like Yelp and Google. Word-of-mouth marketing channels also exist offline, as friends talk to one another and recommend particular products or services.
7. 7. Email marketing: Some businesses build up email lists of existing customers and potential customers who may have provided an email address somewhere along the line. These companies send out periodic email blasts designed to showcase new products and announce special sales. Such emails can also enhance the customer experience by offering handy tips, videos, and articles—the type of content their subscriber base might genuinely care about.
8. 8. Business-to-business marketing: Often abbreviated as B2B marketing, this channel applies to companies whose clients are other businesses. For instance, grocery wholesalers might market to supermarkets, or customer relationship software (CRM) vendors might market to retail companies. This type of marketing usually involves personal relationships and a pre-prepared marketing pitch replete with data metrics, case studies, and testimonials.
9. 9. Marketing via community goodwill: Sometimes the best way to draw positive attention to your business is to drop any sales message and focus on creating bonds within your own community. Volunteering, sponsoring local teams, attending meetings, and participating in block parties can increase familiarity between you and your local market.
10. 10. Direct mail: Some customers still enjoy learning about new products through the mail. They order out of catalogs and read direct marketing mail sent to their homes. Address such customer needs by trying direct marketing where you send information to them in the mail rather than going through online middlemen.
11. 11. Television and radio: With all the different marketing channels now available, it can be easy to overlook traditional marketing channel strategies, like a TV and radio ad campaign. While not as cost-effective as some other forms of marketing, TV and radio ads still reach a lot of people and can leave lasting impressions upon users.
12. 12. Retail store marketing: Some marketers choose to reach potential customers at the point of consumption by marketing in stores. If you've been inside a store and seen a booth set up with a sales representative demonstrating a product, you have seen retail store marketing in action. Other tactics include offering special coupons redeemable for specific products at specific stores.

Both startup entrepreneurs and seasoned business managers can gain a lot by applying the following tips for using marketing channels.

1. 1. Try using a customer relationship management platform. CRM software often provides sales histories, customer demographics, templates for sending mass emails, and a chart of conversion rates. This helps marketing teams understand which marketing channels are delivering for them and which are not.
2. 2. Build a buyer persona and let that guide your choice of marketing channels. A buyer persona is a portrait of the target customer base your company seeks to engage. Buyer personas feature demographic information, including factors such as age, gender, race, income, family size and marital status, occupation and job title, and attitudes toward current trends. As you build out the personas of your ideal customers, ask yourself what marketing channels such a person might engage with. This will help you decide where to invest your marketing budget.
3. 3. Seek out testimonials. Customers tend to put a lot of stock in word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family—sometimes more than any other form of marketing. While the strongest referrals come from those in a person's own network, online reviews also play a big role in convincing someone to try out a brand. Encourage repeat customers to provide feedback that you can share with potential customers.
4. 4. Try micromarketing. TV ads, radio ads, and big digital banner ads can reach a lot of people, but they rarely target the exact groups most likely to make a purchase. Digital marketing tools can offer the opposite phenomenon: a smaller campaign that is laser-focused on a target audience filtered by demographic factors or interests. These campaigns—sometimes referred to as micromarketing—can be more cost-effective for small business startups. They reach far fewer people than a traditional marketing campaign, but they zero in on likely targets, increasing the odds of customer conversion.

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