Dynamic Marketing Collaboration logo
Dynamic Marketing Collaboration logo
Dynamic Marketing Collaboration logo

3 Keys To Marketing Channels

by | Aug 26, 2023 | Marketing Psychology, Promotion/Advertising

3 Keys To Finding A Successful Marketing Channel

As with any social media channel, it’s valuable to understand the platform and get what you can for free first before you go out and start spending money. We spent several months focusing heavily on LinkedIn. We produced blogs, videos, and written content. We got feedback, but there wasn’t a lot of feedback from the type of local Oregon businesses we wanted to work with. Then we started researching. We used the Oregon Business registry and started searching up the names of the owners of different local businesses that we wanted to work with. Our discovery was that out of the 100 businesses we searched, there were only 30 on LinkedIn. Out of the 30 on LinkedIn there were only 10 that looked like they had shown up at least once on LinkedIn in the last 6 months. There were only 3 that appeared active on LinkedIn. The lesson learned was that LinkedIn isn’t the channel we want to spend advertising dollars on. Understanding your ideal customers is crucial. Knowing the message you want to convey is the most important key, but it all falls flat and becomes worthless without promoting on the right channels. It’s incredibly important to ensure that you are promoting the right message to the right people through the right channel. There are 3 dynamics that you should consider when choosing a marketing channel: what events attract your ideal customers, how does your ideal customer educate themselves, and how does your ideal customer entertain themselves? These will give you a great idea of where you want to focus your marketing efforts. There are 3 main ways to determine the answer to these 3 questions. Ask past or potential customers through a market research journey. Go and experiment at different locations. Trial and error spending. First, we will discuss the different questions in more detail then we will discuss some pro tips for finding the answers.

What Events Online Or Offline Attract Your Ideal Customers?

The way we define an event is based upon a gathering of people for a common purpose. The common purpose can vary quite widely. It may be a chance to be around others. A desire to party. A love of a specific thing, or it could be a collective goal. Regardless there are meetups that happen all across the world in digital chats, webinars, and in person. The events attract people for specific reasons.

When you understand the who and why of the event and it connects to your business, then you have a great channel to be able to utilize. The big goal when looking at events is to understand how your target audience might be a large subgroup of the group of people that it attracts. Keep in mind that the subgroup that belongs to your ideal audience needs to be large enough to justify the marketing dollars spent.

Consider a futsal tournament that attracts people from ages 4-25 to play in the tournament. Their connection is an enjoyment of the sport and likely competition. If your product connects to the sport of futsal or the mindset behind competitiveness then this becomes a great event to sponsor, set up a booth, or advertise digitally around.

In B2B especially, these kinds of events for things like industry specific events or professional growth can be a great way to put yourself in front of people who care about what you are offering. It’s the power of being in front of people at the time they have a level of interest.

How Do Customers Research Your Product Or Service?

For businesses that tend to have a level of research done by their consumer, understanding when and how your potential customers educate themselves is crucial. Traditionally the cheaper the product, the less research that is done by the end consumer naturally. But for less frequently purchased things that require research this is a big factor.

Considering how someone looking to educate themselves on fixing a car is likely to search on YouTube, Gen z is showing many signs of using TikTok for this research now also. However, if you want to know more about a specific beauty product you may look on YouTube, but there is also a high chance of looking it up on Instagram. You may be interested in learning more about the keys to passing your wealth down to your kids. That may lead to a Google search.

The power of knowing where they are doing their research is it gives you insights into how to get in front of them early on in their decision making process. This is crucial if you want to be able to scale your company. We saw this happen extremely well with the Keto diet movement. They focused on having content that correlated to where people would research things like diets. Google and YouTube. They made blogs and videos to discuss the power of Keto. This helped in their takeoff. It created a sense of trust and information to make sense for people. Consider what problems people might be looking for that you solve. Then consider where and how they consume that content.

This is a large reason why podcasts have become an increasingly popular idea. It’s because business leaders began saying that they listened to podcasts when working out. Then a movement began among young professionals to do likewise. Now it is a major way to gain reputation and teach towards the young professional crowd. There are several influencers that have made their money and success purely from having a podcast.

Pro tip: Keep in mind that while competition may be great on certain content, you can always focus on going after new content. New laws, new taxes, new statistics, or new innovations to the industry. The world is ever evolving and a key success in research is providing information that matches with those changes.

How Do Your Customers Entertain Themselves?

How many types of entertainment are there? Have you ever considered all the options available to the modern consumer? There’s traditional tv, newspapers, traditional news sources, theaters, influencers, YouTubers, tabloids, TikTok, video games, Hulu, Netflix, Disney plus etc. Entertainment has become a part of everyday life to modern people. This is why they have also become amazing channel opportunities for businesses. Your ideal customers are most likely getting entertainment from one or more of many options available. If you can find individual people or channels that attract a large portion of your ideal customers then those channels can become a very lucrative investment for your business.

Pro tip: Why are they on the platform? This is a crucial step with any and all digital marketing. You need to understand why they are on that platform. Consider YouTube and how they’ve become the “how to” platform. They also are the Non cable free entertainment Godfather. LinkedIn is filled with sales people and young professionals looking for better opportunities. Facebook is heavy with groups and family. Instagram is full of people wanting to see “dreams.” TikTok is a place to relax and laugh. It’s also the Godfather of easy to make content. Google is the research assistant platform. Consider even shows, sports, and movies that are being watched on different streaming platforms. Amazon the best bang for your buck platform and so forth.

When you take the time to understand the different platforms, then you can decide which ones are right for your business, and you can determine how to gear your message towards that specific customer segment. This is what makes digital marketing extremely successful. It all starts with you first understanding the reason they are on the platform. We all do things based upon specific psychographics that dictate how we choose to live our lives. It’s tapping into that level of understanding that is crucial to ensure your ads are going in the right spots.

Where Do Your Customers Shop?

For businesses selling to the retail industry, it’s important that you understand each retail location truly is an advertising channel for your business. While it may seem great to be given an offer by a company to take on your product, it’s always important that you know where there are more people interested in your product. There’s a psychological mindset that connects people’s buying habits to different retail locations. If you understand that some of your customers or potential customers shop specifically at certain retail locations, then consider what psychographic is dictating their buying behavior.

It may seem small and minor, but this has been a massive one to find places to observe people. Consider the major National U.S. Chains like Target, Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods, and New Seasons. Each of these attracts customers for many different reasons, but the majority come because of specific expectations. For example, Target may be where you go for your fashionable forward clothes, and you might as well pick up some other things. Walmart may be for your frugal grocery person. Kroger could be for your coupon person. Whole foods and New seasons may be for your health conscious. If you asked 100 customers and 20 of them shopped at Target, then you need to ask yourself this question. What is the connecting psychographic that connects your two businesses? It’s this level of sociological and psychological understanding of your customers that can lead to greater understanding of where else to promote your product.

Choosing the right channel is what allows you to connect the 3 rights of a successful marketing campaign: right market, right message, right channel. When these 3 align, it allows for you to promote your business in a way that gets a return on your ad spend. If you are missing any of these 3 then you risk never getting a return on your advertising. Keep in mind that we highly recommend determining the answer to these questions as part of market research. For the greater understanding on how to conduct the market research and answer these questions check out our market research blogs. Below is a quick breakdown of the 3 common methods used. Once you are clear on who you want to go after, here are 3 options to gain insights on what channels to use. The first option is to ask past and current customers. This can be done through conversation, interview, surveys, or even social media post engagement. The big thing here is you want to hear and understand your customers and their habits. It’s your job to identify similarities and common experiences that connect them together. They are often your greatest resource for identifying other people of the same market segment. Current and past customers are great resources, but they may limit your market size as there are many more market segments possible. This is why the second way to determine the right channel is to go to an event, observe and talk with others at the event. Your goal should be to determine their values (moral and what they value), testing things out using trial and error, and it should be to determine if they would find value in what you offer. The great thing about this kind of testing is that it does allow for you to possibly reach market segments that were previously unknown or unconsidered. The downside is that it does often cost money for the events, and it will take a lot of individual time to go explore and talk to people at the events. The third way is to just do trial and error testing. This is done by just taking an acceptable amount of lost money and running an ad on that channel, or promoting at a specific event without expecting a return on money. This is by far the fastest way to measure the interest and effectiveness of a channel. However, it also is the most costly way to determine the effectiveness of a channel. A “fourth option” is to utilize people who have experience with different channels to share their experiences and understanding of the crowds that make up those channels. This can save both money and time in knowing the best places to focus your time and energy towards.

Written by Joshua Grenevitch 8/25/2023 – Copyrighted 2023 All Rights Reserved