WebiculesWe know about marketing, sure. But what does this fancy MBA-like term, ‘marketing channels’ mean? Marketing channels are nothing but just the various mediums using which a marketer could use to communicate with their customers, clients, potential customers, leads, etc. There are a number of mediums to facilitate this procedure. Some of them are:
- Social Media Sites
Social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. are all great examples of social networking sites. These sites collectively serve as one of the best ways to get to your customers or potential clients for your products and/or services. The idea here is catching your customer when you know they are relaxing and are looking for some entertainment on these sites. The underlying essence here is that you as a marketer would not want to disturb your customer when they are caught up with their job or any other more important work. A marketer could also give their interaction with the customers a personal touch by interacting with them more often on these sites. A simple act of either like’ing a comment or replying to a comment on your page or answering a customer’s query quickly or sharing engaging posts shows that you are proactive with your brand and care about your customers. This goes a long way than it shows at the beginning of it.
- Blog
Blogging is a great way of letting people know what goes inside your organization. You can always post behind-the-scenes posts on your blog, apart from educational and relevant posts. This helps your customers gain a wider idea of your company and how your work around with difficulties and issues. A blog could also contain some successful case studies with respect to your organization’s work, which could help you to channelize your customers’ trust in your favour. Apart from this, your blog could contain specific meta-tags, which would generate traffic for your blog by utilizing these tags for search engine optimization.
- Websites
It is always a good idea to have a website for your organization because your customers are online. This is where they are going to look for you when they first hear about you or what you are offering to them. Not having a website for what you are doing is almost equivalent to negating your presence in the marketplace. The website could just be a very basic one with all the necessary information pertaining to your products/services or it could be an elaborate one, which could be acting as one of the big revenue-generating machines for you. As a marketer, the choice between the two is yours to make after properly assessing your requirements from a functioning website.
- Direct Mails
Although a little outdated, this is still one of the active marketing channels, nonetheless. Emails could be used for very specific purposes and not to spam customers. As it has been said earlier on as well, there is a very fine line between marketing aggressively and spamming aggressively. Keeping the same in mind, ensure that as and when you send out an email to your customers, it contains some useful information or anything that has some substance to it, and isn’t just one more of those spam emails. There has never been a more sure-shot way of losing your (potential) customers than by spamming them on emails.
- E-newsletter
E-newsletters are publications that are released by business organizations for their customers. An e-newsletter could contain relevant information on various topics, which may be of interest to your customers. By regularly distributing e-newsletters, an organization not only stays in touch with their customers and subscribers, but this could also be used for the promotion of one’s products and/or services.
