Digital Marketing

Week 11 Exercise: 

Marketing Channels Ranked based on companies needs and resources:

1. Search Engine Optimization 
2. Social Media Marketing 
3. Display Marketing 
4. Pay-per-click
5. Mobile Marketing

I have created a ranking system for the available digital marketing channels in order of most to least efficient for our marketing goals. 

Since we are a small start-up with limited capital–I’ve chosen to start with SEO. While the downside here is that our target audience may not know that our product exists, I believe that strong SEO is the place to start for any digital marketing campaign. While SEO does take a good content strategy to implement well, it costs nothing other than labor to execute, therefore the cost to benefit ratio has the potential is high if executed properly. At this time, I am unconvinced that paid search is an avenue we should pursue, as our product is the first of it’s kind and our audience may not know to look for it, therefore I think our capital could be used for other channels that will bring our target audience to us.  

Since we are appealing to a smaller niche market, I believe it will also be vital to create a strong co-current social media campaign, especially if we can gain access to our target audience via their social media platforms, such as Aviation Club’s Facebook pages. We need to create a strong “word of mouth” campaign via network marketing and social advertising. This will help create a strong targeting and retargeting strategy using the third method–display marketing. Display marketing will further zero’s in on our target market and gets our product in front of them when they are browsing aviation websites, and or looking for aviation products, which in turn gets a display or banner ad in front of them while using social media, or casually browsing the web.

 Thirdly, I think that it might be worth spending a limited amount on pay-per-click (ppc) for the purpose of creating brand awareness for a limited time. While PPC will cost us some capital, I believe it will help drive traffic toward our website, which is why I think we should use it in a limited capacity. 

I ranked mobile marketing last for several reasons. One, while mobile marketing can be the most direct, it is also the most intrusive. Most of the available mobile marketing channels are one’s we are already using, and we do not have a physical store location, so targeted location-based banner ads will not be of no benefit. Once we have established customers, we can revisit mobile marketing for the purpose of sending promotions via sms.