Whether you’re looking to increase website views, boost engagement levels or even drive business sales, It’s important to consider branching out from your standard set of marketing channels to garner the attention of untapped audiences. Here’s a handful of useful strategic marketing tips that you can utilize in order to diversify your marketing tactics.

Why Marketing Channels Matter

It’s important to avoid putting all your eggs into one basket, especially when there’s a budget involved and your positive ROI is on the line. With the volatility of social channels, what may work today might not work tomorrow.

Customer attention is fickle, and one day your best-performing channel may become overshadowed by the latest and greatest platform seemingly overnight. Diversification avoids potential disaster. So, in order to maintain an evergreen marketing strategy, diversification is key.

Not only does this strategy assist you in keeping touch with your current audience, but it allows new potential customers to discover you. These users may be an entirely different market than what you’re used to, but they have the potential to be more profitable or align with strategic goals, such as podcast listeners or attendees of a trade show you haven’t exhibited at before.

Choose Your Channels

In order to understand what channels are worth pursuing, take note of who your target audience is and where they have been browsing lately. It’s recommended that you select anywhere from 6 to 12 marketing channels to actively pursue.

And while this may seem daunting, a mixture of digital channels (social media, podcasts, publication websites) and traditional marketing methods (print ads, flyers, tradeshows) is incredibly beneficial to reach the largest scale of your target audience.

Things to consider when deciding what channels are a good fit for your business include:

• • Intent

Whether or not a niche or isolated target audience segment resides on this channel

• • Targeting

Ease of generating targeted ads based on demographic and behavior

• • Trackability

Easily measured results and effects

• • Scale

One of the most important aspects! Is this channel encouraging audience growth?

• • Values

You are getting out preferably more than what you will be putting into this channel

The good news about digital channels is that it’s easy to notify your audience of channel expansions, such as starting a profile on a new social media platform or promoting sign-ups for your email newsletter, through your existing channels.

Stretching Your Budget

The desire to diversify and the ability to experiment aren’t always aligned when it comes to marketing budgets. Fortunately, many digital platforms come at little to no cost, such as social media or even some email marketing platforms, like Constant Contact.

Organic social media can also be a useful tool to see how your audience will react to potentially new content, such as new product releases or changing the tone of your messaging, without any hard costs for the channel use. Paid ads on social media, search engines or even some industry publication sites can also be inexpensive, or at least flexible in terms of budget, so you can test before fully committing. You may find that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for some channels, or maybe stumble upon a hidden treasure.

Many new channels are digital, but you can also expand more traditional methods by checking out local events in new markets to determine if it’s a fit before purchasing exhibitor booth space. Or consider mailing a newsletter or product details to potential customers (with a way to track leads, of course – try a specific phone number, email or website as the call to action). Print has become premium again and a package could make you stand out.

Set Goals

Whether your goal is to boost website visits or overall sales, having set goals in place allows you to visualize where you want to be. Identify a time period in which you’d like to see a set level of results or effects. Testing new channels is only effective if you understand data measurement and analyzing results to determine effectiveness.

Traditional marketing channels may be a bit more difficult to track conversions, but it is important to keep an eye on the performance of these channels during the selected test time period. Digital channels may be easier to track, but you could be missing potential customers who still prefer analog methods if you only stick to digital. Blending both traditional and digital channels will grow the scope of your audience-reaching efforts.

In an age where there is seemingly a new platform or channel every week, it’s important to learn where your business fits in this mix. Diversifying your marketing channels allows you to maintain an evergreen marketing strategy and avoid falling out of touch with your market, which will allow you to easily pivot during this everchanging age of media.