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The Most Underrated Digital Marketing Channels

Forbes Agency Council

Stephanie Sprayregen, Founder, CEO of Spray Marketing.

If you ask most direct-to-consumer brands what their core marketing channels are, the general consensus is that they focus heavily on Meta Ad platforms (Facebook & Instagram), Google Ads (includes YouTube), dabble in a little TikTok, and email marketing for retention. There are hundreds of other tactics and channels that don’t make the cut, mainly due to budget constraints or other limiting factors, but there are also underrated channels that can give brands easy wins that they should consider.

About 85% of people in the United States own a smartphone, which is more than 200 million people. However, in one survey, only 55% of business owner respondents reported using SMS marketing as an integral part of their acquisition strategy. SMS marketing can lead to higher deliverability than email marketing, and it is arguably the future of retention marketing. It’s also a cost-effective form of advertising that has the potential to produce the highest ROI within a brand’s marketing stack. Oftentimes, I see this tactic underutilized or deprioritized, which is a missed opportunity for brands to build customer loyalty and to help close open leads. SMS marketing click-through rates are between 20% and 35% on average, while email marketing CTR averages are under 3%, according to Simple Texting’s research.

Bing

Bing advertising (includes Bing search, Yahoo search and AOL search), which is a Microsoft product, is highly overlooked mainly due to brands prioritizing their paid search efforts into Google, which is generally the clear winner for reach and targeting sophistication. However, because of this very reason, Bing has less advertising competition. One estimate shows that there’s about 36% less competition, which can lead to lower CPCs on average, according to a different estimate. Bing also reaches 63 million searchers that aren’t reached with Google. Since Bing advertising works similarly to Google, and its easy campaign import feature between the two channels, it’s relatively low-lift to add Bing to the marketing mix. This will lead to the healthiest paid search mix and ensure your brand is positioned as an industry leader.

Reddit

As popular (and as addicting) as Reddit is, it’s very much overlooked as a marketing channel. Reddit has around 50 million daily active users and more than 430 million monthly users. Because of the uniqueness of the platform, it’s extremely important to stay authentic, which means ads have to add actual value to the subreddit community, but if executed well, can lead to significant opportunity. What Reddit lacks in reach compared to the social giants—Facebook and Instagram—it makes up for in social engagement with 82% of Gen Z trusting Reddit to learn about new products. Additionally, with fewer advertisers on this platform, CPMs and CPCs can be significantly cheaper than channels like Facebook, Instagram and Google. Lastly, advertisers can hyper-target niche markets through subreddits, which is ideal for brands with “harder to find” audience segments as Reddit has 2.2 million subreddits, 130,000 of which are considered active communities.

With Reddit’s continued efforts to expand its advertising capabilities, aligning with advertising trends, it’s a missed opportunity for brands to not participate in.

Pinterest

Pinterest was built for the planner and the discoverer. With an estimated 445 million monthly users, it is primed for commerce. Since Pinners are looking to shop or discover new products, they’re more likely to engage with ads compared to other platforms. On average, Pinterest promises ads on their platform generate a 2x higher ROI with a 2.3x lower cost per conversion compared to other social platforms. As long you have rich, visual content or videos to share on Pinterest, it’s a worthy marketing test for brands to explore further.

Content Creator Marketing

With social media dominating the marketing space and influencing consumer behavior, it’s extremely important to consider a well-rounded content strategy that includes content creators. This is a relatively new concept for brands and for brands that run e-commerce stores, only half work with content creators or influencers as part of their marketing strategy. Creators gain consumer trust better than brands simply because they try to stay authentic to themselves and their followers. Content creators have people’s trust—61% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand they’ve heard from a friend, family member or influencer on a social media platform, while only 38% of consumers are more likely to trust a brand from a social media platform. Many brands avoid influencer marketing because of the perceived heavier investments, but if brands focus on building a network of nano-influencers with less than 5,000 followers, or work with content creators who are happily exchanging a post for a free product, then it can become an extremely profitable channel tactic.


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