Marketing Channels Explained: How Small Businesses Should Choose the Right Mix

Business owners today have the advantage of countless digital marketing channels at their fingertips. You can promote your small business over email, text, digital ads, social media, and many others.

Having so many choices can sometimes be paralyzing, though. You don’t know where to start to make the most of your marketing budget.

Don’t worry. Digging deeper into each of these channels and the advantages they offer will help you decide how to structure your digital marketing strategy going forward.

Why Your Choice Of Marketing Channels Actually Matters

When you start planning your marketing strategy and see all the available channels, it’s tempting to try everything all at once. Each channel offers distinct advantages, so isn’t the best idea to use them all?

Unfortunately, that’s not realistic for auto shops and other small businesses. On a limited budget, you can’t do everything. Taking a shotgun marketing approach of spreading a broad, generic message to as large an audience as possible just waters down your marketing. You won’t see the results you’re looking for.

A strategic channel mix is the better way to drive a real return on investment. In this approach, you target specific customer behaviors. If your target customers are parents, for example, you would choose around four marketing channels that are most likely to reach parents in your area. That’s one of the key differences between traditional marketing vs digital marketing. Digital marketing allows you to specify exactly what kinds of customers you want to target with your ads.

Another mistake business owners sometimes make is expecting results immediately. Even an effective marketing strategy takes some time to yield results, so be patient. Focus on consistency through the channels you’re focused on and wait to see your efforts make a difference.

The Heavy Hitters: Digital Marketing Channels You Can’t Ignore

For service businesses, there are four heavy-hitting marketing channels. The Power Four: organic search (SEO), paid search, social media, and email. Each of these channels captures different parts of the buyer’s journey, so it’s often worth investing in all of them.

Organic Search

When a customer searches something like “auto body shops near me” on Google, they get a list of businesses in their area. They’ll click through the first few results until they find a business that seems like a good match for their needs and possibly make an appointment there.

If your business doesn’t show up high in those search results, you have little chance of capturing that customer’s business. That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important.

SEO tactics help your business rank higher in search engine results for searches related to the services you offer. Some essential SEO strategies include:

• Incorporating relevant keywords into your website content
• Matching the user intent behind search queries
• Adding title tags and meta descriptions to your website pages
• Sharing helpful, original content
• Making sure your website pages load quickly
• Optimizing your website for mobile devices
• Completing your Google Business Profile and profiles on other online directories

Unlike some other approaches, SEO takes time to start yielding results. Eventually, though, implementing these tactics will bring in more organic traffic to your website from interested customers. Hopefully, higher traffic will mean more conversions, too.

Paid Search

If you want results sooner, you can leverage paid search campaigns. Paid search allows you to get your website ranked above the organic search results as a sponsored result.

These campaigns operate through roughly this process:

1. You and other businesses bid on specific keywords.
2. A user types something similar to that word or phrase into Google.
3. Google ranks ads based on the bid amounts and their Quality Scores.
4. The winning ads show up at the top of the search results page with a “Sponsored” or “Ad” label.
5. You only pay when users click on your ad, which is why these are called pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Paid search campaigns can grant your business almost instant visibility in related online searches. You just have to choose the keywords that you bid on carefully, since some are much more competitive and expensive than others.

Social Media

Social media is another organic marketing channel you can use to increase visibility and build interest in your business. Popular social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Each platform is different, so only focus on platforms that your target customers regularly use. Then, focus on strengthening your branding in service marketing with consistent posts. It will take time, but building a following on social media can help you generate new leads.

Email

Email is different from these other channels. Through email, you have a direct line of contact to customers who have already indicated some interest in your business. You can nurture that relationship and move them through the customer journey to the point of hopefully booking an appointment.

What makes email special is that you own your email list. Search engines can change their algorithms, social media platforms can delete your account, but your email list is completely within your control. Use this channel to share genuinely helpful information with customers and include a strong call to action that tells them what to do next.

Local Listings And Reputation: The Secret Weapons For Auto Shops

Service businesses generally don’t need to target customers nationwide or worldwide. Your target customers are in a specific service area, and your marketing should reflect that.

Leverage online directories like Yelp and Google Business Profile to get your business in front of interested local customers.

Fill out every part of these profiles, including:

• Business name
• Address
• Phone number
• Hours
• Business category
• Services
• Photos

Make sure you build up your reviews, too. Customers use online reviews to decide which businesses they can trust. Around 75% of customers look for online reviews when comparing local businesses, so you want to keep your review score as high as possible.

How To Pick Your Perfect Channel Mix Without Breaking The Bank

With an unlimited budget, you could keep throwing money at every channel until you find what works. No one has that, though. Instead, you have to be deliberate about how you allocate your limited budget to get the best return on investment.

Pick a few of the heavy-hitting channels to start with and invest in them modestly. Once you start running campaigns, even small ones, you’ll begin to see what works and what doesn’t for your business. Only invest further in the channels and strategies that yield results.

Consider where your audience is, too. For example, are they on Nextdoor or Google? Put your money and effort toward the channels your target customers use most. Take a look at what your competitors are doing to see if there are marketing gaps you can fill or things you can learn from their approaches.

Start with low-cost, high-reward efforts, like creating and optimizing your Google Business Profile. Email is another channel that generally offers excellent return on investment. As your business (and marketing budget) grows, you can expand into more channels.

Creating A Strategy Where Your Channels Work Together

Your marketing strategy shouldn’t treat each channel as separate tactics. Create a cohesive omnichannel marketing strategy—one that links each channel and amplifies the results they can provide.

For example, you can promote your email list on your social media page to gather more subscribers. Your SEO efforts can improve your ad quality scores and keyword data, leading to better PPC campaigns. All of your channels should work together.

Measuring Success: Knowing Which Channels Are Actually Paying Off

The only way to improve your digital marketing efforts and get the best ROI is to measure your success. You need to learn what’s working and what’s not to make improvements. That’s where digital marketing dashboards come into play.



Some platforms, like Google, have built-in dashboards that show you important metrics about how your campaigns are performing.

Other times, you’ll need third-party marketing dashboards to track and analyze all that data. Make sure you’re tracking leads, not just clicks, to see which channels are providing meaningful results.

And for help designing and executing an effective omnichannel marketing strategy, turn to Optimize Digital Marketing. Our experts will create a tailored strategy that gets a strong return on your marketing investment. Contact us to get started today.