As a digital marketer, you have a lot of options available to you when it comes to choosing which strategy or channel to use to promote your products and services. The list includes everything from social media marketing, SEO, blog sponsorships, display ads, email list rentals, to pay per click advertising.

With so many options, it can be hard for digital marketers to choose the right strategy to market their businesses. That’s why it’s better to focus on strategies that offer the most potential in terms of ROI. Here are five strategies that have been proven to provide the most bang for your buck:

Pay Per Click Advertising

One of the reasons why pay per click advertising is a strategy worth investing in is because it can work with both small and large budgets. Advertisers also have control over how their daily ad spend as well as how much they want to pay for their ads. This makes it easy for small business owners to compete in the ad marketplace.

With Google Ads, advertisers make an average of $2 for every $1 spent. But Google isn’t the only pay per click ad platform you should be focusing on. Digital marketers have seen great results with many other platforms including Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads, and Bing Ads.

There are other pay per click and even CPM ad platforms that are performing well for digital marketers. It’s worth your while experimenting with them once you find some success on the biggest platforms like Google and Facebook.

Search Engine Optimization

There’s no doubt about the fact that search engine optimization or SEO has become more challenging over the years. However, it continues to be one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for many businesses. The reason why is because people have become used to relying on the search engines for relevant and helpful results.

They use it for everything from researching, learning, shopping, to entertainment. In fact, 39 per cent of buyers are influenced by search results. In the local search space, 76 per cent of users that use their smartphones to find a local business visit a business within 24 hours.

The effectiveness of SEO can’t be overlooked. At the same time, it may not be for all digital marketers. SEO requires a lot of resources and it can be many months before you start to reap its rewards. Thus, SEO shouldn’t be the sole digital marketing strategy used for small businesses.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a huge part of the inbound marketing approach that more businesses are embracing. The idea behind the approach is to attract leads and customers through valuable content and experiences. Businesses are producing content in many formats including videos, podcasts, blog posts, editorials, infographics, and more.

The reason that it’s a great marketing strategy to invest in is that it generates three times the leads as outbound marketing while costing 62 per cent less. This is great news for businesses that don’t have the big budgets required for outbound marketing campaigns. But it’s important to understand that content marketing is not an easy strategy to pull off.

You need to really understand what kind of content your target audience wants. You need to have a solid content creation schedule, an organized system, and a marketing strategy for distribution. Content marketing also works best with other channels such as SEO, social media, and email marketing. This means you have to be well versed in many areas to pull it off.

Email Marketing with CRM

Email marketing is still one of the most profitable marketing channels, returning $42 for every $1 spent. If you’re not using it in your business, you are failing to build an asset in the form of a prospect and customer database. You’re also banking on the first sale over multiple opportunities to sell via email.

Many businesses are using email marketing actively, but what they’re not doing is using it with a strong CRM platform. A CRM platform can provide valuable data that can be used to better serve customers, maximize the value of every customer, build stronger relationships, and understand multiple audiences within your greater customer base. Just using an email marketing platform is not sufficient

Video Marketing and Advertising

YouTube is the second most trafficked website on the Internet, right after Google. However, very few businesses are investing in YouTube. There are several reasons to invest in YouTube and video in general.

• YouTube videos can help you generate more traffic from search engines.
• 85 per cent of all Internet US users are watching videos online.
• YouTube has over a billion users which translates to a whole new audience base you can tap into.
• Videos used on product and landing pages can increase sales by 80 per cent or more.

So what about producing content and advertising? In social media sites, videos produce the best ROI at 63 per cent. This data is significant because YouTube doubles as a social media platform where users can chat, leave comments, like content, add friends, and share their favourite content. Digital marketers should be building followers on YouTube just like they are in other social media platforms.

While it is a new channel for many digital marketers, YouTube advertising seems to be a very effective advertising channel. There are no ROI numbers that reveal the returns digital marketers are seeing for every $1 spent. But a survey does show that 80 per cent of digital marketers are satisfied with the ROI they’re seeing from their video ads. All clues point to the fact that you should be investing in video marketing and advertising.

These five strategies offer the highest returns for digital marketers. Obviously, most businesses will not have the resources to invest in all five strategies. What you need to do is to figure out which strategy makes the most sense for your business. Consider experience, talent pool, budget, and relevancy to figure out which strategy makes the most sense to pursue.