How much time does it take to build apps like Airbnb?

You can assume, that developing apps like Airbnb takes 6 to 12 months, depending on scope and complexity, team size and expertise, design and customization, and testing and iteration: thorough testing and iterations to refine the app can add to the overall duration. Thus, while a basic one can take around 6 months, a feature-rich app could take up to a year or more.

What apps are like Airbnb?

Although now there are hundreds of apps like Airbnb the most prominent ones are Marriott Bonvoy: Book Hotels app, Vrbo, Booking.com, Vacasa, Tripadvisor Rentals, Expedia, Trip.com, Hotels.com, Agoda: Cheap Flights & Hotels, Kayak: Flight, Hotels & Cars and Marriott Bonvoy: Book Hotels.

Best Marketing Channels In 2024: A Comprehensive Guide

Learn about the most compelling and impressive marketing channels that successfully boost the revenues and ROI!

Best Marketing Channels In 2024: A Comprehensive Guide

Learn about the most compelling and impressive marketing channels that successfully boost the revenues and ROI!

In the last 5 years, the marketing landscape has changed more than in the previous 40-50 years. Those businesses did not hold on to the marketing revolution, faced a decline, lagged behind or, even failed to survive. On the other hand, those businesses that move along with the marketing transition witnessed immense success and substantial boost in their growth. Marketing has always helped companies to grow, but what has been a consistent hurdle in this aspect is the selection of the best marketing channels or platforms for businesses/brands.

There are a lot of issues that arise while finding and selecting a relevant channel for marketing. But you can keep your worries aside, as in this blog we bring you everything you need to know about the best marketing channels of 2024 and how they are distinctive in their special ways. This is a comprehensive guide for you to know about what kind of marketing channels exist and how they are relevant for different businesses. Read through the complete article, and get the gist of the creative element of each of the marketing channels that might play a crucial role in uplifting YOUR business to a greater level.

List of top 10 marketing channels to focus on!

Here is a catalog of the top marketing channels that you can emphasize as per your business. This list also tells which channel is best for B2B and B2C, respectively, and also segregates the digital marketing channels from the mainstream ones.

Social Media (B2B)

Social media is perhaps one of the most impactful and best marketing channels in 2024. It is a digital marketing channel. With a range of online platforms and applications, it allows the user to create content, share it with people, and interact with them on and off the platforms. It enables the brand owners to build their online following, connect with potential customers, and ultimately convert them. It provides an optimum opportunity to build the brands from scratch by using different social networks. You can easily and productively use social media to build up and elevate your brand. You can create high-quality posts and stories that share unique information about your brand or anything relevant to your brand and upload them on your social media account.

If the content has the potential to go viral, then it can expand its reach exponentially and create higher engagement. To have a higher audience as a visitor to your brand, you can use the option of paid promotion and post ads of your brand. Whatever you do, just make sure to be consistent, and post high-quality and relevant content persistently.

Social media is best for brands in terms of brand building and brand awareness. Because it helps users to reach a massive audience, hence this makes it one of the best marketing channels. Some of the most popular social media marketing channel examples are:

Facebook & Instagram

Facebook is one of the major social media or digital marketing channels under Meta. It is probably the largest social media network in the world. Facebook allows its users to create personal accounts and brand accounts or groups etc. Also compels other users to join these groups and share different types of content to promote their brand. They can use Facebook’s analytical feature that allows the users to evaluate the brand’s performance.

Instagram is another major social media or digital marketing channel. Instagram also comes under Meta. Instagram offers similar features as Facebook but its main target audience is somewhat different.

Instagram offers a unique feature for its users i.e. IGTV. Customers can use IGTV for extended and in-depth content to promote their brand. Both of these channels offer a platform for brands to market their offerings. Users can create personal accounts or pages for their brands, use paid promotion features and post targeted ads, interact with potential customers on these platforms, join industry-related groups and build up communities, and use the messenger for personalized and top-tier customer service.

TikTok

TikTok is a social media marketing channel that prioritizes short-form and entertaining videos. The viral trends feature allows the users to create unique content that currently has a high search volume. Users can use TikTok to engage with a wider audience through creative content. It can be used to build higher brand awareness.

YouTube

YouTube is a type of video marketing channel. Users can create their own channel and make videos on their offerings. YouTube allows users to create detailed or short videos for their brand. The video could promote a product or service. Business owners can partner up with channels that have a huge number of subscribers to create video content for the brand’s offerings. The channel’s owner can make a whole video on the positive review of the product or service or put pre-created ads in a video on a different topic.YouTube allows users to create long and detailed or concise and brief content to catch attention. This channel is useful for marketing products, giving helpful and instant tips, creating high engagement quickly or making in-depth videos for a thorough overview of the brand.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy utilized on different social media or digital marketing channels. Through influencer marketing, users can collaborate with other users who have a prominent following among a specific or general audience and use that popularity to promote their brands. They can partner up with these influencers to engage a niche audience and build trust regarding their brands. Influencers can create high-quality content about the brand’s service/product and market its USP (Unique Value Proposition) by either reviewing the brand, giving a shout-out, negotiating a PR (Public Relations) package or sponsored posts/content.

Content Marketing - Blogs (B2C)

Content marketing is one of the best digital marketing channels available for brands to grow. It uses an approach to come up with different topics and develops valuable and informational content to grab the attention of a particular audience. Through blog posts on a brand’s own website and other websites that host different categories of blogs, brands can engage a wider audience. Of course, consistently writing and posting high-quality and useful blogs that help the readers is the key here as well, because search engines prioritize websites that upload content constantly as this keeps the websites novel and fresh. Content Marketing helps the brands to enhance their ranking on the search engine result pages. A well-crafted blog with distinguished keywords, internal and external links, and distinct content can boost organic traffic to the brand’s website.

Through blogging, you can share a step-by-step valuable guide and detailed knowledge about an industry or niche. This allows the brands to enlighten the audience about their product/service and hence brands can use this opportunity to position themselves as an authority and develop trust among their target audience. A blog that has valuable information on a specific topic or industry is always on the search list of the industry’s relevant audience.

Email Marketing (B2C)

Email Marketing is another example of a powerful and best channel for marketing. Email marketing consists of the highest conversion rate among the overall list of marketing channels. As per its name, it involves the utilization of emails to generate leads and increase conversions. If it is integrated with other channels, brands can exponentially expand their market reach and generate higher ROI. Brands can initiate personalized communication through emails because emails are sent directly to the recipient’s inbox. Also, messages can be customized as per the preferences, behaviors, and demographics of the target audience making them more special. This is a type of digital marketing channel that allows for higher customer engagement and customer retention potential. Through newsletters and email outreach, engagement can be created.

Through value-driven communication with the aim of fostering a healthy customer relationship, high retention rates can be achieved. Email marketing can be cost-effective and drive higher ROI as well, as it requires fewer capital resources. This channel is well-known for generating high returns on investments because of its effectiveness in converting a higher number of audiences. Email marketing can allow for effortless marketing and scalability through automated campaigns. Through automation, automated emails can be set up for different interactions with the customers like welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, etc. As you increase the email recipient list, the campaign emails will reach a higher audience without any extra cost or added effort. Brands only need to make sure that the emails contain personalized communication. This will eventually increase engagement and drive higher conversion rates.

Omnichannel Marketing (B2C)

Omnichannel marketing is an influential technique for marketing brands on different marketing channels. Omnichannel marketing means to market the brand on channels that are relevant for the brand to provide a better customer experience. It integrates multiple marketing channels to offer an excellent and unified customer experience. While many brands focus on a single channel, omnichannel marketing allows the brands to create a similar marketing strategy that incorporates multiple channels.

Omnichannel marketing allows the brands to switch to different channels when the current channel becomes overly competitive and oversaturated. Brands can easily revise or tweak their existing strategy or content across multiple integrated channels like on websites, social media, and email.

Brands only need to be aware of the major concerns of their customers in terms of experience, creatively innovate the journey to make it more appealing in different ways, and make sure that the experience is reliable on each integrated channel. It is one of the best means of marketing because it compels the brands to focus on customer engagement, experience, and satisfaction. By combining multiple touchpoints and offering personalized communications, omnichannel marketing brings in higher retention, increased sales, and competitive advantage because of the brands being available on various channels.

Search Engine Marketing (B2C)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is yet another one of the best digital marketing strategies that helps businesses grow through different marketing channels. It combines the use of both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online (paid) advertising to provide a comprehensive approach for impactful marketing. It is used by brands to enhance online visibility, bring in targeted audiences, and produce concrete results. Through search engine marketing, brands can easily increase their website’s visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs) or social media marketing channels by incorporating organic and paid strategies.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves optimizing the content on the website or social media channels and use of relevant keywords that improve the ranking of the brand’s website and social media pages, organically.

Online advertising involves utilizing paid promotion opportunities to run ad campaigns online, this includes “display advertising” like pop-ups and banners on Google, LinkedIn or any other platform and paid/sponsored ads on social media marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

SEM offers a brilliant opportunity to grab the attention of an audience looking for quick results and convert them efficiently. Because SEM covers two types of marketing i.e. SEO and Online (paid) advertising, it allows for a consolidated approach to increasing the visibility of the brand online. By combining both the cost-effective and paid methods, it allows for an increased potential to cover a broader range of target audiences. This is because it nurtures the credibility and authority of the brands through SEO and generates leads and conversions through online (paid) advertising. It allows the brand to target the audience with precision by specifically prioritizing high-intent traffic. Through improvised content, relevant keywords and paid search advertising, targeting prospects becomes a lot easier and more impactful, as then the brand focuses on the audience based on their demographics, locations, and behaviors. Also, it supports the strategy of retargeting the previous visitors to maintain brand loyalty and stay at the top-of-mind of that traffic for increased conversions.

Video Marketing (B2C)

Video Marketing stands out as one of the most compelling digital marketing strategies used by brands to market their goods or services on different marketing channels. It is used as a means of promotion through visual and auditory appeal. It unites three sensory experiences i.e. watching, hearing, and motion to produce highly engaging and attractive content that enables the potential customer to take instant action, allowing higher engagement and conversion rates. This is because the use of sensory integration allows for higher attention and memorable content and because a video attracts reactions, comments, and shares hence this engagement improves the brand visibility and reach. Video marketing attracts audiences on a larger scale because through videos we can connect the audience emotionally and also, we can use it to easily break down information into digestible parts about the brand that is a bit too technical or complex for the audience to understand.

This type of marketing is useful for brands, because it allows persuasive storytelling which triggers emotions to connect with the audience on a personal level, and also helps in understanding the message of the brand through helpful visuals, graphics, demonstrations, etc.

Compelling Call-To-Actions (CTAs) can be incorporated into the video content and purchase decisions could be influenced through video marketing, which helps in improving the conversion rates for the brand. The placement of the CTAs is crucial for a higher conversion rate. The product demos and explainer videos play a key role in influencing the buyer’s decisions. Moreover, brands can productively improve their ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) through video marketing because Google prefers video content with optimized titles, descriptions etc. Video marketing is a great way of developing trust and promoting the authenticity of the brand through live streams, live Q&A sessions, customer testimonials etc.

Word-of-mouth Marketing (WOMM)

Word-of-mouth Marketing (WOMM) is a very convincing type of marketing for brands to attract potential customers on all marketing channels where the brand is present, as it is based on trust, authenticity and connection on a personal level. This sort of verbal marketing capitalizes on suggestions from personal relationships close to the brand’s potential customers and genuine communication between the people, as they tend to ask for recommendations and opinions from those closer to them and those who have actually tried the brand or even just know about it. This compels the hearing audience to give the brand a try and eventually they come up on a channel where the brand is present. WOM marketing helps the brand in building strong trust and credibility for itself because the opinions or suggestions come from mostly trusted and well-known sources of the potential buyer.

The potential buyer is more likely to trust and take positive action on the recommendation of their trusted source rather than any other source. This technique is one of the best because of its cost effectiveness. This is because of the fact that in order to leverage WOMM, brands just need to be perfect in their offerings and customer service rather than utilizing any channel. Instead, through WOMM, potential customers will be attracted towards the channels already being utilized. This type of marketing is mostly dependent on the brand’s existing customers because they share their experiences with different people. For this marketing strategy to work successfully, brands can offer rewards to existing customers for sharing or posting reviews of the brand or creating user-generated content (UGC). Brands could benefit from coming up with creative and relevant hashtags and starting a trend for more UGC.

Offline Advertising

Offline advertising is yet another productive marketing type that guarantees positive results by promoting brands on different channels for marketing. It is used by brands for long term usability and broader reach. This is an Above-The-Line (ATL) marketing technique, used to target masses offline. This marketing style utilizes the conventional marketing channels like TV advertisement, Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising, print media etc. to reach a larger audience than the target and leave a long-lasting impression. This is because promotions from this marketing style cover a broader base of masses regardless of the target customers or demographics. Offline advertising includes distributing business/visiting cards, billboards, TV ads, radio ads, magazines, event marketing through trade shows of the industry and many more.

Offline advertising makes sure that the visibility and tangibility remain high. TV ads, billboards and posters can be made more memorable and productive due to their nature of tangibility because they are physically present near the potential customers. For offline advertising to bear greater results, brands can merge online marketing with offline by persuasive CTAs for example compelling the customer to follow the social media page or visit the website.

Partnership Marketing

Partnership marketing is one of the best marketing techniques for businesses to promote their goods or services on different channels for marketing. It is a successful marketing approach because it provides opportunities to improve sales and promote brand awareness. Partnership marketing allows the businesses to build synergies and hence grow mutually. It merges the strengths, resources and audience of multiple organizations. It offers a collaborative approach for complementary businesses in achieving mutual goals and marketing objectives by working together, and utilizing the available resources to have a higher impact. It is beneficial for businesses in terms of financial resources. This is because the investments, assets and marketing operations are to be shared, hence this allows for cost cutting and higher return on investments. Partnership marketing also helps businesses in building trust and credibility.

Because brands have the opportunity to partner up with reputable firms, this drives the valuable business audience to develop trust for the partnered brand, also increasing the reach. This marketing type encourages shared efforts on different marketing channels and in marketing operations like content creation, promotions, events etc. hence this leads to creativity and innovation of a highly successful marketing strategy. For added effectiveness, businesses can determine the most reputable brands to collaborate with and decide on the mutual goals and metrics.

Affiliate and Referral Marketing

Affiliate Marketing and Referral Marketing are very captivating and highly recommended marketing types because of their ability to bring in higher sales from different marketing channels and business networks and relationships. Affiliate and referral marketing strategy leverage the use of Word-Of-Mouth marketing (WOMM) and recommendations from trusted and personal sources to drive growth and customer acquisition. It seeks support from influencers, brands and customers for the product and generates leads which in turn bring higher revenues and profits as well as the support of the merchant brand in promoting their own product/service.

Affiliate and referral marketing leverages the connections and credibility of affiliates and referrers to influence the buyer’s decision, leading to higher conversion rates.

It tends to be more lenient on costs because it is based on a performance model, as affiliates are paid some compensation for generating leads or sales and referrers are rewarded with incentives for the successful referrals. Because of the commissions and incentives, brands get to enjoy an expanded coverage of the audience. This allows for scalability because the business can attract more affiliates and referrers for collaboration and partnership to boost the brand’s awareness and visibility and bring in more audience.

How to Choose a Marketing Channel?

The decision of precisely choosing the best marketing channel crucially depends on the nature of the brand to be promoted. The goals, marketing objectives, and budget are some of the key determinants of deciding the top marketing channel for the brand. The selection of the right choice among different marketing channels is imperative for the brand to drive higher effectiveness and efficiency. This is because the channel that is relevant to the needs of the brand makes sure that the promotions are results driven. Businesses need to implement a planned approach in order to choose from the different marketing channels for their brand.

The primary goal of the business to select the relevant channel is that it needs to have its target audience defined. Also, it should have a thorough understanding of the choices and behavior of its target audience. Then the brand should identify the results it wants from the campaign and shortlist the channels as per the objectives. The required results could be brand awareness, lead generation, sales conversion, customer retention etc. For instance, if the goal is to generate leads for the brand, then a marketing channel that sits best with this goal will be search engine marketing i.e. online advertising, utilizing PPC paid ad campaigns.

Moreover, brands need to evaluate the success rate of different marketing channels in terms of return on investment (ROI), click-through-rates (CTR), conversion rates etc. for that specific industry. They can also conduct A/B testing to analyze the productivity. Furthermore, brands need to consider the overall costs of selecting and using the services of the marketing channel and allocate budget and resources efficiently. Brands should research the industry trends in the market and use that information to make data-driven decisions. Competitor analysis is also crucial. This helps in identifying the best channels and also helps us highlight our mistakes and create innovative strategies for using the same channel.

Lastly, brands should incorporate multi-channel strategies to drive synergies across channels to create an effective and efficient marketing strategy. They need to keep branding themselves and their message consistently and through active feedback mechanisms, keep improving the techniques, keep improving the product/service and keep checking for the productiveness of different marketing channels through constant monitoring.

FAQ's

What is the fastest growing marketing channel?

As per the data and results shown by most of the businesses, Social Media stands out as one of the fastest growing and best marketing channels for brands, both B2B and B2C. This is also due to half of the world's population now having access to stable internet service.

Which is the best marketing channel?

A single marketing channel to use for every other brand can be very risky for the business. There are many marketing channels, but not every channel is suitable for your brand and your marketing objectives. Each has its own unique features that drive the required results. This is why most businesses prefer omnichannel or multi-channel marketing.

Is PR a marketing channel?

Public Relations (PR) is not directly considered a marketing channel. PR marketing is used by the brands to maintain or improve the brand’s image in public. It is not a channel because of its higher influence on the reputation management rather than on the promotion of the product/service directly. A marketing channel either digital or traditional, focuses on product-based results like lead generation, sales conversion and display of products/services.

Conclusion

With the new dawn of marketing, keeping consistent with the channels is crucial for productive and result driven marketing of the brand. Businesses should be aware of all the top-tier marketing mediums and channels around them so they can leverage those channels for unique marketing strategies.

This blog consists of the top 10 best marketing channels of 2024, that have the highest selection rate. Use this guide to select the most relevant and best marketing channel for your brand, optimize the marketing strategies and observe as the magic of marketing unfolds and yields the highest returns on your investments.