Last Updated on March 6, 2021 by Filip Poutintsev
List of online marketing channels with their pros and cons, from most effective to least effective. Pros are market with + / Cons with –.
Affiliate Marketing
CPL, CPS, CPA and revenue share deals (CPC and CPM deals are not really affiliate marketing).
+ You pay only for results, so almost no wasted money if done right.
+ Often transparent and fair.
– Sometimes it’s difficult to reach a big audience, in case no one wants to advertise you.
– Difficult to begin co-operation with some affiliate networks.
Email marketing
+ Very cheap.
+ Works even with no targeting whatsoever.
– There has been a huge black-washing campaign since the dawn of the internet to harm the reputation of email marketing.
– Spam-filters, spam-boxes, and various useless organizations are fighting against email marketing, or how they call it” spam”.
– Lots of low-quality email databases for sale.
– Has experienced massive inflation with results since it was born.
SMS marketing
+ Relatively cheap.
+ Has much higher open and click-rate than emails.
+ No spam-boxes for your SMS; every SMS gets delivered to the inbox folder.
+ Less competition; still not many are doing SMS marketing today.
+ Easier to get data than for email marketing, because there are not so many fake phone numbers around.
+ Works even with no targeting whatsoever.
– Local mobile operators are starting to block marketing SMS (but still not as much as email providers).
Other Direct Marketing
Direct messaging on social media, instant messaging apps, forums etc.
+ Cheap.
+ You can benefit from social media exposure without spending a lot of money on social media campaigns.
– Many platforms block advertising messages very aggressively and ban accounts.
– Often cannot be fully automated.
– Is often viewed as spam.
Influencer Marketing
Direct deals with social media page owners or blogs.
+ Often cheaper than Social Media Ads or dealing through Ad Networks.
+ An endorsement can boosts sales more effectively than simple ads.
+ Some people may agree to promote you for free product samples.
– Can be time-consuming to find influencers and to negotiate deals with them.
– Well known influencers ask for insane prices.
– Some influencers can refuse to promote you if they don’t like your products.
– Some amount of scammers.
SEO
+ Can bring a lot of high-quality traffic.
+ Once established, effects are long term.
– Extremely hard to get high-quality backlinks.
– It may take years to achieve significant results.
– Can turn out to be very expensive.
– Risk of being punished for black hat techniques.
– You depend on Google, which changes search engine algorithms all the time, so it’s possible that after hard work and some initial success, your page will drop down significantly.
– Very hard to calculate ROI, since it takes so long for results to appear.
The borderline of profitability. Marketing channels that are below this are rarely profitable.
Social Media Ads
+ Good targeting options.
– Expensive.
– Requires a lot of optimization and testing.
– Difficult to master.
– Everyone is doing it, so the competition is huge.
Google Ads
– Very expensive.
– Requires a lot of optimization and testing.
– Difficult to master.
– Everyone is doing it, so the competition is huge.
– Some amount of fake clicks.
– Lacks many targeting features.
Other CPC/CPM based ads
Display ads, banners, pop-up/pop-unders, etc.
– Usually highly overpriced.
– Traffic quality is often very low.
– Sometimes requires optimization.
– Can be a lot of bot traffic and fake clicks.
Offline Ads
TV, radio, newspaper and street ads (mostly brand marketing).
– Nearly useless for online business.
– Not possible to integrate links.
– Almost no targeting options.
– Virtually not possible to get any data on the success of the campaign.
P.S. If I didn’t write some obvious points, it’s because all of these channels have them, and therefore it is not necessary to mention below each of them.
Did I miss something? Write your thoughts in the comments!
