12 digital communication channels for growing businesses

When your business is growing, it’s an exciting time. All the effort you’ve put into making everything work is paying off, and the future looks bright.

Critical to continuing this success is nailing your messaging both internally and externally. This article will take a deep dive into 12 digital communication channels you should consider using to help your business achieve even higher levels of productivity and reach.

How digital communication channels promote growth

When your business is in a growth phase, it’s essential to make sure every choice you make contributes to future success. That includes deciding which communication channels to use and when. As you scale up, the methods you relied on before may not be appropriate anymore. 

For example, a rapidly growing business may find it useful to engage customers — whether through notifications, support, or simply user delight — using an in-app communications platform.

One way to achieve this is by implementing a client portal, allowing customers to have direct access to the company's services and communications. 

Implementing a messaging API within your in-app communications platform can enable your business to communicate with customers seamlessly and at scale, providing a more personalized experience that can drive user delight and customer loyalty.

Having a complete rethink of how your organization communicates means looking at the topic from two points of view, namely, from both internal and external perspectives.

Internal

Have you been hiring a lot of new talent as you expand? This may be highly beneficial for growth. But it can also upset the balance of how your teams collaborate. 

Suppose you’re used to working with a team of 20 people. Suddenly you’re working with 60. That kind of change can be pretty disruptive.

Before, you might have been communicating quite informally, messaging one another as new tasks or issues cropped up. Now, this ad hoc communication won’t cut it. You’re finding that messaging gets lost, is unclear, and people fall between the cracks. It might even mean that the quality of work starts to dip.

To ensure the show stays on the road, you’ll need to use more structured, effective communication platforms. This could include tools for document automation, which can streamline workflows and reduce errors as your team scales up. Putting this in place will mean your teams can continue performing on a high level, which will help secure further growth.

Additionally, implementing a platform to share documents online can help ensure everyone is on the same page, no matter where they're located or what their schedule is like.

External

Of course, every company aims to secure more business. But a sudden surge in customers can also pose a problem, great as it is. 

Taking steps like implementing a cloud contact center will go some way toward maintaining your customer support standards. But there’s a lot more you can do.

For marketing purposes, you need to match the digital communication channels you use to your target market. 

Consider demographics. If you’re trying to reach Gen Z, you’re more likely to find them on YouTube than Facebook, for example. Moreover, for all the hype about TikTok, YouTube still reigns supreme with this age group.

Image Sourced from morningconsult.com

That might mean deprioritizing Facebook ads in the budget to make room for YouTube influencer marketing. Either way, knowing which channels to use is critical for establishing a solid customer base and driving growth in the long term.

12 digital channels that drive business growth

Let’s explore the best digital communication channels to take advantage of as your business grows. 

Some of these you’ll no doubt be using already. Others may not be on your radar yet but they could prove valuable as your company’s positioning develops.

Email

Kicking off the list is good old email. There’s a reason it’s one of the most popular digital communication channels: emails are endlessly versatile, and anyone with an Internet connection can send and receive one.

This makes email marketing one of the best ways of reaching out to customers, regardless of demographic. You can use emails for a various types of messages, too, including:

Purchase confirmations
Newsletters
Delivery tracking
Special offers
Terms and conditions change notifications
New product launch notices

According to Campaign Monitor, average email open rates hover at around 21.5%. There’s some variation by industry, of course. The highest rate in the 2022 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report was 28.5% for Education, while Retail proved the laggard, languishing at 17.1%.

This makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Consider this: how many emails are sitting in your inbox from e-commerce stores you bought from once or twice? Chances are these campaigns are trying to encourage you to make another purchase. 

If you have no intention of buying, it takes a fraction of a second to hit “delete.” In comparison, you’re unlikely to be getting spammed by education providers, whose marketing operates in a much more selective manner.

That’s the challenge with email: standing out from the clutter isn’t easy. You need to craft engaging subject lines to encourage the recipient to open yours. It’s also vital not to smother your email list with loads of messages since nobody wants that, and you’re likely to see unsubscribe rates shoot up.

Nevertheless, squaring up to the challenge of building an effective email campaign is worth it. Whatever anyone tells you, emails aren’t going away anytime soon. Just look at how many emails it’s forecast will be sent daily by 2025.

Image Sourced from statista.com

376.4 billion — every single day. It’s also clear that it’s a growing trend, which is why email has to be a core element of your digital communications strategy. Nothing else comes close for maximizing reach.

Website

If your business is relatively new, you may still be dependent on your social media platform as a virtual shop window. But grow beyond a certain point, and it’s best to make the leap to a professional-looking website to develop an online presence.

Bear in mind that creating a website doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. Sure, if you have the budget, hiring a professional developer and graphic designer is a good idea. But it’s not completely necessary initially. There are plenty of online tools to help you set up your first site yourself.

If you're looking to build a website, don’t forget that creating a privacy policy is a vital part of ensuring your customers’ data is protected. You can find a Free Template online to help you get started.

While most established businesses have websites these days, not all of them are genuinely reaping the benefits. The beauty of having your own site is that it acts as an official hub for all communications. Not every company takes advantage of that in an intelligent way — but you will.

Having your own site opens up a whole new avenue of marketing possibilities. Google will start indexing your pages, meaning your products or services will start appearing in organic search results. In other words, new customers will start finding you without any extra effort on your part.

You can also optimize pages for SEO and attract traffic using content marketing. 

Where do you put that content? Most likely, on a blog. So let’s talk about that.

Blogs

Blogs are the cornerstone of content marketing. The idea is that if you create blog posts that give readers genuinely helpful content, they’ll find your site when they’re looking for the answer to a particular question. 

Assuming you’ve designed your website well, this represents an opportunity to direct newcomers to other pages on your site and — with any luck — convert browsers into buyers.

Of course, blogs are multipurpose beasts, so they’re useful in other ways. You have complete control over the information you post there, so they can help:

Reinforce your brand voice
Boost your authority as experts
Promote engagement
Build trust with your audience
Personalize your brand

If you decide to launch a blog, don’t forget that keeping to a regular blogging schedule is vital. You don’t need to post every day — although it’s great if you can. But publish an article at least twice a week.

Why? Because when search engines index your site, they deprioritize out-of-date material. So if you’re not refreshing your content often enough, your organic search rankings will slip.

Video conferencing

It’s the digital channel that has defined the moment over the past few years. 

The sudden upsurge in remote working in 2020 made video chats a necessity, where before, it had been a choice. According to Precedence Research, the global video conferencing market is forecast to grow by an average of 11.7% a year to 2030.

Image Sourced from precedenceresearch.com

For team or client meetings, video calls have the brilliant advantage of being more personal than audio-only calling. It also removes the need for everyone to travel to one site, which is particularly handy for hybrid and remote teams.

There are some drawbacks, however. For one thing, it’s heavily reliant on all participants having a stable Internet connection. If the tech glitches, it can significantly hinder your meeting goals.

For all its merits, video conferencing isn’t always a faithful replication of the face-to-face experience. It can be tricky to know how to interrupt speakers, for example. So always ensure you have processes in place to guarantee everyone gets a turn to speak.

Instant messaging

If email is the workhorse of digital communications, instant messaging (IM) is the bouncy puppy. It’s fast, nimble, and demands your attention.

When it comes to marketing analytics, email is a well-understood prospect. But while email is great for more formal messages within the workplace, it’s asymmetric in terms of time. In other words, you don’t expect an immediate response when you send an email. The recipient will get back to you when it’s convenient for them.

If you need to get an answer from a colleague quickly, it’s not ideal. That’s where IM comes in. Enabling some form of instant messaging in your internal communications is an absolute must for any modern business.

The reality is that if you don’t have this capability, many of your staff will use non-work IM channels for work purposes. 

So many people use these platforms routinely as a personal form of communication that they won’t be able to break the habit. That can pose security issues around the sharing of confidential business data, which is not ideal.

There is good news, though.  A business messaging platform is generally pretty easy to access and implement. If you use formal collaboration platforms, they’ll be installed as a core element of the package.

Image Sourced from dialpad.com

Project management tools

If your business is growing fast, there’s a good chance you’ll need to reorganize how you work. Using a project management tool enables your teams to collaborate effectively through a cloud-based platform that everyone can access from anywhere, at any time.

This is essential for distributed teams because it acts as a central hub that keeps everyone informed. All the vital scheduling, task allocation, and progress monitoring functions are collected in one place.

Usually, this kind of software comes with extensive feature options. For example, you can specify access settings so that clients can log in to the platform to check information or review relevant documents.

They won’t be able to see other clients’ data, so there’s no risk of embarrassing leaks. But getting your stakeholders involved in this way can vastly speed up the delivery of successful projects.

Chat

As your client base grows, you should look into the various chat options available for customer support services. Many people prefer the immediacy of chat to the old-fashioned experience of being put on hold — and being told their call is important to you over and over again while they wait.

Your two basic options are live chat or a chatbot. With live chat, customers have a conversation with human support staff using a chat box located on your support page. A chatbot, on the other hand, is AI-driven software that uses machine learning to try to answer customer queries as accurately as possible.

If you have any experience using chatbots yourself, you’ll know there’s a trade-off here.

Paying teams of humans to do the chatting evidently involves higher labor costs than just slapping a chatbot on your site and hoping for the best. But there will often be complex queries that a chatbot simply isn’t capable of resolving.

The best way forward, then, is to have both. Use chatbots when human support officers aren’t available, either because they’re offline or busy. The chatbots will act as a triage layer, solving simple problems while escalating the trickier ones.

One of the major reasons for using chat is to make things easier for your customers. So remember to keep that in mind at all times. It’s also good practice to conduct regular performance reviews to make sure your clients are happy with the service.

Social media

For direct but general messaging, social media stands out. Having social media accounts on the major sites is a terrific way of building up your brand visibility and driving traffic to your website. It’s very time-sensitive too. That means it can be particularly useful for things like seasonal marketing campaigns or responding quickly to unexpected events.

However, it’s a lot of work to keep your social accounts updated regularly. But being selective helps. 

One important thing to remember is that it’s better to do a few social media channels well than have accounts on every single site but use them badly. Your brand voice and industry will influence which ones you focus on.

For example, Instagram is a very visual medium. That means it’s good for businesses selling physical products because it can act as a showcase. You can post awesome pics of your items looking great and attract business that way — or consider Reels that show your products in action.

On the flip side, if you run a management consultancy firm, Instagram’s probably not going to work particularly well. What exactly would you put in the images? Some brand logos? Not very inspiring. 

In this case, you’d be better off sticking to social media sites that are more text-focused, like LinkedIn or Twitter. You can then maintain a regular posting schedule by using an AI post generator to keep things simple. 

If you have the resources, another option could be posting to a video sharing site like YouTube, where you can go into more depth. Sharing how-to demonstrations and video guides are a great way of offering helpful content for potential customers and engaging them with your brand, products, and services.

Phone calls

We’re not suggesting cold calling for sales purposes here. But phone calls are an essential element of a good customer support offering. In fact, many people still prefer to speak to a human to resolve issues.

It should come as no surprise. The Northridge Group surveyed 1,000 adults in the US and found that, on average, they reported phone calls as being the fastest way of solving a problem. Around 43% of respondents who used phone calls said they typically had a resolution within a few minutes, the top figure for any channel.

Image Sourced from northridgegroup.com

So it’s worth putting some thought into how to organize that. Let’s face it: communicating well with customers who need your help is crucial for maintaining their loyalty.

Did you know that there are now AI call center platforms out there? These nifty software tools automate most of the grunt work traditionally associated with phone support. 

As well as creating live transcriptions of phone conversations in real time, they can do things like search for information in-call to help the support agent with tricky questions.

That can only be good news for your customer satisfaction levels. Plus, the fact it makes life easier for your support staff will be excellent for team morale.

Intranet

A classic internal channel of communication, Intranets have been around in one form or another for several decades. The idea is that you create a local private network that acts as a resource hub for your staff.

These are highly useful because they act as a single source of information. You can distribute important news and give your teams access to necessary materials.

Another benefit? Versatility. You can design your Intranet to function in any way you like. Yours may amount to a simple blog that keeps everyone up to date or you could include integrations with other operational tools to create a core, multifunctional platform. It’s entirely up to you.

SMS

According to a Klaviyo blind research study, 29% of consumers cite SMS as their preferred method of contact from marketers. So the first thing to be aware of is that, while it’s a popular option, it’s not universally loved.

The key to using SMS effectively as a business is understanding what kinds of messages your customers will be happy to receive. Unsurprisingly, top of the list in that study came delivery and shipment confirmations — 51% and 46% of participants, respectively, said they liked to receive text messages for these.

Hot on the heels of those, though, was birthday deals, at 36%. This illustrates the fact that SMS is an excellent option for personalization in marketing. It’s a great conduit for tailoring messages directly to the individual customer.

Podcasts

If you’re looking to try something different, consider giving podcasts a whirl. These can either be used as an internal communication channel or an external, brand-building one.

The great thing about podcasts is that they speak directly to the listener. That makes them immediately engaging in a way other digital communication tools can sometimes lack. For internal messaging, you can use podcasting to deliver all kinds of information, from company news updates to training modules.

On the other hand, if you’re planning to launch a podcast for general consumption, the emphasis should be slightly different. In this case, you’ll want to use it to build your brand authority. Think of it as an aural blog, and you won’t be far off the mark.

Just like with blogging, establishing a podcast can create opportunities for cross-collaboration that can boost your brand visibility and draw in new customers.

Edison Research found that 55% of people in the 12-34 age group listen to a podcast at least once a month. So it’s a consumer habit you shouldn’t ignore, particularly if you’re trying to reach a younger target audience.

Using digital communication channels to your advantage

When your business is in a growth phase, it’s important to ensure your messaging scales up with it. This can mean having a total rethink of how you approach communicating both inside and outside your organization.

Luckily, the digital communication channels available today offer a wealth of opportunities for the savvy marketer. It’s all about selecting the right channel for the right message at the right time. Manage that, and you’ll be well on your way to even greater success.