Digital Marketing is a successful way to achieve meaningful results in business. We need to understand what’s strategy is about, how it works, and the types of Digital Marketing that can be used.
If you want to boost your traffic, attract a greater number of clients, grow brand awareness, and engage the teams or audience, it is essential to understand the type of Digital Marketing.
Here, you’ll see one of the most effective types of Digital Marketing, its benefits and objectives, along with when and how to use each one of them.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising
- Marketing Automation
- Email Marketing
- Online PR
- Inbound Marketing
- Sponsored Content
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Instant Messaging Marketing
- Influence Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Audio Marketing
- Virtual Reality Marketing
Here’s a quick rundown of some common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher on search engine results pages. Thereby increasing the amount of organic traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.
There are number of ways to approach SEO to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:
- On-page SEO: This type of SEO focused on all of the content that exists “on the page” when you’re looking at a website. By researching the keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning). You can answer the questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
- Off-page SEO: This type of SEO focused on all of the activity that takes place “off the page” when you’re looking to optimize your website. “What activity make my website could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links also known as backlinks. The number of publishers link to you, and the relative “authority” of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By building networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website) and generating external attention, you can also earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
- Technical SEO: This type of SEO focused on the backend of your website ie, how your pages are coded. Image compression, the structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading speed. It’s an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.
2. Content Marketing
The term denotes the creation and promotion of the content assets for generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers.
The content marketing strategy includes:
Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company blog help you to demonstrate industry expertise and generate organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately helps you more opportunities to convert the website visitors into leads for your sales team.
Ebooks and whitepapers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader’s contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer’s journey.
Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.
Audio or visual content: Television and radio are popular channels for digital marketing. Creating content that can be shared online as a video or heard on the radio by listeners can greatly broaden your potential audience.
3. Social Media Marketing
This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.
If you’re new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule content for multiple channels at once, and monitor analytics from the platform as well.
On top of connecting social accounts for posting purposes, you can also integrate your social media inboxes into HubSpot, so you can get your direct messages in one place.
The channels you can use in social media marketing include:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram
Snapchat
Pinterest
Many marketers will use these social media platforms to create a viral campaign. Partnering with a popular content creator or taking part in a trend that’s currently resonating with a wide audience is a strategy of viral marketing. The purpose is to create something shareworthy in the hopes that it will organically spread across a social media channel.
Don’t know how to get started with social media marketing? Download our free social media content calendar to get your social strategy up and running.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:
- Paid ads on Facebook: Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the news feeds of people who match your business’s audience.
- Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
- Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.
5. Affiliate Marketing
This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:
- Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
- Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.
This is part of the relatively new wave of influencer marketing. Creating a campaign with the use of influencers can be a highly effective form of affiliate marketing. Finding the right content creators can take your digital campaign to the next level.
6. Native Advertising
Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be “native” — Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising, for example.
7. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:
- Email newsletters: Email automation doesn’t just allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
- Social media post scheduling: If you want to grow your organization’s presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of an unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels for you, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
- Campaign tracking and reporting:Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people, emails, content, webpages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help you sort everything you work on by the campaign it’s serving, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.
- Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process.You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an ebook
8. Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business’s website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:
- Blog subscription newsletters.
- Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
- Customer welcome emails.
- Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
- Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.
9. Online PR
Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
- Reporter outreach via social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media opportunities for your company
- Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.
10. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing
- Blogging vs. pop-up ads
- Video marketing vs. commercial advertising
- Email contact lists vs. email spam
11. Sponsored Content
With sponsored content, you as a brand pay another company or entity to create and promote content that discusses your brand or service in some way.
One popular type of sponsored content is influencer marketing. With this type of sponsored content, a brand sponsors an influencer in its industry to publish posts or videos related to the company on social media.
Another type of sponsored content could be a blog post or article that is written to highlight a topic, service, or brand.
12. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
When a potential lead is searching for a product or business that is related to yours, it’s a great opportunity for a promotion. Paid advertising and SEO are two great strategies for promoting your business to capitalize on those future leads. Search engine marketing is another way to increase website traffic by placing paid ads on search engines. The two most popular SEM services are Bing Ads and Google Ads. These paid ads fit seamlessly on the top of search engine results pages, giving instant visibility. This is also an example of effective native advertising
13. Instant Messaging Marketing
Marketing your products through messaging platforms is a fast way to reach potential leads, even for those who haven’t offered up their cell phone number. It’s a simple way to let your audience know about flash sales, new products, or updates about their orders. If your customers have questions or need more information, it’s also a convenient way for them to connect to customer service. You can choose to send messages directly to a mobile phone by text or through messages on platforms like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
14. Influence Marketing
Once we are talking about digital influencers, it is time to explain who they are: specialists in specific subjects with a big audience interested in what they’re saying.
Digital influencers may produce specific content for your brand if it fits their voices.
They can make public tests of your products and show their public the results, no matter positive or negative. Therefore, they have the power to praise or destroy your brand.
More and more brands are using influencer marketing in their strategies and getting good results.
Even with some risks — the influencer may speak or do something that affects your image negatively —, the loyalty of their followers may get to your brand a lot of new clients.
15. Mobile Marketing
Nowadays, mobile marketing is almost mandatory if you want to reach customers.
Google research shows that 27% of the global population use voice search on mobile, and the consumer journey is becoming increasingly complex.
This research also shows that immediacy is as crucial as loyalty. And nothing is more immediate than solving a problem with a smartphone anywhere, anytime.
Mobile marketing is no more just a trend. It must be a reality for brands that desire to be all the time side by side with their customers. Some ways to invest in mobile marketing include:
- create an app: and spread push notifications when you want to talk to your audience;
- adopt instant messenger marketing: speak to your public directly;
- offer products or services by geolocalization: and be where your consumers are;
- explore SMS potential: keep your audience updated about their interests;
- offer mobile content: hold your public attention with engaging content such as videos, which they can consume anywhere.
16. Video Marketing
According to the blog Think With Google, there are 2 billion people per month looking for something on YouTube.
Entertainment, news, how to do something, content to study, whatever, it is a big opportunity to reach new customers.
Video marketing strategies are being used to drive results throughout the marketing funnel, likewise blog posts and emails.
People are looking for videos for a few reasons, such as seeing credible reviews about some products or services.
80% of people use, alternately, search engines and video, and use it to learn more about products and to see how others have used it. And 55% of consumers do it before buying.
As you can see, this is a nice opportunity to make sales easier.
17. Audio Marketing
In the mobile era, Audio Marketing deserves some attention from marketers. Even don’t have the same dynamic of videos, formats like podcasts are increasingly being consumed.
Truly, podcasts are an authentic phenomenon and are taking the audience of radio, especially, when people are in transit or doing something mechanics like cleaning the house or working out.
If you know the habits of your target may think about subjects for your podcasts that have some relation with the activities that your public may do while are listening to them.
This way you may insert your product or service contextually and turn audio marketing into a big sale opportunity.
18. Virtual Reality Marketing
VR or Virtual Reality is already in our lives and may be used by marketers to achieve a brand’s audience. It brings the ability to give your public an immersive experience with the brand, product, or service.
The impact of this type of communication on people is almost unforgettable, and it separates your brand from others in the same market segment.
By being considered an innovation yet, Virtual Reality Marketing associates your brand with a modern idea and puts your business in an innovative position, ahead of your time.
As you saw while reading this article about the different types of Digital Marketing, there are some ways to grow your leads base and, consequently, improve your sales. So, if you want to get better results, you should apply one or more of them in your Digital Marketing plan as soon as possible.
