Digital marketing has become an essential component of an organisation’s marketing strategy over the last decade. It enables businesses to tailor messages to a specific audience, allowing them to market directly to people who are most likely to buy their products.
Digital marketing is now one of the key strategic initiatives for companies. Consumers prefer to be educated about their purchases, so many of them turn to the internet for information on businesses and products.
So, before we begin learning about the various types of digital marketing, let us first understand –
What is digital marketing?Digital marketing is a type of marketing that uses the Internet to promote and sell products or services. It is the process of communicating with your target audience via online marketing channels such as email, social media networks, and search engines. You can find people who are interested in your offering, interact with them, and build trust in your brand by using digital marketing. |
Also Read: Digital Marketing 101: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
Types of digital marketing
You can use various types of digital marketing to broaden your audience reach. Using multiple digital marketing channels can help you develop a well-rounded strategy that will yield the best results.
Here are 13 of the most effective types of digital marketing to help you decide which strategies will work best for your company:
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
What is SEO?SEO refers to the process of optimising your website so that it appears more prominently when people search for products or services related to your company on Google, Bing, and other search engines. The higher your pages appear in search results, the more likely you are to draw attention and attract new and existing customers to your business. |
How does SEO work?
There are several search engines available, such as Bing and Yahoo, but the vast majority of the population uses Google to search for products, services, and information about businesses.
Search engines operate by carrying out the following tasks:
- Exploring the internet for new web pages and documents
- Storing that information in a massive index/database
- Ranking that content based on various criteria
What these types of digital marketing (search engine optimisation) activities entail is devising and executing optimisation strategies that keep all the functions of a search engine at the centre so that your content appears at the top.
2. Content Marketing
What is content marketing?Content marketing is a marketing strategy that attracts, engages, and retains customers by utilising relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This strategy develops expertise, increases brand awareness, and keeps your company at the forefront of people’s minds when it comes time to buy what you sell. |
How does content marketing work?
Content marketing works by utilising the full power of the four stages of the customer purchasing cycle.
Stage #1: Awareness – Customers may have needs but are unaware that businesses can meet them.
Stage #2: Research – Customers discover the available solutions and how their needs can be met through research.
Stage #3: Consideration – Customers compare different products to determine the value and locate the best quality for the lowest price.
Stage #4: Purchase – A customer makes a final decision and completes a transaction.
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
What is SMM?Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing that harnesses the popularity of popular social media networks to achieve marketing and branding objectives. But it’s not just about setting up business accounts and posting whenever you want. For your Social media marketing efforts to be successful, an evolving strategy with measurable objectives is a must. |
How does social media marketing work?
As social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram grew in popularity, they transformed not only how we connect, but also how businesses can influence consumer behaviour.
It helped businesses boost content that drives engagement and also helped them in deriving and utilising factors such as geographic, demographic, and personal information to deliver messages that resonate with users.
Your social media marketing (SMM) strategy will be more effective if it is more targeted. Keep in mind the following action plan for developing a winning SMM campaign with an execution framework and performance metrics:
- Align SMM objectives with specific business objectives.
- Find your ideal customer based on age, income, location, job title, interests, industry, etc.
- Perform competitive analysis on your competitors (successes and failures)
- Examine your current SMM (successes and failures)
- Make an SMM content delivery calendar
- Create best-in-class content
- Monitor performance and adjust SMM strategy as necessary
4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
What is PPC?PPC is a type of online advertising in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their advertisements. There are different sorts of PPC ads, but by far the most common is the paid search ad. These ads appear when a user searches for things online via a search engine like Google, primarily when they perform commercial searches, indicating that they are looking to buy something. |
How does pay-per-click work?
Advertisers cannot simply pay more to ensure that their ads appear more prominently than their competitors’ ads to appear alongside the results on a search engine.
Ads are instead subject to the Ad Auction, a completely automated process used by Google and other major search engines to determine the relevance and validity of advertisements that appear on their search engine result pages.
5. Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing?Affiliate marketing is a type of advertising in which a business pays third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads for its products and services. Affiliates are third-party content providers who are paid to promote a business. |
How does affiliate marketing work?
Because of the internet, affiliate marketing has gained popularity. Amazon popularised the practise by establishing an affiliate marketing program in which websites and bloggers place links to the Amazon page for a reviewed or discussed product in exchange for advertising fees when a purchase is made.
Affiliate marketing is, in this sense, a pay-for-performance marketing program in which the act of selling is outsourced across a large network.
New-age affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing that supersedes the Internet, but analytics and cookies have transformed it into a multibillion-dollar industry.
A company that runs an affiliate marketing program can monitor the links that bring in leads and see how many convert to sales using internal analytics.
6. Native Advertising
What is native advertising?Native advertising is the concept of creating ads that are so integrated into the page content, design, and platform behaviour that the viewer feels the ad belongs there. Popular examples of native ads include promoted search results and sponsored social media posts. Both formats offer users the same type of value as organic search results and user-generated social media posts. |
How does native advertising work?
Native ads, a performance marketing tactic, work based on supply and demand. Publishers with an audience and reach who want to monetize their sites are on the supply side. Advertisers looking to reach an audience and achieve goals such as awareness, sales, or lead generation are on the demand side.
When a user visits an ad-supported website, the publisher’s SSP sends a bid request to a DSP, which returns an advertiser’s bid and metadata metrics. The user sees the ad of the advertiser who placed the winning bid.
7. Marketing Automation
What is marketing automation?The use of software to automate recurring marketing tasks is known as marketing automation. Marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks like email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns not only for efficiency but also to provide a more personalised experience for their customers. Marketing automation technology makes completing these tasks faster and easier. |
How does marketing automation work?
We’ve all got a list of manual, repetitive tasks: reminders, follow-ups, reporting, and email drafting. These tasks aren’t difficult, but they divert your attention away from more important tasks that can have a greater impact on the bottom line.
Marketing automation allows you to set up those manual processes once and then forget about them. While you focus on larger projects, your automated campaigns can continue to run in the background.
Marketing automation campaigns, at a high level, send specific content to leads based on behaviour and data, to close more sales.
Email Marketing
What is email marketing?Email marketing is a type of digital marketing that allows you to notify prospects on your email list about new products, services, and discounts. It can also be a softer sell to inform your audience about the worth of your brand or to keep them engaged in the interim. It could also be anything in the middle. |
How does email marketing work?
There are numerous applications for email marketing, some of which are as follows:
Build relationships: By engaging the audience via personalised activities
Increase brand awareness: Keep your business and its products/services at the forefront of your prospects’ minds until they are ready to engage
Promote your content: Regularly share relevant content or useful resources with your audience via email
Create leads: By enticing subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for a valuable resource
Promote your products and services: By marketing them
Lead nurturing: Delight your prospects with content that will help them achieve their objectives
Online PR
What is online PR?Online public relations, also known as digital public relations, is a link-building strategy that entails creating a story or piece of creative content and distributing it to target media to secure coverage which includes backlinks to a client’s website, thereby improving SEO and overall search rankings. Essentially, the goal of digital PR is to build a variety of quality links on relevant, high-authority publications that matter to the client – while also aiming to improve the client’s reputation and increase brand awareness. |
How does online PR work?
The opportunities for online promotion are nearly limitless. Businesses must look beyond print to interact with their target audience online.
Digital public relations firms combine the best of traditional public relations with a focus on new trends in content marketing, social media marketing, and other areas.
A digital public relations specialist employs a wide range of strategies to improve a client’s web presence. Here are some examples:
- Putting together online press releases
- Establishing relationships with online journalists and bloggers to generate online press coverage
- Setting up business profiling
- Putting together online reviews and interviews
- Ensuring your press releases are optimised with relevant links back to your website. This benefits readers by providing links to additional information and improves your search rankings by obtaining high authority links to your website from popular blogs and news sites.
- Influencer marketing and blogger outreach to gain visibility on influential social media accounts and blogs
- Creating online content to gain a larger audience and high-quality backlinks
Inbound Marketing
What is inbound marketing?Inbound marketing is a vital strategy that attracts customers by developing useful content and user experiences that are designed for specific requirements. Inbound marketing establishes connections and solves problems that your audience already has, whereas outbound marketing bombards them with content they don’t always want. |
How does inbound marketing work?
The inbound methodology is a business growth strategy that involves nurturing meaningful, long-term relationships with new and existing customers.
It is about valuing and empowering these individuals to achieve their objectives at any stage of their journey with you. Why? Because your success is dependent on the success of your customers.
The inbound marketing strategy can be applied in three ways:
Attract: Capture the right users by giving relevant content and having conversations that demonstrate you as a trustworthy consultant with whom they would want to collaborate.
Engage: Present insights and solutions that address their pain points and goals, increasing their likelihood of purchasing from you.
Delight: Offer assistance and support to help your customers succeed with their purchases.
Sponsored Content
What is sponsored content?Sponsored content is top-quality content developed and released on behalf of a sponsor by a publisher. It’s a type of native advertising that blends in with the rest of the content on a page. In other words, sponsored content is an advertisement that appears to be a natural fit for a platform rather than an intrusive advertisement. |
How does sponsored content work?
Of all the types of digital marketing, sponsored content is most engaging when you sponsor a company or influencer who already discusses topics relevant to your brand and targets your core audience. When done correctly, any mention of your brand feels more like a natural fit than an intrusive advertisement.
Instead of thinking they’ve just seen an advertisement, audiences should leave sponsored content feeling as if they’ve learned something new. This increases the credibility, rememberability, and, most importantly, trustworthiness of your brand.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
What is SEM?The practise of marketing a business through paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) is known as search engine marketing. Advertisers bid on keywords that users of search engines like Google and Bing may enter when looking for specific products or services, giving the advertiser the chance for their ads to appear together with search results for those queries. |
How does search engine marketing work?
Because the algorithms that power search engines are becoming more sophisticated by the day, SEO and SEM are the types of digital marketing that should be essential components of your online marketing strategy. So, a well-thought-out paid search advertising strategy is now an absolute must if you want to ensure high rankings in relevant searches for your business.
Advertising Research tools can help you monitor your competitors’ ad copy and landing pages, providing insight into how to optimise your campaigns as well as what you can do to beat your competition.
Advertisers in search engine marketing pay for impressions that result in visitors, hence the name pay-per-click. PPC advertising is ideally less intrusive because it aims to reach users when they are most in need of the information you have to offer.
Overall, a well-planned SEM strategy can help your website’s SEO by attracting high-quality traffic. This demonstrates to search engines such as Google that your website is an important reference, which can improve rankings.
Instant Messaging (IM) Marketing
What is instant messaging (IM) marketing?Instant messaging (IM) is a software application that allows people to communicate in real-time via text and rich content. Business uses Instant Messaging to enable quick problem-solving with accelerated team workflow while interactively sharing important information and updates with customers at scale. Essentially, it is a primary mode of communication in this mobile era, and it has gained popularity since replacing emails in most scenarios. |
How does instant messaging marketing work?
Here are four ways in which IM can assist marketers in selling their brands:
- One-to-one communication: Because messages are unique and tailored to a specific audience, interaction via messaging apps is more personal.
Brands can now send direct messages to fans, and even better, these messages are treated similarly to those sent by friends.
- Segmented reach: Target audience segmentation is an important part of targeting. You can share content with a single person or a small group of people by using instant messaging apps.
The majority of these apps allow you to create different segments (groups) within the app.
- Fast process: IM supports both parallel and serial communication, allowing you to multitask while the customer service representative investigates.
It also prevents dropped signal areas from interfering with calls, allowing customer service representatives to work with multiple people at the same time.
- Safe & secure method: People use instant messaging apps to communicate with friends or people they already know. However, they are always concerned about their privacy while online.
Using Touch ID or facial recognition to unlock phones has resulted in the most secure platform yet. PINs and passwords are no longer required; just frictionless personal and secure services at your fingertips.
- High conversion rates: Because of the high degree of confidence, shorter response time, and personalised human communication, fan engagement is relatively higher.
Messages sent through messaging apps are typically opened and read within a few minutes, making message delivery much more effective. It is one of those types of digital marketing using which marketers can reach nearly all of their followers listed on their IM list by using private messaging apps.
On a concluding note
The types of digital marketing discussed in this blog can be considered as diverse set of tools. So, the first step is to decide what you want to do – create a radio ad, start a podcast, experiment with smart home assistants, and so on.
Consider who your audience is and where they spend their time. By doing so, you will know which channel to focus on, and how to use existing content rather than creating something new.
To successfully market your brand, product, or service, you must incorporate digital marketing into your overall marketing strategy. Similarly, integrating a strong payment gateway is critical to a company’s overall success. That is why you must –
