In this article, we’ll take a look at 8 types of digital marketing, and discuss the benefits and challenges associated with each. Ready to get started? Let’s go!
Digital Marketing can be divided into 8 major categories including Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-Click, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Marketing Analytics, and Affiliate Marketing.
In the past decade, digital marketing has become a vital component in an organization’s overall marketing strategy allowing companies to tailor messages to reach a specific audience (targeted), making it possible to market directly to people who are likely to be interested in their product.
What is Digital Marketing?
It encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies, which help companies reach consumers online. As a form of online marketing, it allows organizations to build a brand identity and customer loyalty, thereby, it has revolutionized the marketing industry.
According to Dr. Mark Hobson, a senior associate dean of business programs, although digital marketing appears to be a brand-new field, it is really founded on many classic marketing concepts and necessitates both fundamental marketing expertise and technological know-how.
The two fields, according to Dr. Jessica Rogers, senior associate dean of business at SNHU, let customers connect with different demographics. She noted that while digital media may target highly particular people, traditional media is a terrific method to reach a wide customer base. According to the target audience, some channels are more effective than others, which is a crucial factor.
Here are 8 Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a popular way to reach and engage customers online. Depending on the type of digital marketing you choose, you can create content, build an email list, design and launch a website, or develop social media strategies.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
The primary goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google Search results, thereby increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website. This is accomplished by researching words and phrases, that consumers are using to search for information online and using them in your own content. According to the “Beginners Guide to SEO” published by top SEO software business Moz; the content on your web pages, the way other websites connect to you online, and the structure of your website are just a few examples of the numerous components that make up SEO.
In general, here are some of the things for SEO strategists and marketers to understand how SEO works today:
- Content indexing – It is essential to allow search engines to clearly “read” what your site content is, it includes things like adding alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio content.
- Good link structure It is crucial that search engines can quickly “crawl” your site’s architecture and discover all of the material on it. An expert can perform a variety of things to format links, URLs, and sitemaps correctly so that web spiders can easily reach them.
- Keywords and keyword targeting – One of the essential components of SEO is effectively utilizing your keywords, or the search phrases you want your site to rank for, in your content and headers.
Stuffing your content with as many keywords and keyword variants as you can is no longer a good idea. It is widely accepted best practice to write high-quality content that includes keywords in the headers and a few times throughout the crawlable page content. Pages that follow this rule will perform higher in search engine results.
2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC):
It refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. It is a short-term form of marketing because the ads will discontinue once you stop paying. It is used to increase search traffic to a business page online like SEO. A few examples include, the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a page of search results while browsing the web, before YouTube videos, and in mobile apps.
The differentiating factor between SEO and Pay-Per-Click is that you only pay for the results in the case of the latter one.
You only pay in a conventional PPC strategy, such as a Google AdWords campaign, when someone clicks on your advertisement and visits your website. Pay-per-click marketing may be done for pretty much any budget. Even though many big businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars every month on pay-per-click, some businesses may get benefits after paying just a few hundred dollars.
The cost of running an advertisement or promoting your search results will mostly rely on how competitive your keywords are. Low-competition terms will probably be less expensive than high-competition terms, which are defined as phrases for which numerous websites are vying for visibility.
You may select whether you want your ads or promoted results to be displayed to users globally or only in a certain region when you set up a Pay-Per-Click Campaign. According to Google, the ability to target users based on their geography saves you money on advertising by preventing you from delivering adverts to those who are far away from your business.
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM):
Social media is a fantastic tool for marketing. Marketers must take a planned, integrated approach to social media. It involves much more than just writing content for social media platforms and answering comments.
Success requires an afterthought rather than a deliberate effort. Marketing professionals should only utilize automation as a tool rather than taking a “set it and forget it” attitude. There are several internet solutions for automating and scheduling social media updates that may assist keep content consistent. Users will quickly learn if there is not a real person behind the posts.
Social media usage shouldn’t be done independently of other marketing initiatives. To ensure that every aspect of the business is delivering the same narrative, social marketers must collaborate with the company’s larger marketing team to coordinate their messaging across both online and offline media.
A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Social media marketers must also focus on analyzing the performance of their posts and strategies based on their analytics.
According to Statista, 88% of business experts said that in 2021, a rise in their company’s exposure will be the main advantage of social media marketing. In addition, 79% of businesses stated that the biggest benefit was an increase in website traffic. Beyond Instagram and Twitter, there are more free ways to get your word out there. Other choices include eBay, Facebook Messenger, Google My Business, and Marketplace.
In other words, social media marketing requires a blend of creative thinking and objective, data-driven strategy, unlike just managing your personal social media account.
4. Content Marketing:
It uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand awareness. The goal is to convert a person into a potential customer, by acting toward becoming a customer or signing up for your newsletter or email list, or by just making a purchase.
The term “Content” means blog posts, e-books, digital videos, podcasts, etc. The main objective of your content should be to provide value to the person consuming it, and not just advertise your brand or force them to make a purchase. It is about building a sustainable, trustworthy relationship with your clients, that may help you get sales over time and continuously, and not just a single transaction.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy as opposed to a PPC strategy. Over time, marketers gather various content (text, video, podcasts, etc.) that will continue to attract visitors to the website from search engines. This content library also promotes your brand and portrays you as an authority on the subject. In addition, you want website users who are looking for information to consider you as a resource when it’s time to make a purchase.
Content marketing is a great alternative for folks who enjoy writing, making videos, or producing audio. Like digital marketing in general, it also calls on possessing good strategic and analytical skills.
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5. Email Marketing:
Even though many marketing channels have emerged, email is still one of the most effective marketing techniques. It can be used as a part of a content marketing strategy, to provide value to people, and thereby, convert them into customers.
Professionals in email marketing are adept at designing effective campaigns, comprehending the best methods for reaching audiences, and evaluating consumer interactions and data in order to draw conclusions about future courses of action.
Email marketing software can offer many different analytical measures, but the two that marketers are always striving to improve are the Open Rate – the percentage of recipients who opened the email and the Click-Through-Rate, the number of recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email. There are many things marketers can do to make their emails more appealing to users and more likely to be opened. These include:
- Create a Sense of Urgency – By writing email text that informs readers that a limited-time offer is still valid. This will encourage more recipients to click through to your website.
- Personalize Your Email – Including the recipient’s name in your emails’ subject lines has been shown to enhance open and click-through rates.
- Let Recipients Set Their Preferences – Allow consumers to decide how frequently they want to hear from you can assist some of your email subscribers to stay on your list and click on your communications.
6. Mobile Marketing:
This marketing strategy involves reaching your target audience on their smartphones/tablets. It reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email, or mobile applications.
According to a poll done by Statista in February 2022, 46% of the participants said they use their phones for personal purposes for five to six hours every day. In addition, 22% claimed they use their phone for longer than 3 hours each day. Mobile users in the U.S. spent about 40 minutes per day using social media applications between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, with Facebook and Instagram having the biggest audiences.
E-commerce has expanded significantly over the past several years and is now a significant force in the worldwide retail industry. According to Statista, smartphone users accounted for 70% of all retail website visits in 2021, and e-retail sales increased by over 4.2 trillion dollars in 2020.
7. Marketing Analytics:
The main advantage of digital is that it is highly trackable and measurable. A few years ago, coupons were the only trackable marketing piece, and if a customer used the coupon, you knew the message resonated. With the use of analytics, marketers can now monitor user activity at a very granular level, including how frequently users click links, how long they stay on websites, how frequently they receive emails, and much more.
This allows marketers to learn what is successful with consumers, and adapt their marketing messages, and it helps to demonstrate their value to the company too. One of the most vital parts of a digital marketer’s work is to understand this data, and this function sets them apart from their traditional counterparts too.
Depending on their goals and their target audience, many marketers will use a combination of the various tools available for gauging the performance of digital marketing efforts. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for marketing analytics and can be tailored in almost infinite ways to assess how well your website is performing, which keywords are sending visitors to it, how they are interacting with it, and much more.
Good, reliable statistics and the ability to comprehend them may help marketers “fail fast,” immediately removing unsuccessful initiatives and constructing more effective ones around ideas with a history of success.
8. Affiliate Marketing:
The increased prominence of online marketing has resulted in affiliate marketing becoming popular among organizations, to help bridge the gap between consumers and organizations. Affiliate Marketing is also known as Influencer Marketing.
The increasing prominence of social media influencers is used in affiliate marketing. In exchange for money, your business will work with these external influencers to promote your products or services. In order to boost sales and develop new leads for your business, influencers will engage with their following through articles, blogs, or videos.
Over the past several years, as new media sources like blogs, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other have grown in popularity for entertainment, news, and commerce, affiliate marketing has increased dramatically. Influencermarketinghub.com predicts that by 2022, the affiliate marketing sector will be worth $12 billion.
The job market is constantly growing for marketers. The number of managers working in advertising, promotions, and marketing is expected to rise by 10%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labour and Statistics (BLS). According to the BLS, the median pay for those occupations in 2021 was $133,380.
Marketing Skills
According to Hobson, digital marketers support the bigger marketing team and the strategic goals of the entire company by implementing marketing strategies online. Rogers claims that the goal of digital marketing is to represent the voice and preferences of the consumer through brand interactions online. In order to manage integrated digital content, maximize investments, and boost traffic and conversions, marketers take a strategic approach to the brand’s channels.
Due to their constant need to be present where their clients are, digital marketers are responsible for staying up to date with technological, social media, and software advancements. Due to the quick development of technology, the popular social networking app of today could be mostly forgotten by next year, but many of the essential marketing principles won’t change.
According to Rogers, many companies now demand knowledge of Google Analytics, Google, and Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and Hootsuite. Additionally, they are seeking applicants with experience in Adobe Creative Suites and a working understanding of SEO and keyword analysis.
However, since the time when businesses mostly ran print, radio, and television advertisements, several crucial elements of the marketing puzzle have remained the same. Strong communication skills and a solid understanding of marketing ideas are essential for all marketers.
According to Rogers, employers list these soft talents alongside technology-related competencies in job posting criteria.
She stated that conveying a marketing message to a target audience is a fundamental marketing principle. “We need to be able to connect with consumers, executives, and more in addition to our co-workers. These people are our target market, and without effective communication skills, our messages won’t be understood the way we meant.”
Hobson noted that because digital marketing is a continuously evolving field, it is essential for businesses to keep current on new and developing methods. There are several methods that businesses might do; some of them fall within the purview of digital marketers, while others are handled by other departments.
Maintaining an edge over the opposition has never been more crucial, according to Rogers. The business environment is evolving so quickly that it has become essential to look at your competitors to assist guide your own digital strategy.
Conclusion
There you have it! The 8 Types of Digital Marketing we were talking about. As you can see, each type of digital marketing comes with its own set of unique challenges and opportunities.
The right one for your business depends on your goals, resources, and the environment where you operate in. It’s worth experimenting with different types to figure out which suits best for your business.
