What is digital marketing? This is the question that everyone seems to be asking. While everyone has this idea about what the term means, it does not only mean social media marketing. Instead, there are several channels and tactics of digital marketing. It includes promoting on all digital platforms. Here, we will discuss all about types of digital marketing.
In fact, in today’s world, you must create some online presence. If you do not do that, your brand or company will suffer, as your business will never reach its goals, and you will be left behind. Think about it; there are thousands of companies that are getting established every day. They are all trying to compete for clients. With 4 million internet users, the majority spending their entire day on the phone, and the internet, it is vital for your company to reach out to these internet users to increase your clientele base. It is not enough to send out flyers and create some quirky advertisement for TV; you need to have a great digital marketing team and an amazing strategy to be effective.
The majority of newly established companies find it hard to find a place online. It is not that they are not trying; they just do not know how to go forward in the digital marketing scene. They are lost. Every company needs a digital marketing professional that can help create a brand for the company and get the word out there.
Table of Contents
Types of digital marketing
Without further adieu, here are eight different types of digital marketing that digital marketers mainly use to promote your company and products.
Content marketing
Content marketing is one of the major tactics that are used by digital marketers to market your brand. This is one of the most efficient types of digital marketing and is mainly used to engage your readers or customers and create a kind of equation with then, which makes trust you. This also helps generate leads. The more your readers trust you and read your content, the more they will be interested in the products or services that you sell.
Content can be anything; it can be the meme that you just posted on Instagram, or the tweet or the video that you uploaded on YouTube. When you are creating content, there are few things that you have to keep in mind. You should first consider your audience and create content targeting them. You should also focus on what are the products that you are trying to sell, or what topic you want to discuss and share with your readers and create content around that. Language is also very important in contact marketing. Whether you are to use a friendly conversational tone or a professional tone, it will depend on your audience.
What you need to know to start
The word limit also matters in content marketing. Content also exists in blogs and articles; when we talk of content, the majority thinks it’s about blogs and listicles. When writing blogs, make sure that they are 2000 plus words. The more the word limit, the better it is because Google will rank you higher on the search engine results. The minimum word limit should be 500 anything less than that, will not rank in the first two pages of Google search results. Also, your content should not have any fluff.
You should not be writing to meet the word limit; you should write to create sales or educate your readers. Content marketing also includes using SEO or search engine optimization to help your content rank better in Google search engine results. This tactic also includes using social media marketing. The content should be shared with all social media platforms so that it reaches users that may not be on some other social media platform. Apart from this, if you have a blog, your blog should also include backlinks.
Viral marketing
Everyone well knows the term viral. When anything goes viral, you know it has been seen or retweeted or posted by millions of internet users. This is not geo-specific. The fact that a post can go viral and reach a global audience makes it all the more worthwhile. Making a video or a post go viral is extremely tough to do. It is easier said than done. The post has to be quirky or funny to catch people’s attention and have millions of shares and likes.
If you manage to make a post or a video of your go viral, you can expect to see a sudden increase in the traffic to your Blog, and this can happen overnight! More traffic meals, more income!
Influencer marketing
Do you suddenly see photos of Instagram stars or TikTok stars promoting brands or pairing up with celebs for promotional reasons and think about how they do that? Well, these individuals are called influencers. In this present social media age, the term influencer does not just apply to charismatic individuals that can lead millions but to problems that have a massive following on their social media accounts like Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok. Their posts and videos generally get thousands of likes and views. They have high engagement levels on their social media profiles, which makes them the ideal person to promote a company whose target audiences are teenagers or the youth. When the companies hire these influencers to promote their products, these influencers not only get paid but also make their followers take notice of the company and the services they provide.
Sometimes companies would even hire them to handle their social handles for a few days, thus converting his or her followers to the company’s customers.
Of course, there are risks involved in this. The majority of people now uses bots or creates thousands of fake accounts. So if you choose an influencer whose followers mainly comprised of not accounts or fake accounts, your company will not benefit too much from this. You need to hire someone that has genuine accounts following him or her.
Do note that this is a new kind of digital marketing that is currently being adopted by many companies to promote their brand and reach youngsters.
Email marketing
This is yet another type of digital marketing that mails the latest offers and deals to all your subscribers. This digital marketing is very effective as it creates readership and trust with your customers. Every subscriber who has subscribed to an email newsletter is sent an email every time you have anything good to offer them.
These subscribers are not bots or even paid individuals, which makes it even more important for you to keep them on your list of returning customers. Several programs and software are used in email marketing to send email to thousands of subscribers.
Social media marketing
Online visibility and presence are gained through social media marketing. You need to be active on social media, to monitor all the likes and the comments and see what the people are talking about. You need to update your company’s social media handles to keep it trending, while letting your customers know about all the latest deals that they are missing out on!
Nowadays, it is not enough. It just has one social media; you need to have several social media handles to make sure that you are reaching out to everyone. Companies usually choose the most popular social media sites to engage with audiences and customers. Still, it is better to do thorough research on who you are target audiences are and which site they frequently visit. Then you can just create social media accounts for your company at those social media handles.
How is it different from content marketing?
Social media marketing is a lot like content marketing services. You need to create engaging content to keep the customers interested. You cannot just create anything and expect to get millions of likes and shares. Also, you need to pay attention to what your customers are saying, or your target audience is interested in and then create content based on that.
Most of the companies use social media marketing to see what the customers like, what their rival companies are posting, and of course, what the customers are saying about their services or products. The feedback is instant on social media platforms, which increases the satisfaction level of the customers. If you are running a business, you have to keep your customers, happy right?
Hashtags play a huge role in social media marketing. You have to check for the trending hashtags and create content and then add those hashtags to make your content trend.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing may sound complicated, but it is not. You hire an affiliate to market your products or services, and then as the customer buys your product or avails one of your services, you pay the affiliate a commission. You do not have to do any of the hard work as you let the affiliate work on promoting your brand and products and bringing you new customers.
Unless and until a visitor has purchased something from your website, you do not have to pay anything to the affiliate. But yes, this involves a contract and proper discussion about your brand’s image. You need to communicate to the affiliate what you want them to portray and what do you want them to say. You need to make sure that they uphold the image of your brand throughout. When you hire an affiliate, you can decide the rate of commission; of course, he has to agree to it to make it a deal.
Search engine optimization
Short for SEO, this is used to boost your website’s ranking in the Google search engine results. You will notice that the top 5 ranked pages all have outstanding content to offer with short and long keywords sprinkled throughout the content. The blog will also tend to have backlinks. SEO is mainly searching for the right keywords and including them in your content. Write content based around the keywords that are trending right now, and will give you the most views. These are the keywords that internet users are mostly typing into the search engines when they are looking for something on the internet. Hence you also need to understand your audience and what they are searching for to be able to write content that is relevant to their query.
Google has upped its SEO game and content quality. Google changes the algorithms ever so often to make it easier for internet users to find what they are looking for. This frequent change means you need to keep yourself updated about the latest SEO techniques.
When you are able to create SEO content with rich keywords, your chances of landing on the first page of the Google SERP increase, the higher you rank, the higher is the traffic to your website, and it is more likely that these visitors will become your customers. With this very goal in mind, most companies tend to work in creating SEO content and land in the top 5 ranks.
Digital marketers may use several keyword and SEO tools to make a website, and its content search engine optimized. This is undoubtedly one of the most vital types of digital marketing strategies.
Search engine marketing
Last but not least, search engine marketing or in short SEM. This is the domain of paid promotion, whereby you pay money to the search engines to display ads. This, in turn, gets you revenue. More ads mean more revenue. Search engines like Google will display ads in only some websites based on the package that you have purchased. This is one of the reasons why some websites are riddled with ads. No matter how annoying ads can be, they are a way of earning more revenue for the company.
Some digital marketing strategies may also involve a pay-per-click advertisement. You can display your company’s ads on several websites. But every time someone clicks on these ads and redirects to your website, you pay money to the search engine.
These are the eight different types of digital marketing that companies are adopting today to gain online visibility. It is time you try your luck with these!
