Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a process of promoting a product or service using any platform which takes internet as a platform are a source of communication. It can be a search engine all social media platforms and instant messaging application.The marketing practice can be executed with the help of following a set of organic activities and paid campaign.  both the search engine and social media has organic method and paid method for growing promoting and increasing sales of any product or service on the internet.

That includes online marketing activities – but strictly speaking, that also includes some traditional marketing activities, too. And that is good. Why? Because it would be a mistake to view online marketing activities totally detached from all other marketing activities. A great marketing campaign will combine the best of both worlds.

To give you a thorough understanding of what the term „Digital marketing“ includes, here are the 10 most important types of digital marketing. And you should make sure that you know about all of them before you decide what types of marketing you are going to include in your digital marketing strategy. And don’t just focus on one type of digital marketing. Most successful digital marketing solutions follow a multi channel approach.

1. Social Media Marketing

The Social Ms has a strong focus on social media marketing. So that is where we are going to start our list of types of digital marketing. Social Media certainly has a rightfully earned place in this list.Social Media Marketing is „the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service.“ Source WikipediaThat means all sharing of information and engagement with followers, fans, partners or competitors on social media platforms with the goal of promoting your products is part of digital marketing. In essence, social media marketing is the targeted use of social media conversations to increase awareness for a brand or product.But be careful, to be successful with social media marketing you have to fully understand the one social network you want to use for your marketing. Each social network has unique features, communication best practices, and content they like. Some social networks will work great for your situation, product and content – others won’t.Today, almost all digital marketing strategies utilize social marketing one way or the other. And don’t worry, your social media strategy does not have to use ALL available social channels or take a lot of manual action. Focusing on one or two social networks and adding marketing automation to your activity will make it much more efficient.

How it Works

Through like campaigns and targeted ads, the goal is to grow your following on social media in the hopes of gaining more business through these platforms. Sites like Facebook collect data about your likes and interests, as well as personal factors like age, location etc. All of this information is available to Facebook business users to create targeted ads to appear on a select demographic’s news feed. These ads can be used to promote products, services or entice users to ‘like’ your page, keeping them up to date with your posts.

Strategy

SMM can be both a long-term or short-term investment. Whilst maintaining social media is key, using targeted ads via the service doesn’t have to continue forever – otherwise, it could cost a lot.

2. Content Marketing

This style of marketing is a little different than the previous ones we’ve mentioned. It’s not so much about directly marketing products and services to customers, but rather creating enriching and valuable content that enhances customer experience. Some of the biggest brands in the world will actively post blogs, images and videos relating to their business that are entertaining and informative too. It’s what establishes your business as a brand and essentially what makes your customers like you more. It’s like promoting your brand without the aim to an incentive to sell anything behind your posts – simply providing information that is both enriching and engaging.

How it Works

Through posting blogs, videos and images, you build up a loyal consumer base, that visit your site for content that serves a purpose. Whether that be informative content about your business or industry knowledge you share, your customers will appreciate the effort behind every blog or video you post. It’s about listening to your customer needs and producing what they want. If your content is share-worthy enough, it can help drive in traffic and potentially more business.

Strategy

Content marketing should be a long-term investment, and like SEO needs to be worked on constantly in order to yield results.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing content or websites so that they show up in search results in search engines like Google. Search engines decide which websites to show for a search term based on keywords mentioned on the website and links that refer to this website. That means SEO has a lot to do with using the right keywords or keyphrases in the copy of a website or within the content you want to show in organic search and getting links to this website or content.

How it Works

Through keyword research and ranking analysis, we determine how you fair against your competitors for keyword rankings. We then work on optimising your website and the content on it for search engines, as well as building quality links both to and from your website, in order to allow your website to be crawled efficiently. Your content is crawled by search engine robots, or crawlers, to collate the data and index it in search engine archives. Then, when a relevant search term is used, Google will return your site as a result. The ranking determines how relevant your site is to a user’s search term. The goal is to be in the coveted top 3 spots.

Strategy

SEO is an on-going strategy, and the longer you invest in it, the more results it yields. It’s not a quick fix.

4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

While SEO describes the process of getting unpaid traffic from search engines – SEM refers to using paid advertising to get traffic from search engines. The most common form of search engine marketing is probably Google Adwords for the simple reason that Google is by far the most used search engine.

In SEM the marketer usually pays the search engine a predefined amount of money for showing a marketing message at various places within the search results for specified keywords or phrases.

Paid search or SEM is a form of Pay-Per-Click advertising and is part of digital advertising.

key words

Keywords lay at the core foundations of any search engine marketing strategy. Firstly you need to identify the keywords that are relevant to your business’s services or products. The keywords need to be ones that your prospective customers are highly likely to use when making a search query. One way easy way to get started with keywords is by using Google Keyword Planner

5. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Similar to SEM other forms of PPC advertising also describe marketing methods where the marketer pays for each click on a link to a website. Apart from search engines, almost all social networks offer the opportunity for Pay Per Click advertising. These ads then appear in the feed of the targeted social media users.

Note that many of these activities cannot be clearly separated. The lines between the various types of digital (online) marketing are often blurred.

How it Works

By bidding on a selected keyword or search term, you can make your way into the 4 ad spaces on offer by Google. Through tools like Google AdWords, PPC pros work on finding keywords that your website will perform well, and dependent on the competition, CPC is determined. Through bidding on keywords, against competitors, your ad appears in relevant search results and will charge you if a user clicks on your ad.

Tip

Always do your research, Find successful keywords that do not charge too much and never be scared to try new strategies. Think ahead of the competition and not with them

Strategy

Many of our clients use both short-term and long-running PPC campaigns. Dependent on what you’re using your PPC for, it can be either

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based type of digital marketing. In contrast to PPC advertising with affiliate marketing, the advertiser does not pay for traffic but rather for conversions. The rates are usually higher but the risk on the side of the advertiser are limited since he only pays for conversions.

Affiliate marketing is popular with bloggers and high-traffic website owners who make money from selling other people’s products to their audience.

How it Works

This investment cycle entails finding someone with a large following. This can be on social or in an industry and then approaching them with a collaboration. Most will require payment or a cut of the sales that come from their audience purchasing their products or services. Then, they’ll create posts, blogs or videos, to ‘show off’ your collaboration and hopefully bring in more sales for your business. It’s about finding the right influencer for your business.

Strategy

Influencer or Affiliate marketing can be a short-term campaign, to help bring in more sales or increase website traffic. Influencers won’t usually continuously promote for longer than a week or less. This is because of their following disengages (they get bored of seeing your product on their ‘idols’ feed).

7. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best converting marketing channels. By sending regular updates to your email subscribers you can build and nurture a relationship. By providing value with your email updates you can build trust – eventually, you will be able to turn a percentage of your audience into customers

Note that email marketing is far more than buying an email list and bombarding them with promotional messages or a one-time advertising spot in someone else’s email newsletter.

The best results from email marketing will always be achieved with a list of subscribers you personally earned and nurtured. Then your email list can easily turn into your best digital marketing asset and an email campaign can drive sales.

Many articles on digital marketing stop with the above 7 types of Online digital marketing. But then we could simply name it online marketing.

For your digital marketing strategy you should also know about the most important offline digital marketing types:

How it Works

By using your existing mailing list, you can create a prospective list of recipients for your mail. Whether it be for remarketing or to update them on a new blog post, you need to send the right email to the right people. Once you’ve decided on the mail you’re going to send, using email marketing tools or a digital marketing agency *cough*, us, *cough* you can design an on-brand email to send out to your mailing list. This can bring in traffic to your site, or even help you sell some products with unique discount codes. With the analytic tools, you can monitor things like opening rate and even how many clicked through on a link.

Strategy

Email marketing is usually considered short term but can be used as long-term. If you’re sending out unique discount codes for a brief time, it can be a short-term fix to boost sales. Or if you choose to send blogs or newsletters, to boost your website traffic, it can be used long term. Just don’t send email after email every day – people don’t like that.

8. Radio advertising

You know what I am referring to, don’t you? Those breaks in your favorite music program where someone tells you what car to buy or what cleaner to use. Some of these spots can be rather annoying, a select few manage to be entertaining – at least when you hear them the first time.

There is still more to radio advertising: For instance, you can sponsor a program.

How it Works

You can now use targeted radio ads for different locations. So, whether you’re targeting a local or national consumer base, your radio advertising can be heard by the right people. There’s also the option to advertise through Spotify, for non-premium users. The ads they will hear can be targeted towards them based on their age, location, gender and more – because of the account information they provide to Spotify.

Strategy

Look into targeted location ads if you’re a local business, and if you’re a national one, look into Spotify advertising to directly target a select demographic. Setting up Spotify ads was once quite a long-winded task, but now the leading audio streaming platform has an incredibly user-friendly self-service ad platform. Spottily Ad Studio also includes a handy voice-over option where you type in what you want the ad to sound like, and they use their own in-house voice actors to create your ad.

9. Television advertising

It is not dead yet: The spot that breaks up your favorite television program. While we are more and more getting used to finding ways to omit having to actually watch TV commercials there is still some marketing success in TV advertising.

In fact, some spots like the ones created for Super Bowl make it to some notable marketing fame. Some of the best Super Bowl spots even make it to social media fame and get a ton of shares that the advertisers do not have to pay for – or rather which is probably calculated into the price of advertising space for Super Bowl anyway.

What you need to keep in mind is that advertising via TV offers very limited targeting options.

Edit: Since there have been a couple of comments on this post why radio and television are included here, let me explain. There has been a huge development in radio and television in recent years and there are such things as digital radio and digital television. The options for marketing with digital adds a ton of options that former non-digital radio and television did not provide. That is the reason why I think digital radio and digital television have a rightful spot in this list of digital marketing types.

How it Works

Marketers are navigating this marketing channel by combining personal data about consumers, together with utilizing new delivery methods for Television Advertising, like addressable ads. They are also placing Television Advertising at the very center of cross-channel marketing campaigns. So, if a consumer sees an ad on TV, they will also see it on their digital devices reinforcing the ad’s message.

Additionally, television ads can now be targeted directly to locations or demographics through things like Virgin or Sky TV. But, it’s not just on your TV. If you use on demand or catch up TV, adverts can also appear midway through your stream (like on All 4). It allows you to have targeted ads for selected audiences.

Strategy

While Television Advertising remains as a major component of the overall marketing mix, it is essential to adapt and pivot your strategy based on your audience’s demographic and where they consume video content. Not only does Television Advertising reach a rapidly growing generation of consumers who are choosing to cut the cord from traditional TV. But, the disruptive evolution of data-targeting capabilities now means that you can personalize your TV ads for audiences on the big screen.

By taking advantage of this video intelligence means that you are able to target your defined target audience with more TV ads that are specifically catered to their personal interests and at times that will make the most impact.

10. Mobile Phone Advertising

Of course, many of the above types of digital marketing can take place on your mobile phone. That is called mobile marketing. You are probably using Facebook, Instagram, and Google on your mobile phone after all. But there are some other types of marketing on your mobile phone that so far would not fit into any of the mentioned categories: mobile advertising.

SMS advertising has been around for some time now. Whats App as a marketing channel is growing. And with technology like Bluetooth still on the rise, the marketing and advertising options for mobile especially in local marketing have by far not yet been fully leveraged.

How it Works

You can target mobile ads by audience segments or by using fencing. Geo fencing is one of the most popular tactics as it is based on a consumer’s physical location. This is a razor-focused strategy as you are able to target mobiles ads to a clearly defined and relevant audience.

Strategy

You need to carefully think about how to adapt your broader advertiser strategy and optimize it for the mobile device environment. You need to consider that you have a much smaller screen size to work with and that intrusive interruptions tend to be less appreciated on mobile than any other device.

Once you have prepared everything, you are ready to launch your ad to the mobile device spectrum and begin testing conversions. You can collect data by using key metrics when running your mobile ad campaign and then invest even more time in perfecting your strategy once you know that it is working.

Knowing the fine details will help you pivot and generate a mobile ad campaign that has a high conversion rate. You can collect and analyse this data through sources such as Google Analytics.