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Types of Digital Marketing
Let’s quickly run through the different types of Digital Marketing platforms and media that can be used in business. However, don’t think that you will need every platform. You can employ all of them if your business is such that it can make use of all of these services for more returns. Always calculate your gains and losses before investing.
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1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is essentially a subset of SEM, minus the budget. Not all businesses can invest in paid advertising. SEO is a set of strategies and practices that can allow even a small business to drive traffic to its website over a period of time.
With the endless changes in the Google ranking algorithm, SEO has become more complex over the years. Nonetheless, one can start by:
- Listing their business on the Google My Business page to help turn up on local searches
- Researching and segmenting the target audience to optimize online marketing performance
- Creating informative and fresh content that is relevant to the business, in the form of blogs, videos, infographics, etc., to drive traffic
- Promoting the business on social media
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Your content should never compromise on quality, and with the use of correct keywords, you can increase the number of visitors to your site.
SEO requires time and effort to yield results, but once you start accumulating a loyal audience, you will earn more credibility. Promoting your new products/services in the future will definitely yield more promising performance and conversions. There are various SEO tools used by SEO experts which make this work a bit easier.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing or SEM is nothing but paying to get your website or business to rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). SEM is not as easy as traditional advertising though. Various factors play significant roles in the bidding process. Keywords, relevant content on the landing page, and quality—all play a part as key factors in the scoring process for the bid. So, comprehensive research is required in keyword management.
To enter the ad auction, you have to specify how much you are willing to bid on specific search queries. If Google deems your landing page relevant, you will get a spot on the SERP. SEM is a powerful tool to get a higher ad rank. This is how it works:
If your website or business has a low-quality score, even if you bid higher, you will not be rated higher in Ad Rank. Quality will invariably be one of the strongest metrics in Digital Marketing.
SEM can be profitable for your business if your landing page creates a segue for conversions to happen. That being said, as a small enterprise, investing in paid advertisements may seem risky. However, if planned and executed carefully and wisely within the budget, it can create a competitive advantage, especially to match up to any big and renowned business pages.
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SEO and SEM
Before moving on to the next type of Digital Marketing, I want to briefly touch on the dynamics between SEO and SEM in business. In the case of SEM, once you stop investing in it, you will notice your traffic going down more steeply than if you were to stop implementing SEO. But, let’s not discredit its spike when you do invest in SEM compared to what you would normally get out of SEO within the same timeframe. A smart move for someone with a low budget to invest in Digital Marketing is to delicately intertwine SEO and SEM together to create a power couple. If you can optimize on that, there will be nothing like it. Learn SEO vs SEM: What is the difference?
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3. Pay-per-click (PPC)
According to Search Engine Journal, PPC (Pay-per-click) and SEM are technically one and the same, despite their two separate Wikipedia pages. If not the same, PPC is a major subset of SEM. It is most likely that the need to clearly define specific paid campaigns led to two different paid search-engine-advertising terms meaning the same thing. The only plausible difference could be in the usage of SEM as a broader term to include both organic and paid marketing on the search engine platform.
The term, PPC, is pretty self-explanatory. Your ad account will get charged by the search engine platform you are using to advertise every time someone clicks on your ad. It is a form of paid advertising. The cost-per-click (CPC) again depends on the quality score and the keyword competition.
Social Media Marketing is one of the categories of Digital Marketing that uses social media platforms to promote a business. It is a great place where businesses can grow a network of potential customers. Every social media platform comes with its own type of audience. Depending on your target audience, you can choose your platforms to create your brand image.
Keep in mind that a musician won’t be promoting his gigs on LinkedIn and, instead, will prefer to share them on Facebook. In the same way, you aren’t likely to find recruiters hunting recruits on Instagram but on LinkedIn. Instead of investing time, money, and effort on every possible social media platform, you must stick to the few that align well with your business objectives.
The following are a few popular social media platforms and Digital Marketing Examples which you can use:
- Facebook: Videos and curated content
- Instagram: Photos, stories, and quotes
- Twitter: News, GIFs, and blog posts
- LinkedIn: Professional content, company updates, and jobs
- Pinterest: Photos and infographics
You can create targeted ads to appeal to your audience on some of these platforms.
5. Mobile Advertising (Mobile Marketing)
Any form of Digital Marketing that you can think of gets transformed into a mobile format. This is because the majority of consumers are using mobile phones throughout the day for all kinds of activities, such as shopping, reading news articles, searching for information on the Internet, etc. Hence, a smart Digital Marketing strategy would see a separate budget being set aside solely for Mobile Advertising.
How Mobile Advertising works is by targeting ads to your segmented audience. Everything that you create for mobiles should fit the small screen size with user-optimized designs. This is one of the types of Digital Marketing that, if done correctly, will yield higher conversion rates.
6. Content Marketing
Content Marketing, even if it is not marketing directly, is one of the most popular types of Digital Marketing. Whether it be blogs, videos, or attractive images, people love to spend time on online content. So, if you bring informative and fresh content that is of interest to your audience, you will end up creating your own loyal base of regular content consumers. If your audience shares your content, your network will grow and drive traffic to your website.
With any form of content, consistency is key. It takes all the time and effort, but in the long run, you will find that you have accumulated a loyal audience that trusts your brand.
7. Email Marketing
Unlike Social Media Marketing, where posts get filtered, Email Marketing is one of the types of Digital Marketing that can directly relay the information to your audience. As unlikely as it may seem, Email Marketing is 40 times more effective than Social Media Marketing, according to a study by McKinsey & Company.
Before we check out how Email Marketing campaigns can be made successful, let me get into why they often don’t meet the interest of the recipient. Think from the consumer’s point of view. Here are two reasons:
- You will unsubscribe from newsletters or emails if you are bombarded every day with product information.
- You will be uninterested if you receive emails that are of no relevance to you.
The above two factors limit the success of email campaigns the most. Here is the fact—people have subscribed to your newsletters or emails because they wanted to receive information. They were already interested in continuing the relationship with your brand the moment they signed up. Here, you only have to retain them. Your job is to give them something that they would be interested in and keep them engaged. However, if you don’t have enough information about your contacts, you will lose out on potential leads and conversions.
There are four ways you can use Email Marketing to your advantage:
- Loyalty: Aims to retain the relationship with existing customers
- Commercial: Intended to increase conversions with new products and attractive deals
- Informational: Keeps customers informed of the upcoming events or product launches
- Offline Store Business: Notifies people about the location of the physical store to increase visits and sales
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8. TV/Radio Advertising
Both TV and radio have unexpectedly entered the digital world and are included as one of the types of Digital Marketing. Spotify is one such example. Since people now prefer consuming the same content online than in the traditional manner, advertising through these channels can also generate more leads. That being said, there are a considerable number of people who still watch TV.
Before investing in that advertising spot on TV, you can run a cheaper test ad online to get insights. Once you know your demographic, you can narrow down the TV advertising spot to one that fits your crowd without wasting the budget on spots that won’t benefit you. Through subscriptions such as Sky TV, Tata Sky, Virgin, etc., advertisers can show target-based ads on TV, keeping in mind the locations or demographics.
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9. Influencer/Affiliate Marketing
Anybody with a large audience holds power as an influencer. Collaborating with influencers, especially on social media sites, is a great way to gain leads through their audience in return for an agreed payment or a percentage of the sales. Sometimes, this type of Digital Marketing collaboration benefits both parties.
10. Viral Marketing
First, you create content that is so fun or gripping that people can’t help but share it around. The next thing you know, millions of people have engaged with the content you made. You can say, ‘It has gone viral!’
Viral Marketing is using exactly this to promote brand awareness, especially if yours is a B2C business. Making something go viral is not an easy task, but if you can make that happen with proper planning, you are in for a substantial number of leads.
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11. Marketing Analytics
Digital Marketing can be tracked and measured by different tools like Google Analytics, FoxMetrics & Mixpanel. Marketing Analytics helps marketers track customer behavior. They can identify how many times users click on a link, how many times an email has been opened, how much time a user spends on a website, and so much more. It is important that marketers are able to comprehend what all of this means and how this can be useful.
Marketing Analytics helps marketers identify what works with the customer and what doesn’t. This information can be utilized to make strategic decisions. There are several tools available to help digital marketers and it’s common for them to use multiple tools.
If you have a good analytics report on your campaign, it can help you make quick decisions. If you know something isn’t working, you can change it. Or if something is working, it can be amplified accordingly.
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12. Marketing Skills
Digital Marketers have a very important role to play in the marketing team of an organization. They are responsible for creating digital marketing campaigns and how customers interact with the brand on the digital platform. To make sure they are always up to date with the customers, digital marketers have to constantly upskill.
Technology is ever-evolving. What is trending today might be old news in a few months. While technology keeps changing, the foundations of marketing stay the same. There are some basic skills that a digital marketer needs to have.
When companies are hiring digital marketers, they look for specific Digital Marketing Skills. All marketers should have strong communication skills along with a good understanding of marketing principles.
13. Video Marketing
YouTube gets about 2 billion people every month, looking for videos worth watching. This makes YouTube a huge opportunity for digital marketers. People are on the lookout for credible reviews, DIY videos, study materials, etc. You can utilize Video Marketing to drive traffic to your website, encourage people to buy your product, and so much more.
Videos give a humane element to your brand and the more customers can engage with your content, the more likely they are to buy your product or service.
14. Audio Marketing
With the amount of content that is consumed on mobile devices, it becomes imperative that digital marketers focus on delivering content curated to them. Podcasts have become popular again owing to their ease of consumption.
People listen to podcasts when they are traveling, cleaning, working out, etc. You can use Audio Marketing to deliver relatable content to your target audience.
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Benefits of Different Types of Digital Marketing
Using different kinds of Digital Marketing can be beneficial to your business. Let’s see how you will get benefits of Digital Marketing:
- It provides you with various platforms to target different types of people. You can use them to post different types of content and engage your audience.
- You might not be able to reach all your target audience through one of these types. By using different ones, you can at least ensure that your campaign has reached the most number of people.
Summary
So, there you go! Above are all the different types of Digital Media Marketing you can use for your business. However, as mentioned at the beginning of this blog, depending on your business targets, you may not require to include all of them in your Digital Marketing strategy. Every business will have its own set of Digital Marketing tools and platforms that will align best with the company’s requirements. Make sure to find out which types of Digital Marketing work best for your business.