Over the past ten years, digital marketing became an integral part of companies’ overall marketing strategy. It allows companies to tailor messages and reach an audience who are most likely going like what they have on offer. Here are some of the types of digital marketing in practice now.
Digital marketing can be broadly broken into seven main types including:
- Content Marketing,
- Search Engine Optimization,
- Search Engine Marketing and PPC,
- Social Media Marketing,
- Affiliate Marketing,
- Email Marketing and
- Instant Messaging Marketing.
Let’s unpack these main types of digital marketing.
Pro-Tip
The more types of digital marketing you use, the better your results will be. We recommend using all eight for the best possible results.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that focuses on creating and distributing content for a target audience. The content aims at being valuable, relevant, and (ideally) consistent.
Its ultimate goal is to drive profitable customer action. The most important part is “valuable” and “relevant”. The target audience should want to seek your content out and consume it.
So content marketing is part of every other digital marketing activity, be it social media marketing, SEO, or email marketing.
Examples of content marketing include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization aka SEO is the process of getting quality traffic from free/organic search results on the search engines (like Google, Bing, or Yahoo). The reason we say “quality traffic” is that the traffic you drive to your website must be relevant to your industry.
If you manage to attract a high volume of visitors searching for Apple computers while what you actually do is selling candy apples, the traffic will be of no use to you. By optimizing your content, like this blog post, for search engines, you can see an incremental increase in the stream of relevant traffic to your website.
Without search engine optimization, your target market simply won’t be able to find you on the Internet. This makes SEO one of the most important types of digital marketing.
Some techniques for SEO optimization include: researching relevant keywords and including them in your website copy, optimizing your website titles, description, and improving the loading speed of your website pages.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The term “search engine marketing” was initially used as an umbrella term for gaining both paid and free search traffic. Over time, the term “SEM”, or Search Engine Marketing became the term solely for paid activities. So, what does this type of digital marketing mean?
Search engine marketing refers to a form of digital marketing that aims at increasing the visibility of a website in search engine results by using paid methods or more commonly known as PPC.
In other words, it’s the ads you put out there on Google Ads or Bing Ads. You can see the paid search results in Google search results by the little sign “Ad” at the beginning of the URL as Google puts ads at the top of the search results.
Paid marketing is based on the Pay-per-click (PPC) model of advertising where marketers pay a fee every time people click on their ad.
Basically, PPC is the process of buying visits to your site, as opposed to getting them organically via SEO or other types of digital marketing. PPC is one of the types of paid search. It’s similar to SEM (search engine marketing) but can also include display advertising, and affiliate advertising.
By combining SEO and SEM, you can drive great-quality traffic to your website. With the help of search engine marketing, you can put yourself in front of an audience that is actively searching for services and brands like yours. Sounds hectic? Learn the basics from my article on the basics of SEM & SEO.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing is no doubt the most popular type of digital marketing and refers to the process of using social media platforms to attract traffic and attention. By using social media, you can increase exposure and build meaningful relationships with your customers. Everybody can benefit from SMM as a type of digital marketing. It is all about listening to what your customers have to say, engaging in the conversation, and sharing valuable content consistently.
Together, content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing constitute what is called “inbound marketing”. It is a marketing method that aims at attracting, engaging, and clinching leads. One of the goals of inbound marketing includes attracting users’ attention, driving relevant traffic to the website, and converting it into happy customers.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the popular ways people make money online. If your affiliate program is successful, you might earn quite a decent passive income.
Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing where a business or person, partners up with other businesses in order to receive a commission for the traffic s/he generates for this business.
Imagine this: you put a link to an external website on your own blog or website. Every time a user proceeds to this external website and makes a purchase, you receive a commission.
This marketing strategy might work especially well for bloggers since they can write different types of articles on the given topic and naturally include affiliate links.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most popular and important types of digital marketing.
Did you know that the Return on Investment (ROI) for email marketing is 44x for every $1 spent?
So to put it shortly, email marketing it’s the use of email for promoting one’s products or services. And that is how you might be reading this article – as you followed the link from an email.
Email marketing also works as a way of building relationships with your customers. Ideally, emails you send out to your clients should not only speak to them but also encourage meaningful interaction with your brand.
There are many things that contribute to the success of your email marketing strategy, from the content you create to the time you send your emails.
One thing is certain, though; email marketing is far from being dead and should definitely be an integral part of your overall digital marketing approach and strategy.
Did you know?
Return on Investment (ROI) for email marketing is $ 44 for every $1 spent.
Instant Messaging Marketing
Instant messengers are the latest communication trend. According to Statista they are 1.5 billion people globally using WhatsApp on a monthly basis, followed by Facebook Messenger and WeChat in China.
If you want to be where your audience is, join and use instant messaging marketing. This type of digital marketing exploded over the last couple of years.
People are much more likely to trust the information sent via a messenger (as if it comes from a good friend) than email or SMS which are vulnerable to spam.
There are different ways how you can proceed with instant messaging marketing, from using them for customer support to updating your users about new posts on your blog.
In conclusion
There are other types of digital marketing but these seven will give you a solid starting point. You don’t necessarily have to start with all eight at the same time.
Choose a few that match where your audiences are and that suit your business, then experiment, and measure the results to improve your efforts… then repeat and repeat, and repeat!
Interested to Become A Digital Marketer?
Digital marketers are highly sought-after professionals across the world so if you are ready to become an internationally accredited digital marketer, join the 100% online Professional Diploma course in Digital Marketing.
Bye for now
Nikolina and NK Digital Team
