We all know what Digital Marketing is, and if you have read our blog on Digital Marketing, I am confident that you have a fair idea about what Digital Marketing means. If you don’t have any idea about digital marketing, read our previous post. In this blog, we will talk about the 6 kingpins of Digital Marketing.
Different types of Digital Marketing
There are different types of Digital Marketing. Listed below are the top 6 types of Digital Marketing.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Email Marketings
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is all about gaining online visibility in non-paid (organic) search engine results. With the right knowledge and practice of SEO, you gain more visitors, awareness, traffic, branding. If all goes well: you gain more leads and conversions too!
To rank on the first page of a Google search, you need to optimize your website using SEO. You have higher chances of success if your content is informative and solves the problems of your target audience. Focus on your meta tags, and use the most relevant keywords with your target audience in mind. This will elevate your chances of SEO success.
How SEO works:
If you rank higher on SERP, more traffic is directed to your website. This means the chances of making a passive visitor an active customer also increases.
(SERP is short form for search engine results page. It appears to users after they search for specific keywords using search engines. Eg: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Each user receives a results page which is targeted. This is more relevant to him/her. Such targeted results page are based on keywords, the user’s location at the time of searching, and their browsing history.)
Search Engine Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising
To put it in very simple terms, paid SEM is pay-per-click and unpaid SEM is SEO.
What is Search Engine Marketing?
While SEO is all about getting traffic in organic ways i.e. via the non-payment route, SEM mainly focuses on attracting traffic from search engines via the payment route. With Search Engine Marketing, you purchase advertisement space that appears on a user’s SERP. The most common platform for paid search is Google AdWords. The other is Bing Ads.
A marketer is charged a certain amount by the search engine to display their advertisements. Pay-per-click advertising or PPC is an example of SEM.
What is Pay Per Click?
PPC or pay per click is a digital marketing method wherein search engines charge a company each time the company’s advertisement is clicked. It is one of the fastest types of Digital Marketing channels that drive targeted traffic to web pages and related services.
PPC is ideal for businesses that have a good spending plan. If you want to ensure better online recognition in the quickest turnaround time and have the pocket for it, PPC is the ideal marketing tactic for you. It gives swift targeted results. For instance, PPC-generated ads show up in the news feeds of a company’s target audience. This means that through PPC, you are buying traffic via paid search listings. This helps marketers generate more web traffic through desktop and mobile web searches.
Social Media Marketing
Are you social media smart? If you are, then social media is potentially the most viable marketing platform for you and your company. Social Media is the target marketplace for any marketer. In today’s world, social media has become the limbs and soul of any marketing strategy.
Without social media, your marketing strategy will lose impact as social media plays a key role in connecting you with your consumers and gives you increased exposure. This kind of interaction alone can help you gain valuable customer feedback which can further help you improve your customer service, product, and service.
But what is social media marketing?
Social Media Marketing is anything and everything that you do to market your business using social media, be it Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or LinkedIn. To make the most of Social Media Marketing, pay close attention to what your target audience discusses on social media. Get involved in their conversation. Better yet, get so involved, that you know and understand the needs of your audience like the back of your hand. Use Social Media Marketing as a way to assess if the content you put out attracts a positive response. This can be done by monitoring shares and likes on your social media post. Is your post well-received? Is it getting enough likes and shares? If it does, you have your answer. If it does, your marketing strategy is working jolly and well.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing in very easy terms refers to the practice of marketing your content. It is effective because it combines exceptional content with other types of digital marketing like SEO and Social Media Marketing.
Content Marketing revolves around the management and execution of different written, engaging, downloadable and visual Digital Media Content. It focuses on attracting and converting targeted audiences into customers by designing, publishing, promoting, distributing and sharing valuable and relevant content on different digital marketing channels.
Content Marketing is an ongoing practice. It’s not always about sales but is also about engaging your audience and educating them about your brand. It is about building brand recognition, trust, and equity. Thus, a well-planned Content Marketing Strategy ensures better creation, channelization, and conversions for a business.
At the end of the day, you need to make an impactful content marketing strategy to thrive as a Content Marketer. You need to know your audience: who they are, and what they are interested in. Then make a list of the keywords they use, and ultimately use these keywords to boost your SEO. Follow this recipe, and you’ll know what content you should put out.
Affiliate Marketing
If you google “what is affiliate marketing”, the first search result describes Affiliate Marketing as “a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.”
According to Wikipedia, “Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”
Affiliate Marketing is quite common among bloggers who use this tool to earn income. When someone agrees to do affiliate marketing with a company, he/she becomes an affiliate of the company. Thus, an affiliate represents a company’s brand. They earn a commission based on each sale the company makes based on the affiliate’s referrals.
A company generally determines the rates and pays for conversions. Thus, there is no upfront cost for affiliate marketing.
Email Marketing
As the name suggests, email marketing, is any kind of email-driven marketing. Simply put, every email a company sends to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
A company is in the best position to update their email subscribers on a regular basis through email marketing. Be it regarding new products, or discounts. Thus, there is a healthy stream of dialogue between a company and its customers. As a result, companies are able to build brand trust and loyalty through such kind of marketing efforts.
To conclude, we can say that Email Marketing is one of the best marketing strategies. This is so because your subscribers are people who voluntarily subscribed to receiving email updates from you. People who opt for your email subscription voluntarily are more likely to become active buyers of your product than anyone else. This is why email marketing is an important tool for marketers, and a promising source for sales conversion of a company’s products and services.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of this blog. What we have listed above are important tools of Digital Marketing. A good Digital Marketer is one who has a good grip of all the different types of Digital Marketing put together. He/She is someone who knows what works and what does not work.
- To read about the Top 7 Advantages of Digital Marketing, click here
- To know what Digital Marketing is, click here
