7 Digital Marketing Types you Need to Use today
By definition, marketing is ”the action of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”. Today it is an advanced blend of strategy & technology while it had its humble beginnings of simply trying to sell goods & services.
Researchers believe that marketing is as old as civilization itself. The art of persuasive communication is said to have its origin in ancient China & India which is where the idea of marketing started to develop. It has had many evolutions as time went by & has accelerated at a rapid pace adapting with technology.
Print marketing had its beginning in 1450 when Gutenberg invented the movable type printing machines which made mass printing possible & it took a new turn with the emergence of Magazines in the year 1731. The medium of posters also started got into the game of marketing in 1839 while 1867 marked the year of advertisement with billboards. WEAF of New York aired its first paid radio commercial in the year 1922 while in 1922 the first recorded television advertisement got broadcasted. Now the world of marketing has reached new heights through the medium of internet & marketers around the world are now integrating digital marketing into their marketing plans.
Digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. In the current world, the majority of companies focus on online channels over offline tactics primarily because it allows them to reach their audience where they’re already spending most of their time: online. Well-structured digital marketing campaigns use a combination of different strategies which can be mainly categorized as:
1.Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. Google or any other search engine has crawlers that goes out & gather information regarding all the content that they can find on internet. The crawlers bring all the 1s & 0s back to the search engine to build an index. This index is then fed through an algorithm that will try to match all the data with your query. There are lot of factors that go into the search engine’s algorithm which include Domain level keyword usage, keyword agnostic features, social metrics, link authority features, page level, domain level, etc.
The optimization part is where the people who write all the content & put it on their particular sites are guessing that content & those sites so that search engines will understand what they’re seeing & users who arrive via search will like what they see.
There are further subdivisions to SEO which can be categorized as SERPs, Backlinks, Meta-Tags, White hat, On-site & Offsite.
2. Search Engine Marketing
With millions of businesses out there trying to capture the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online & SEM is the most effective way to promote business & products. It is the practice of using paid advertisements that appear on SERPs. Bidding on keywords that users of platforms like Google & Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services are done, to provide the marketer the opportunity to place their ads alongside results for those particular search queries.
Search Engine Marketing ”enables advertisers to put their ads in front of an audience who are ready to buy at the precise moment they’re ready to make a purchase”. This is something which no other advertising medium can do & makes SEM so amazing & powerful.
3. Social Media Optimization
Social media optimization is the perfect mix between online marketing SEO- Search engine optimization & social media. It helps a lot in enhancing your company’s presence in online through interactive communities – not just Facebook & Twitter but also blogs, forums & anywhere your business is mentioned or linked socially.
With search engine optimization, all of the social media accounts can get connected in a cohesive and consistently branded manner that points your prospects and potential customers to where you want them to go. Specialists apply a strategic, multi-point process for building a successful SMO foundation & boost SEO to drive potential prospects to your site.
With the help of SEO messages which are sent out through social media channels can be tailored to specific groups of individuals, which help social media managers to provide different offerings based on demographic & geographic profiles.
4. Social Media Marketing
In today’s world your brand doesn’t exist online if you are not represented across all social channels. Social Media Marketing is the kind of procedure to use social media platforms & its resources to promote your brand in the most efficient & effective way that allows targeting specific market groups with ease which will eventually lead to increased traffic to your website.
Social Media Marketing includes a paid advert strategy for specific platforms, unlike Social Media Optimization. Platforms like Facebook & LinkedIn have special provisions for ads where you can keep a check on the analytics on how the audience is responding with your posts.
Social Media Marketing is the next step to Social Media Optimization.
5. Content Marketing
Content is called King & there is a reason for it. Content marketing is now everywhere in the online world. It is the strategic marketing approach that marketers should focus on to create & distribute valuable, consistent & valuable content to attract & retain the audience to ultimately drive profitable customer action. The basic idea is providing relevant & useful content to your prospects to help them solve their own issues instead of pitching your products or services. Quality content is needed for all parts of digital marketing.
Without good content the prospects don’t have any reason to visit a company’s website, read their tweets, open their emails, or care anything about you. Content is the way for you to provide the right information to capture the attention of your potential buyer.
6. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the online techniques that have withstood the test of time since the introduction of the internet. In simple terms, it’s a form of direct marketing that uses electronic mail to directly connect with prospects. It’s the most cost-effective way to reach thousands of potential customers when compared to advertising or other forms of media exposure.
With the usage of analytics, marketers can easily track the responses to the emails, to identify what parts of the campaign are working & what is not. By identifying that, instant modifications can be made to the campaign strategy as needed.
Today emails can be more than just text as rich media formats can provide images & give your product/service a flavor or texture. Marketers just have to make sure that you make your emails worthwhile to read once it reaches a prospect.
7. Affiliate Marketing
One of the oldest forms of marketing wherein you refer someone to any online product & that particular person buys based on your recommendation and you receive a commission for it. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money in the online world. Affiliate marketing lets product owners increase sales of their products in a modern way of paid-word-to-mouth technique.
After getting accepted in affiliate programs marketers receive a unique URL that includes their affiliate ID. When a prospect clicks on that link, the affiliate software records that click & any resulting product sales in the affiliate’s account. The affiliate is paid when commissions reach a pre-determined threshold.
Today almost all major companies have affiliate marketing programs of some kind & almost anybody can sign up to be one.
One of the most popular ways to pursue affiliate marketing is to use Amazon affiliate marketing. It is undoubtedly the most popular affiliate platform.
Winding Up
So there you have it! The 7 wonders of Digital Marketing which are taking on the corporate world today, one step at a time. Digital marketing which is similar to modern architecture in many ways mainly form follows functions. What truly defines digital marketing are the three basic elements: people, process & technology. It’s all about targeting the right audience in order to achieve the right results!
About the author
Amberlynn Adam
Blogger, Content Developer & Editor of DataCaptive Blog. Amberlynn is a Content Marketing Professional and is an integral part of DataCaptive since its inception. She holds a passion of tracking new changes in the ever-evolving business world and putting them down in the form of blogs to encourage intelligent discussions & thought exchange. Apart from writing, reading fiction and thriller novels are her major interests. She also plays a major role in Content marketing of DataCaptive Contact Builder App.
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