Why Digital Marketing Matters
The amount of time we spend connected to our digital devices increases every day. In fact, people spend over 11 hours each day using digital devices.
Types of Digital Marketing
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Content Marketing
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Influencer Marketing
7. Email Marketing
8. Messaging Bots
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO refers to the process of growing your online visibility in non-paid (organic) search engine results. SERPs or search engine results pages appear to users after they search for a given set of keywords using a search engine like Google or Bing. Each user receives an individualized results page based on keywords, the user’s location at the time of searching, and their browsing history.
Organic search results appear in a list and are ranked using the search engine’s algorithm. As users change the way they search and engage with online content, these algorithms change. The higher you rank on a SERP,potentially the more traffic is directed to your site and the more chances of making a passive visitor an active consumer.
2. Pay per Click Marketing
Pay per Click Marketing (PPC) or Search Engine Marketing covers the ground SEO ignores, paid traffic from search engines. With SEM you purchase advertisement space that appears on a user’s SERP. The most common paid search platform is Google AdWords. PPC refers to a digital marketing method wherein search engines charge a company each time their advertisement is clicked.
Social media platforms also offer PPC advertising in recent months. These ads show up in the news feeds of a company’s target audience. This system is a great example of how the different types of digital marketing bleed into each other to form a complete digital marketing strategy.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing gives you increased exposure. It allows you to connect with your consumers in a more knowledgeable way. From this interaction, you can gain valuable customer feedback that allows you to improve your customer service, product, or service.
Using social media marketing you’ll gain more reach when you post quality content. Everything you do to increase traffic or business on your social media channels is social media marketing. Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or LinkedIn these efforts all amount to social media marketing.
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to the practice of delivering a quality piece of content to your users to generate sales and leads. This content can live anywhere online. Tweets, a YouTube video, and blogs on your website all comprise content marketing. Content Marketing works because it melds together exceptional content with other types of digital marketing like SEO and Social Media Marketing.
Keep your audience in mind as you create content. Remember who you’re talking to and what they’re interested in. This will dictate the subject of your content.
Last, share your content across all of your social media platforms for maximum exposure and feedback. It’s not always about sales but more so about engaging and educating your consumer to build brand recognition, trust, and equity.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing refers to the process of paying for conversions. Think of it like hiring a salesperson for your product or service. That affiliate earns a commission. You determine the rate for affiliate marketing. You only pay for conversions. This means there is no upfront cost to affiliate marketing. Many bloggers or e-commerce websites use affiliate marketing.
When you choose to use affiliate marketing ensure that all of your terms and boundaries are discussed beforehand. The affiliate represents your brand, so you want them to carry your brand’s message close to them. Think about the kinds of words you want the affiliate to use.
6. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is among the newer types of digital marketing. Influencer marketing uses people with an enormous online reach considered experts by your target market to drive traffic and sales.
Influencer marketing is popular on social media channels like Instagram and Snapchat. Businesses hire Instagrammers with large followings to promote their brand by posting one or more photos with the product. Businesses now engage in Instagram or Snapchat “takeovers” where the hired influence controls the company’s social media platform for a given amount of time, most often a day. These social media takeovers drive the influencer’s following to your social media channels increasing your new followers and unique views.
Always make sure to do your research on an influencer before you decide to do business with them. You might want to verify their Google analytics and make sure their following proves legitimate and not full of fake accounts.
7.Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to update your email subscribers on a regular basis about your company. This fosters a relationship unlike any of the other types of digital marketing. Your email updates provide value to your consumer. As a result, you build brand trust and brand loyalty.
The best email marketing campaigns involve a list of subscribers earned by your content and company, not paid for by your company. People who opt-in to your email subscription prove more likely to become active buyers.
8. Messaging Bots
Messaging bots thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) are a super online salesperson when used correctly. There are many options to use for the facebook and whatsapp messaging services.
How to structure a digital marketing plan?
An integrated digital strategy will give you a foundation for all the key online marketing activities.
Plan – Build customer personsa and a use a data-driven approach to review your current digital marketing effectiveness, customize analytics, set up KPI dashboards and SMART objectives create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology and data to increase leads and sales
Reach – Build awareness and build your audience online that will drive traffice to your website or online store.
Act – Encourage interactions on your wesite and social media to help you generate leads and sales for the future.
Convert – Use retargeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels if these are important to you.
Engage – Increase sales from existing customers by improving personalized communications using web, email and social media marketing