What Types of Digital Marketing are Right for You?
There were approximately 4.8 billion internet users in June 2020. Digital marketing becomes the best—and often only—way to reach them. That makes digital marketing a thriving industry even in uncertain times.
Maybe you want a career in marketing, but you’re not sure where to start. Or perhaps you want to invest in marketing for your business.
Knowing different types of digital marketing lets you choose the right one for you.
Search Engine-Based Marketing
This term covers two main strategies. That’s search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).
With SEO, you seek to optimize pages that appear higher up the search engine results. That gives you more traffic and the chance to turn website visitors into customers.
The methods for doing so vary as the algorithms change. Yet ultimately, SEO works best when you create helpful, user-friendly content.
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads also come under this heading. These include things like Google Ads, where ads direct you to web results. Businesses run the ads by targeting keywords that customers are likely to use.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (or SMM) involves creating awareness and building relationships. Use social media platforms to do this.
Posting useful or entertaining content is a great way to build an organic audience of loyal fans.
Businesses also use ads in SMM to leapfrog the organic (or user-generated) content. Think of Facebook or Instagram ads. These target people based on their interests or demographics.
You can also use influencers (or becoming an influencer) within SMM. Here, you might give sample products to an influencer that they can showcase on their platform with links back to you.
Content Marketing
A few years ago, content marketing usually meant ‘blog posts’. Now, it also encompasses e-books, podcasts, YouTube channels, and much more.
You market your product by creating and sharing content related to it. For example, a financial coach might write blog posts about managing debt. Or she might run a podcast interviewing other financial experts.
Her call-to-action would always be back to her own services as a financial coach. Offering this content for a low cost (or often free) helps the audience to see the creator as an expert.
Email Marketing
Almost all digital marketing campaigns use email marketing at their core. Even though people say email marketing is dying, it’s still popular.
Emails don’t disappear from inboxes the way posts disappear in busy social media feeds. You can personalize the content based on what customers have bought from you in the past.
With access to a person’s inbox, you can build a relationship with them, creating loyalty. Email marketing also works well with all the other types on this list.
It can form the backbone of your entire digital marketing strategy. Consider digital marketing training if you’d love to build a solid foundation.
Affiliate Marketing
This type of digital marketing can be lucrative if you do it well. It involves creating content about other people’s products or services. Then you direct your audience to those services.
The original seller or creator pays you for every customer you send their way. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) works really well for affiliate marketing.
Yet to make real money, you need a big audience as the percentages you’ll earn can sometimes be low.
Other Types of Digital Marketing
Older forms of advertising, such as television and radio, also bleed into digital marketing. Many of the ad types used in radio also work on podcasts.
Television ads also work on YouTube. The difference is that digital platforms give you much better options for targeting the right audience.
Choosing What Works for You
Many of them work alongside one another. Mix and match digital marketing tools to suit your audience and business goals. You might use PPC ads on Google to send visitors to your content. Then you convert them to sign up for your email list. There, you might sell affiliate products or your own services.
