12 Types of Digital Marketing
If you are a business owner who is looking to increase brand awareness, attract more customers, and generate more sales for your business through various types of digital marketing, or simply a digital marketer that wants to accomplish the same outcome but for your clients’ businesses then you are in right place.
In this blog post, we provide you with information about the different types of digital marketing available to you, going into detail about what they are, the pros and cons associated with each one, and most importantly, how to implement some of these digital marketing strategies.
Below is a breakdown of the main sections of this blog post.
- What is Digital Marketing?
- What are the Different Types of Digital Marketing?
- What’s the most effective type of digital marketing strategy?
What is the Definition of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing (also known as online marketing and internet marketing) is the promotion of brands and/or businesses to communicate with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication such as email, social media, web-based advertising, and instant messaging channels.
Digital marketing is a good way to acquire the attention of potential customers and thus convert them into paying customers that buy the goods and/or services a business offers, which can sales and revenue.
What are the Different Types of Digital Marketing?
The 12 main types of digital marketing are: content, search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), email, social media, mobile, affiliate, video, audio, voice search, instant messaging, and chatbot marketing.
Below we will examine each one in detail; looking at what they are, the benefits and costs of each one, and how you can implement them into your marketing strategy.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant, valuable, and consistent articles, videos, podcasts, and other media.
Content marketing is important because it can establish expertise, build trust, promote brand awareness, increase traffic, gain new customers, and increase revenue.
Using blog posts to target informational keywords that are topically relevant, aligns with the business’s goals and the target audience can increase the organic traffic going to your website. This can lead to new customers that may have never heard about your brand before, which can increase conversions, sales, and thus revenue.
According to Demand Metric, businesses that produce blog posts get 67% more leads in comparison to other companies highlighting the importance of content marketing.
Producing high-quality content through content marketing can attract backlinks from other credible websites in the industry. This is important because backlinks are ranking signals that search engines use to determine the ranking position of your website in the SERP as they are a sign of trust for both users and search engines but also because they pass PageRank onto your website. Backlinks can also send referral traffic to your website thus increasing the chance of conversions and sales that occur on your website.
However, content marketing isn’t right for every business because getting started takes time and resources – you must ask yourself whether your company has the expertise, time, and resources to consistently publish content. You must also understand whether you have the budget for content marketing considering the other types of marketing you are doing or plan to do.
Additionally, content marketing may not produce immediate results as it will require constant iteration to get the tone, quality, and find the correct target audience that resonates with your content.
Once you have considered these factors and decided whether it’s right for you, then you need to know how to get started with content marketing – we have provided some tips below.
- Identify your target audience.
- Determine the right formats such as videos, infographics, or blog posts that aligns with the sales cycle you’re creating content for.
- Determine how you’ll distribute the content whether it’s through email, social media, or article.
- Create a content calendar for the next few months to ensure that you have a strategy that you can stick to.
- Follow best practices such as avoiding fluff, being concise, and including call to actions to subtly guide your audience to decide on your website.
If you’re interested in understanding more about content marketing and how to implement it into your digital marketing strategy for an ecommerce website, then check out our blog post about content marketing for ecommerce sites.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimising a website’s technical configuration, content quality, and link portfolio so that the web pages become more relevant and helpful towards user search queries, which results in search engines ranking them higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for users to find them.
SEO is important because it can boost brand awareness by showing your web pages higher in the SERP for relevant keywords, which can increase organic traffic going to your website and thus improve the conversion rates and sales.
The number one position in Google’s results pages get nearly 32% of clicks and moving up by one position can increase your CTR by 30.8%, which highlights the importance of SEO for acquiring new customers.
Additionally, this is traffic and potentially new customers that you did not directly pay for, which is very cost-effective for businesses to generate new leads. SEO is also a great way to build trust with your audience because you have good user experience in the form of navigation and high-quality content, but also through the number of credible sources that approve and thus link to your website. This trust can then lead to customer loyalty thus increasing the number of customers that continually purchase the services or products you offer.
As we have mentioned above, SEO is a great way to gain new customers however, there are a few things to consider before you begin your SEO endeavours. SEO can be expensive as you must spend money on producing content, acquiring backlinks, and developers to help with technical SEO. Also, there is a lag time between your SEO efforts and results, which can be a several months to a year, and in some cases, you may not even get any results if you build the wrong links or produce low-quality content. Additionally, you are at the mercy of Google algorithm updates, which can reduce your rankings and visibility in the SERP. Therefore, it is important to factor in these points when deciding on whether SEO is right for you and your business.
Below are some of the best practices for SEO.
- Align your content with search intent
- Produce helpful content
- Build topical authority
- Leverage primary and secondary keywords
- Write SEO-friendly meta data (title tags and meta descriptions)
- Optimise your images
- Improve your sites page loading speed
- Ensure you build a logical internal linking structure
- Enhance user experience
- Ensure your URLs are SEO-friendly
- Earn authoritative backlinks
- Balance your anchor text ratios
Here at Autify Digital, we have successfully helped many businesses over the past few years acquire new customers through our SEO services so be sure to check it out.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is a type of online marketing where advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. There are different types of ads however, the most common is paid search ads, which appears when commercial intent searches take place on Google.
PPC is important because the results in terms of new leads for your business are faster in comparison to SEO, which is why we recommend using PPC for short-term customer acquisition and SEO for long-term customer acquisition.
PPC is also important as it assists you in acquiring more visibility and thus more leads and eventually paying customers, which can help increase the number of sales.
PPC campaigns are also quite easy to measure allowing advertisers to see if their ads are generating conversions and revenue. Moreover, because PPC ads can be easily adjusted you can quickly adapt your campaign to the latest trends and developments in the industry.
Flair Blinds, a company providing blinds for homes observed 2,652 impressions, and 555 leads through booked appointments and phone call enquires, with at least 400 turning into a sale from paid advertising campaigns highlighting the importance of PPC for businesses.
As we mentioned earlier, PPC is not a sustainable long-term strategy because it requires ongoing cash flow otherwise traffic will stop. Additionally, there is a high chance of cash flow stopping if you don’t manage the campaign properly and end up getting caught in a bidding war over keywords.
Below are the best practices for creating an effective PPC campaign.
- Define your PPC goals
- Perform keyword research
- Analyse your competition
- Create your ads
- Pick your bidding strategy
- Set up your audience targeting
- Track, adjust, and modify your PPC campaign
Check out our previously written blog post about PPC for ecommerce websites if you have an ecommerce site that has a PPC campaign or going to use one soon. We touch on many key points that shouldn’t be missed.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the usage of social media platforms to interact with customers to build your brand, drive website traffic, and increase sales. Social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
52% of online brand discovery comes from social media channels, which highlights the importance of social media marketing for businesses.
But what makes social media so important? Social media marketing is important as it helps build trust in the eyes of both customers and search engines as you position your website as a genuine business meaning customers are more likely to buy from you, and search engines to be less sensitive to reducing your organic traffic during core algorithms as you have social traffic suggesting you are a brand with a trusted online presence.
Social media marketing is also essential because it can help with your SEO endeavours. Posting your website content on social media platforms allow more people to visit and engage with the sites’ content, which creates positive user signals that can indirectly help your sites rankings in the SERP. Additionally, there are more opportunities to gain backlinks as more people are seeing your content.
Ultimately, social media marketing is key for increasing brand awareness by expanding reach and exposure.
However, before deciding to embark on your social media marketing endeavours please consider that it is also time and resource intensive, which can become overwhelming and less effective without adequate planning and allocation of resources. Also, social media marketing efforts may not yield a solid return on investment as it has been become more difficult to capture a user’s attention as they scroll through an infinite amount of posts.
Below are some things to consider when creating a social media marketing campaign.
- Identify your audience
- Define your goals and KPIs (key performance indicators)
- Appropriately allocate your resources
- Utilise multiple social media platforms
- Post relevant content consistently
- Prioritise quality over quantity
- Interact with your followers
- Reflect your brand identify
- Partner with influencers and industry leaders
- Measure your results
For more information about social media marketing for ecommerce websites then check out our other blog post.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses emails containing promotional or informational content to make the customers on your email list aware of new products, discounts, and other services you provide.
Email marketing can increase your brand awareness as you can directly engage with your customers. Sending email readers to your website through effective call to actions and links can also help increase the website traffic. Because you are keeping your customers updated on your latest products and services through regular emails, you are virtually building trust, credibility, and thus customer loyalty. Finally, email marketing can improve the number of sales, which is shown by Constant Contact where 60% of consumers say they’ve made a purchase due to an email received.
It’s a no brainer to start email marketing given all the benefits however, you must be aware that email marketing can come across as spammy if the content is not interesting or relevant. This can cause more people to unsubscribe from your emails thus shortening your email list. It’s also time consuming to produce successful emails but also you can only target existing customers or people who know about your brand rather than new customers.
Nonetheless, below we have provided you with some ways to do email marketing if you have decided that this form of digital marketing is right for you and your business.
- Choose a relevant email list (to ensure you will be sending emails to the right people)
- Design your email (include the use of branding, white space, and images)
- Personalise your email subject line and content (to make it feel more personal)
- Use conversational language (to make it more personal and engaging)
- Create follow up emails (to help convert people more)
- Send emails from an actual person (to also create more of a personal vibe)
- Track the success of your email campaigns
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is an advertising activity that promotes products and services through mobile devices, such as smartphones, feature phones, and tablets.
Mobile marketing includes promotions sent through SMS text messaging, through downloaded apps using push notifications, through mobile websites, through in-app marketing, or by using a mobile device to scan QR codes.
Mobile marketing can be another key form of digital marketing because most people around the world have a mobile phone allowing you to reach your customers in the fastest way possible. It also provides flexibility to reach your customers through apps, social media, websites, and more. Also, because a mobile phone is an extension of the user, receiving information from their mobile devices will seem more personal to the customers. Lastly, mobile marketing has an increased chance of making your content go viral as content can be easily shared on mobile.
However, mobile marketing has little room for error as it can be difficult to fix any mistakes before they are seen by the customers meaning that bad ads have the potential to go viral, which can be damaging to the brand. Also, different devices have different screen sizes, which makes it hard to standardise an image. These are just some of the disadvantages of mobile marketing that you should be aware of.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing model where a company compensates third-party publishers such as affiliates to generate traffic or leads to the company’s services and products. Companies usually pay affiliates per sale rather than by impressions or clicks.
Affiliate marketing is low-cost advertising, which leverages the audience, following, or marketing skills of other people (usually influencers) to send traffic or leads to your business thus helping increase brand awareness, conversions, and sales. Additionally, affiliate marketing doesn’t require too much maintenance as you simply need to set up an affiliate program on your website and then let people join and promote your brand. Over 80% of brands use affiliate marketing programs according to Luisa Zhou showcasing the importance of it for businesses.
Video Marketing
Video marketing involves the use of video content to promote or inform audiences about your brand and products. Brands usually distribute these videos across multiple digital channels such as their own website, social media profiles, and more. According to Wyzowl, 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool highlighting its importance for companies worldwide. But why is video marketing important?
Video marketing is important for businesses because it can expand your potential audience using multiple digital channels, easily take the attention of viewers, and create helpful content. It can also allow you to showcase and express your brand and products in a unique way.
There some cons associated with video marketing such as the video making can be costly due to large number of resources involved such as buying cameras, microphones, scriptwriting, and more. Also, production can be quite time consuming due to the various stages of creation. Moreover, you run the risk that the videos you create may not appeal to all audiences. Therefore, it’s worth weighing up your opportunities and decide whether you should go with video marketing.
If you do decide to invest time and resources into video marketing then below, we provide some tips on how to create a successful video marketing campaign.
- Establish your video campaign goals
- Understand your audience and message
- Ensure your videos are high quality
- Make the sound of your videos optional
- Provide call to actions for viewers
Audio Marketing
Audio marketing is a type of marketing that uses music, podcasts, and other sounds to promote your brand. If you use any of these channels like Soundcloud or Apple music than you have probably experienced audio marketing as you have heard the ads in between songs so you know how powerful audio marketing can be.
Audio marketing is important because music streaming is growing every year and now makes up 84% of the music industry revenue according to Exploding Topics showcasing the big opportunity to reach more potential customers on different verticals like podcasts, audiobooks, music, and much more.
Interestingly, people are more likely to find and purchase products when they hear relevant ads when listing to ad-supported music. This is shown in a study that found 29% of Amazon connected Audio Consumers made a daily purchase compared to 18% of the general population. Therefore, indicating that audio marketing can be a great way to convert people in buying customers.
To create an effective audio marketing strategy, you must decide on a channel for example, because music streaming is the leading interaction with smart speakers you might decide to go with using audio ads on music streaming platforms. You must also understand your audience in terms of what they are looking for and what topics they may be interested in. Understanding where they are located will also help you understand what channel is best for your audio marketing. Lastly, you should also monitor the strategy and ensure that you use KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure success or failure of the audio marketing strategy.
Voice Search Marketing
Voice search marketing is the process of optimising your website so that voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri can find it when people ask for a specific search query. For example, someone may ask for the search query “Find boxing gyms near me” and come across your website because it has been optimised for voice search.
Voice search marketing is important because more users are relying on voice search for hands-free convenience as they don’t want to waste time typing their search, therefore creating a huge opportunity for marketers and business owners to take advantage of this to gain new customers and increase the number of sales.
The best ways to optimise your website for voice search is to write in a concise and natural way. 23 words is also an optimal length for voice search results across all assistants, except for Google Assistant, which can return an answer of 41 word on average according to SEMrush. Additionally, 70% of voice search results are taken from featured snippets, so it’s important to focus on SEO best practices such as building content around popular search questions and using question-answer pairs with relevant headings within the content to ensure that you occupy the featured snippet for voice search results.
The advantages of voice search optimisation far outweigh the disadvantages, but it is worth knowing what the cons are. The main cons associated with voice search optimisation are that voice search assistants may lack search accuracy as they can misinterpret accents or dialects, there are also privacy concerns as voice recordings are stored and processed, and lastly, voice-only results don’t include visual content like charts or images available in text searches. Consider these cons before deciding to incorporate voice search marketing into your digital marketing strategy.
Instant Messaging Marketing
Instant messaging marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and LinkedIn, to communicate and engage with customers in real-time.
Instant messaging marketing is important becuase it allows businesses and brands to target a wide audience, engage with customers in real-time, and effectively promote products through popular chat platforms. All in all, to improve brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, and increase sales and revenue.
Instant messaging marketing is associated with some drawbacks for example, consumers already receive a large volume of messages daily and adding marketing messages can lead to overload causing important messages to be ignored or deleted. Instant messaging often requires quick responses to maintain engagement, which can strain resources for businesses that don’t always have dedicated customer service or marketing teams available.
Additionally, there are strict regulations regarding user consent and data privacy that vary by country, which can be complex and lead to fines and damage to reputation if there is intentional or accidental failure to comply. Considering these drawbacks is crucial when planning an instant messaging marketing strategy to ensure it aligns with overall business goals and customer engagement practices.
Chatbot Marketing
Chatbot marketing is a marketing technique that uses computer programs to automate interactions with prospects and customers, either on your website or in your app, for the purpose of generating sales.
Some companies use AI chatbots to help encourage sales while others use it as part of a support team to provide real-time help for customers.
Chatbot marketing is beneficial because it can be used to engage and qualify leads for example, it can ask questions to obtain basic qualification details like email and then encourage a user to make an action like contacting you, signing up to your email list, or even booking a call with your sales team if the user has interest in your products or services.
Additionally, chatbots offer 24-hour availability, instant answers, and the elimination of human errors. With technology expanding and including the use of natural language processing (NLP) and semantics, which means they understand the meaning of words rather than just the words (lexical), these chatbots will be able to provide a much greater experience for users and will be more effective in generating new leads for your business.
However, you must remember that chatbots aren’t humans and are not perfect as they can be basic and limiting in some cases, they need ongoing maintenance, they require an investment of money, and there is no guarantee that it will work for your business so it;s worth considering these drawbacks before implementing chat bot into your digital marketing endeavours.
What’s the most effective type of digital marketing strategy?
The most effective type of digital marketing strategy is SEO in my opinion. This is because it can encompass many of the other digital marketing strategies such as content, social media, video, and voice search marketing. It also is a great way to provide long-term growth of a business through the increased visibility and rankings in Google search, which has 5.9 million searches per minute according to SEMrush.
However, it is important to understand your business goals, the resources you have at your disposal, and the time you are willing to wait before seeing results.
We also recommend having a holistic approach to digital marketing where you acquire traffic from SEO and content marketing to email marketing and social media marketing. This is known as traffic diversification, which is important to ensure that you can always reach a wider audience, mitigate risk, and improve your profits.
Here at Autify Digital, we have worked with many businesses with their digital marketing endeavours over the years through our digital marketing services so be sure to contact us if you need help.
