Types of Digital Marketing
If you own a computer or a smartphone, as many of us do, you've experienced digital marketing. It could be an email in your inbox, a search result while using Google, an ad on Facebook, a text message sent to your phone, or an influencer's post on Instagram. As you can see, internet marketing is a broad field with many areas of specialization. The main forms of digital marketing are:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Say, SEO involves carefully structuring and optimizing your website pages to achieve the best possible position on search engine results pages (SERPs) when Internet users search for your business on an engine like Google.
2. Paid social and paid search advertising
Ads that appear on social media are paid social ads, and paid search ads are what appear in the SERPs when you enter a query. Advertisers create these paid ads and compete with others for position on their chosen social platform or SERP for their chosen search engine.
3. Email Marketing
Any marketing that happens via email is known as email marketing, and it's not just for newsletters and coupons. All marketing-related interactions via email fit into this category.
4. Content Marketing
Every effort to market through online content is considered content marketing (and often employs SEO, paid search, and paid social advertising). For example, all of these content types (and more) are grouped under the content marketing category:
● Blog posts
● Infographics
● video
● Ebook
● white paper
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing where companies reach out to third-party websites to advertise their products and services. These are also known as referrals. Affiliate website target audience becomes important in this aspect of digital marketing. Affiliates are incentivized based on a few ways:
● registration
● Email sign up
● sales and
● Membership
6. Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is a type of digital marketing that focuses on reaching target audiences through mobile devices. We all are heavy users of mobile devices and by following simple marketing tactics there is a good chance to grab their attention. Push notifications, emails, social media posts, MMS, SMS, newsletters are a part of mobile marketing.
7. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a practice that increases brand awareness and helps brands achieve their marketing goals. There are wide content buckets available for social media marketing like videos, memes, static posts, trending posts, testimonials, stories, reels, etc. If you execute SMM correctly, your conversion rate is more likely to increase. You will be able to generate better top-funnel traffic, and your paid marketing costs will decrease.
Other types of digital marketing include marketing automation, design, apps and SMS, web analytics and growth hacking.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has become hugely popular in such a short period of time, and for a good reason. Today's customers and clients spend an increasing amount of time online, and they expect their favorite companies to be online as well.
The Internet landscape may seem daunting, but effective digital marketing can be a huge boon for businesses. With careful strategy and implementation, the benefits of digital marketing to businesses include expanding the audience, meeting target customers where they are spending their time, and achieving this at a much more affordable cost than traditional marketing methods allow.
For these reasons and more, more than 60 percent of marketers have shifted their focus from traditional to digital marketing.
How does digital marketing work?
Although the benefits of digital marketing are numerous, understand that each form of internet marketing works in its own way. Companies would be wise to decide which type of digital marketing to invest in and which platforms to use. It is generally recommended to crawl before you walk–start small with your online marketing strategy and grow as the company adapts to different areas.
Digital marketing is extremely helpful for firms as it allows them to grow their audience as far as their budget allows. On the other side of the coin, Internet marketing allows companies to clearly focus on marketing to the right audience. In other words, a firm can reach the perfect target clients on a local, national or international level, all while staying on budget.
Digital Marketing Roles and Responsibilities
Job responsibilities of digital marketers will vary depending on experience and specialty.
For example, an SEO expert will understand all aspects of SEO, including driving organic traffic, identifying and evaluating high-quality content, and performing competitor analysis.
On the other hand, a social media manager will develop a social media strategy in line with the brand identity, define a communication style and a content strategy, create and adapt content for each social media network, and stay up-to-date. Stay up to date on the latest digital marketing trends.
Now, since you have a good understanding of what digital marketing is, its types, benefits, roles and responsibilities, let's take a look at the difference between inbound marketing and digital marketing.