Types of Digital Marketing : Over the last decade, digital marketing has expanded to become an essential part of any company’s promotional efforts. It enables businesses to promote their products to the individuals who are most likely to be interested in them by delivering communications that are relevant to them.

Two professors from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) discussed the ways in which digital marketing complements more conventional strategies and provided examples of the many forms of digital marketing now in use.

What is Digital Marketing

When businesses use the internet and other types of digital communication to reach out to prospective clients, this practice is known as digital marketing or online marketing. Email, social media, and online advertising are only the beginning; now consider text and multimedia messaging as another avenue for spreading your message.

In its most basic form, digital marketing is any kind of advertising that takes place in the digital realm.

Why is digital marketing important

All forms of advertising may boost sales and expand customer bases. Nonetheless, as digital platforms have grown more widely available, digital marketing has gained in significance. Indeed, in April 2022, there were 5 billion people online throughout the world.

You can reach your target audience through social media, SMS, and other digital marketing channels. In addition, the start-up expenses for digital marketing are low, making it an affordable marketing option for startups and small enterprises.

Types of Digital Marketing

As with the many forms of online communication, digital marketing is very specialized. Some of the most common strategies used in digital marketing are outlined here.

1-Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO works to improve a company’s visibility in Google’s search engine results to drive more interested customers to the company’s website. To do this, search engine optimization (SEO) professionals study what customers are typing into search engines to get answers to their questions and then include those keywords in their material. The “Beginners Guide to SEO” by industry leader Moz explains that SEO includes everything from the text on your web pages to the way other websites connect to you on the web to the structure of your website. According to Salary.com, the average annual income of an SEO professional is $70-$999.

So, what are some ways to boost a site’s search engine optimization? One of the difficulties of search engine optimization is that the answer to this query is always dependent on the most up-to-date algorithm used by search engines. With that in mind, in Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO,” we cover some of the most crucial aspects of modern SEO that SEO strategists and marketers need to know:

To ensure that search engines can accurately “read” your site’s content, you should provide descriptive alt text for pictures and text transcripts for audio and video material.
A well-organized network of links ensures that search engines can simply “scan” your site and get all of its material. An SEO expert can do a lot to ensure that the site’s links, URLs, and sitemaps are all structured in a way that is friendly to search engine spiders.
Search terms and keyword optimization: One of the cornerstones of SEO is the strategic use of keywords—the phrases you want people to use to find your site—in the body text and headers. We no longer recommend “cramming” your content full of keywords and variants on those keywords. Better search engine rankings may be achieved by the creation of high-quality content that makes use of keywords in the headers and a few times in the crawlable page content.

2-Social Media Marketing (CMM)

Everything a company does in the realm of social media falls under this category. Although social media is ubiquitous, marketers still need to have a planned and integrated strategy. Making social media postings and reacting to comments are just the beginning of social media marketing.

Efforts are more likely to succeed if they are planned in advance and carried out in a consistent manner. Marketers should only use automation as a tool and not as a “set it and forget it” solution when it comes to social media, although there are numerous online tools available to automate and schedule posts to help retain consistency. Users will immediately catch on if there isn’t a genuine person behind the postings.

Those in charge of marketing on social media shouldn’t operate in isolation from other parts of the marketing department. To ensure that the brand’s narrative is consistent across all of its channels, both online and offline, social media managers must collaborate with the company’s larger marketing team to synchronize their messaging across all channels.

Analytics play a vital role in social media advertising. Marketers that work in social media must also be adept at assessing the results of their content and adapting their methods accordingly. Before proceeding with your new social media strategy, it is essential to evaluate the success of your present postings.

Visual data depicting written material If you have a bachelor’s degree and work as a social media analyst, you can expect to make about $69,834, according to Salary.com. According to Statista, by 2021, the majority (88%) of business experts will see increased brand awareness as the primary advantage of social media marketing. Behind that, 79% of businesses mentioned an increase in website traffic as the main benefit.

Beyond widely used platforms like Instagram and Twitter, there are more free opportunities to get the word out there. Google Merchant Center, eBay, and Facebook’s Messenger and Marketplace are a few additional alternatives.

Managing a personal social media presence is far simpler than a business one, and vice versa. In order to be successful, you’ll need to be able to combine creative ideas with a logical, data-driven approach. This field may be a good match for those who appreciate using both sides of their brains. According to Salary.com, the average annual salary for a social media analyst with a bachelor’s degree is $69,834.

3-Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

In this context, “pay-per-click” refers to sponsored links and other forms of paid search engine promotion. Since this is a temporary form of digital advertising, once payment stops, the ad disappears. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another method to boost a company’s online visibility in search engines.

The term “pay-per-click” may be used to describe the many forms of online advertising, including those located at the top and sides of a results page, those shown before films on YouTube, and those found inside mobile applications.

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There are many ways in which pay-per-click advertising differs from search engine optimization, but one key distinction is that with PPC advertising, you only pay when clicks are made. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising models, such as those offered by Google AdWords, often require payment only when a user clicks on an ad and is sent to the advertiser’s website. In pay-per-click marketing, you may invest as little as a few cents or as much as several thousand dollars every day. While smaller businesses may get positive returns from a monthly budget of a few hundred dollars spent on pay-per-click advertising, many larger businesses spend much more.

Ad placement and search engine optimization (SEO) expenses are largely determined by how much competition there is for the targeted keywords. Generally speaking, you should expect to pay more for high-competition keywords (those with lots of monthly searches and lots of competing sites seeking to rank for them) and less for low-competition phrases.

Advertisements and promoted results may be targeted to people in a certain region or the whole globe when you set up a pay-per-click campaign. According to Google, the ability to personalize by geography assists brick-and-mortar businesses in avoiding wasting advertising dollars on customers who are geographically distant from their stores. 

4-Content Marketing

Storytelling and information dissemination are at the heart of content marketing, which aims to raise consumer awareness of a company. The end game is to get the reader to become a paying client by doing something like submitting a contact form, joining an email list, or buying anything. We use the term “content” to refer to a wide variety of media and information sources, including but not limited to blog entries, digital video, podcasts, and white papers. In general, it has to help the customer before it can even think about selling anything. Content marketing is not only about earning a single sale; it’s also about establishing a long-lasting, trustworthy connection with your clients that may generate repeat business.

Material marketing is synergistic with other forms of digital marketing; for example, it may be used to include SEO search phrases into new website content, and it can also be used to make social media postings and email marketing publications. What are people searching for that led them to your site? This is just one of many questions that may be answered by analyzing your content marketing statistics. What types of information encourage people to explore further? Which ones cause people to give up and leave your site?

Content marketing is more of a long-term approach than something like pay-per-click advertising. According to Market, a marketing automation business, over time, marketers amass a library of material (text, video, podcasts, etc.) that will continue to draw consumers to the site through search engines. Knowing your brand is more well-known and that you are a reliable source of information are both benefits of having a content library. If consumers come to your site for knowledge, you want them to think of you as an expert by the time they leave.

If you have a knack for putting pen to paper or camera to microphone, content marketing might be the perfect career path for you. However, similar to other forms of digital advertising, it requires excellent strategic and analytical abilities.

5-Email Marketing

Email is still one of the most successful marketing methods, Rogers said, despite the rise of social media, mobile apps, and other channels. As a content marketing tactic, it may help consumers and ultimately lead to sales. According to the American Marketing Association, experts in email marketing have a deep understanding of audience outreach, can effectively analyze consumer interactions and data, and base their judgments on this information.

Marketers are continuously looking to increase their open rate (the percentage of recipients who really opened the email) and their click-through rate (the number of recipients who actually read the email and clicked a link in the email). Constant Contact, a market leader in email marketing software, claims that there are several tactics marketers may use to increase the click-through and engagement rates of their emails. Examples of this are:

Bring About a Sense of Deficiency: The number of individuals who click over to your website from an email may be increased by making it clear that they need to act quickly to take advantage of a special offer or that there are only a limited number of such offers available.
Tune Up Your Electronic Correspondence: It is a tried and true method for increasing email open and click-through rates to include the recipient’s name in the email’s subject line and body. (Here’s an example of a subject line: “Katie, a unique deal is exclusively for you.”)
The recipients’ preferences should be honored. Providing customers with the option to choose how often they get your emails may keep some of your subscribers engaged with your mailing list and your content.

6-Affiliate Marketing

With the increased prominence of online marketing, affiliate marketing—also known as influencer marketing—has become popular among many organizations for bridging the gap between consumers and organizations. But what is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing utilizes the ever-growing popularity of industry experts and social media influencers. In working with these third-party influencers, your organization will collaborate to promote your products or services in exchange for compensation. In collaboration, influencers will engage their audience with posts, blogs, or videos to bring in more business for your organization and create new leads.

Within the last few years, affiliate marketing, or influencer marketing, has grown immensely with new media like TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, and blogs becoming mainstream forms of entertainment, news, and shopping. Affiliate marketing has become one of the more popular forms of digital marketing. According to influencermarketinghub.com, the affiliate marketing industry is expected to be a $12 Billion industry in 2022.

The job market is growing for marketers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) predicts a 10% increase in the number of advertising, promotions, and marketing managers. In 2021, the median salary for those positions was $133,380, according to the BLS.

7-Mobile Marketing

This kind of digital advertising is geared toward connecting with consumers through their mobile devices. People may be reached with mobile marketing through email, social media, websites, and apps. When a consumer enters a business or an event, for example, marketers may greet them with a special offer or display unique content based on their location and the time of day.

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According to a poll performed by Statista in February 2022, 46% of respondents said they spend five or more hours a day on their mobile phones. In addition, 22% admit to using their phone for more than three hours every day. Mobile users in the United States will spend around 40 minutes per day on social media applications from December 2020 through January 2021, with the majority of their time spent on Facebook and Instagram.

Over the last several years, e-commerce has expanded rapidly, solidifying its place in the retail industry worldwide. Smartphone users accounted for 70% of all retail website traffic in 2021, and online retail sales increased by more than $4.2 trillion in 2020, according to Statista.

8-Marketing Analytics

Digital marketing’s quantitative and trackable nature is one of its main benefits. Coupons and other direct mail offerings were formerly the only marketing elements that could be tracked. To gauge how well your message was received, see how many coupons are really redeemed. Using analytics, modern marketers can monitor their audience’s every move, down to the number of times a link is clicked, the amount of time spent on a website, the frequency with which emails are opened, and more. However, marketers need to be able to properly comprehend what the statistics represent and how they can guide strategy since there is a deluge of accessible information on the efficacy of digital marketing.

Marketers may see what works with customers and modify their approach going forward; they can also prove their worth to the firm in this way. Differentiating themselves from their more conventional rivals, digital marketers must be able to make sense of all this data and use it to inform their strategic choices.

The performance of digital marketing efforts may be measured in a variety of ways, and many marketers will employ a mix of these methods according to their specific goals and target demographics. Google Analytics is one of the most popular marketing analytics tools since it can be tweaked in virtually infinite ways to collect data on, for example, how well a website is doing, which keywords are sending visitors to the site, and how those visitors interact with the site.

Marketers that have access to reliable data and the skills to evaluate it may “fail fast,” discontinuing efforts that aren’t producing results and refocusing efforts on ideas that have already been shown to be effective. As time goes on, analytics will serve as more than a measurement tool; they will also guide and enhance your future efforts.

You’ll learn about marketing plans and strategies, branding, mobile marketing, and digital advertising, in addition to other topics, as you pursue a degree in digital marketing.