9 Types of Digital Marketing: A Comprehensive Overview

Businesses need to have an online presence if they want to survive in the market today. It’s what they use to connect with customers through a variety of digital marketing channels. 

In 2023, if marketers and sellers don’t bring their business online, they’re losing out on a major portion of their target audience. The ideal digital marketing strategy includes different best practices across different channels. This helps make sure that you’re able to reach out to your target market in different ways.

Thankfully, there are so many options available for digital marketing. But then, it can be overwhelming to determine which one works best for your brand. That’s why in this article, we’ll be giving you a comprehensive overview of the top types of digital marketing, their objectives, and key tactics.

9 Types of Digital Marketing: A Comprehensive Overview of Strategies to Connect with Customers Online

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

According to data, Google processes more than 105,000 search queries every second. This shows that a big chunk of your target market is using the internet to find what they need. Are they able to find your products and services when they look for you online?

This is why Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most important elements of every digital marketing strategy. SEO increases brand awareness and visibility. It also helps bring more organic traffic to your website.

The objective of SEO is to enhance your online visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. Over 50% of marketers report that keyword rankings and organic traffic are the top ways to measure the success of SEO efforts. Therefore, it is critical to identify which keywords to target to bring in a steady flow of organic traffic to your website.

Here are some key SEO strategies that you should consider:

• Keyword research is crucial to your SEO strategy. It helps you identify terms that your target market is using to look for your product and services. Targeting these terms will help you improve your discoverability.
• Use your target keywords naturally throughout your content and headers. Make sure that you avoid keyword stuffing. This is the process of overusing your target keywords even though it doesn’t make sense. This practice is penalized by Google so it’s going to cause you more harm than good.
• Build an internal link structure that makes it easy for search bots to crawl your site. If search engines find that your website is easy to follow and understand, they’re more likely to suggest it to users online.

Related read: The Importance of Link Building in SEO

2. Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a model of digital advertising where the advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads is clicked by a user. What’s great about this digital marketing strategy is you’re only paying the fee when a desired action is done. In this case, you will only pay when users visit your website or landing page.

The goal of PPC advertising is to drive targeted traffic to your website through paid ads. On average, the cost-per-click is under $2. This is why PPC is a very affordable but effective option compared to organic search. 

There are various PPC ads that you can use. They can be made up of text, images, videos, or a combination of all of these. PPC ads appear on search engines, websites, social media platforms, and other parts of the internet. 

Here are effective PPC strategies that you should consider:

• You should place ads on search engines, relevant social media platforms, and high-traffic websites. Location targeting puts your ads in front of your target audience.
• Set daily budgets based on your keyword competition and conversion potential. Upon reviewing the performance of your ads, make sure you adjust budgets accordingly to optimize performance. 
• Don’t forget to maximize geotargeting. This is the process of using location data to deliver different content to website users based on their geographic location. This helps you show more relevant ads to your target audience based on their location.

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing refers to all marketing efforts done on any social media channels. If you want your business to thrive and succeed in the market today, you’ll need to have a solid social media presence.

With over 3.6 billion global social media users, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X offer immense potential for brands looking to engage audiences. The goal of social media marketing is to build lasting connections and relationships through compelling content.

Here are the top social media marketing tactics that you should include in your strategy:

• Create shareable visual content that is tailored to the platform you’re posting it in and the target audience on that platform. Videos, photos, and infographics tend to perform the best so it’s a good idea to focus on creating content like this.
• Make sure that you maintain a consistent voice and messaging throughout all your social media platforms. This helps establish branding for your audience.
• Monitor the performance of your posts. It’s good to keep an eye on engagement, growth metrics, and ROI. This will allow you to tweak your strategies to optimize them for better results.

Related read: How Social Media Link Building Can Boost & Manage Business Reputation

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the foundations of digital marketing. That’s why 82% of marketers use content marketing and consider it a staple in digital marketing. It involves creating content around your business goals and strategies. It focuses on creating high-quality helpful content for your target audience.

The content can be anything from white papers, blog posts, e-books, videos, and many more. What’s important is that you keep your content relatable, entertaining, and most of all, helpful to your audience.

Keyword research is taken into account when creating content for your brand. You want to have content that answers the questions of your target audience and helps them get to know your brand better. When you bring them value, they’ll keep coming back to you and that will turn into sales in the long run.

The main idea of content marketing is to provide value to the user. This helps establish trust in your audience which would later lead to conversions. 

Here are some effective content marketing tactics that you should consider:

• Develop a value proposition and content mission that aims to provide genuine value to your consumers. Your main goal is to give them helpful content.
• Don’t focus solely on promoting your brand and your products and services. If you keep talking about yourself, no one will want to consume the content you produce.
• Make sure you curate content that is appropriate for whatever platform you’ll be publishing it on. For example, long form content is great for blog posts but can be boring for videos on TikTok.
• Repurpose content. Creating content can be time consuming and expensive that’s why you need to make the most out of it. One piece of content can be repurposed for different platforms. It can be a case study for your website, a blog post, a YouTube video, a Facebook post, and a TikTok video. This helps maximize your reach.
• Track your content performance metrics. This helps you gain insight into the preferences of your audience and which strategies bring the best results. This helps you optimize your overall strategy and make better decisions moving forward. 

Also, in content marketing, EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) plays a huge role in content creation. Your audience will trust you only if your content expresses the authority and expertise that you have in the field. This concept helps you create and curate content.

5. Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a growing and ever-expanding field of digital marketing. It is the process of running email campaigns to boost your business and gain new potential customers. Admittedly, email marketing can be quite tricky because you need to create emails that are highly curated for it to be effective. Additionally, the emails have to be exciting and unique to avoid monotony. 

Successful email marketing depends on two major factors. The first is the click through rate. It is the rate at which the recipients of your email campaign click the link inside your email and reach the page or product. The second is the response rate or open rate. The more people respond to your mail, the more successful your email campaign is.

Email marketing is a highly targeted form of digital marketing. When used correctly, it can be an extremely effective way to reach your target audience. 

A lot of marketers don’t believe in the magic of email marketing anymore, but data shows otherwise. Email marketing has an average open rate of 20%. This is why it remains a vital digital marketing channel that should still be utilized in 2023.

Productive email marketing strategies that you should include are the following:

• Make sure you personalize the content of your email with relevant information about the recipient. You’ll have a better chance of making a sale if the content is relevant to the interests and preferences of the recipient.
• Allow your audience to determine the frequency at which they receive campaigns. This gives them control of how much information they receive, avoids oversaturation, and prevents them from getting annoyed with your emails.
• Optimizing A/B testing subject lines, content, layouts, timing, and other factors will help you increase open and click-through rates.

Related read: Top 8 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

6. Mobile Marketing

Statistics show that in 2022, the number of unique mobile internet users was at five billion. This is 60% of the global internet population and if you’re not optimizing your content for this market, you’re missing out on so much. 

A big part of mobile marketing is geo targeting and studying the behavior of your target market. You can reach out to them via messages and notifications to remind them about sales and promotions. 

It’s important to curate these messages and notifications based on your customer’s location and past behavior and interactions. This helps you direct them into a purchase or a sale since the content they see is relevant to their unique experience. 

Additionally, you also have to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile viewing. People use their mobile phones to compare products and prices when researching online. If they can’t navigate their way around your website to easily find what they’re looking for, then there’s a high chance that they won’t be choosing you. 

Here are a few mobile marketing strategies that you should consider:

• Create content that is easy to understand and tailored to fit small screens. Some of your customers have a hard time seeing elements that are too small on their phone screens. Make sure you make it easy for everyone to see what you want them to see on their phones. 
• Test your website if it’s mobile-friendly. You can do so by using Google’s tool for testing mobile-friendliness. 
• Create a mobile app for your brand to make it easier for your consumers to interact with your brand. It should also help your consumers find your products and services.

7. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process where affiliates receive a commission for each completed process agreed upon with your brand. This can be a website visit, signup, or sale. This form of digital marketing is becoming popular in recent years and is expected to grow exponentially in the following years.

This is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy because you only need to pay after the desirable action has been completed. 

Here are a few key points to remember for affiliate and influencer marketing:

• Structure fair performance-based compensation for affiliates using methods like revenue share or cost-per-action. This will help motivate your affiliates to work hard because they are compensated properly.
• Diversify your reach across multiple affiliate platforms like dedicated networks, influencer marketing, and loyal customer referral programs.

8. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves partnering up with individuals who have a significant social media presence to promote your brand. 

What makes this an effective digital marketing strategy is that it connects you with your target market on a personal level. Internet users also trust influencers more than traditional advertisements. Statistics show that 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than a traditional celebrity endorsement. 

Influence marketing helps you promote your brand effectively. It helps establish brand awareness and keeps your brand relatable and engaging. This helps with conversions and later on, increasing sales. 

Strategies for successful influencer marketing include:

• Find influencers who align with your voice and reflect your brand well. This helps make sure that the people representing your brand will appeal to your target audience.
• Co-design campaigns that align with not only your brand but also the style of your influencers. This will help showcase the partnership between you and your influencers.
• Track campaign reach, engagement, conversions, and ROI to understand which strategies work best. The results will also help you make better decisions moving forward. 

9. Video Marketing

Data shows that a record-breaking 91% of businesses are expected to adopt video as a marketing strategy. This is a significant increase in recent years, and it shows how video marketing is becoming an extremely important and effective form of digital marketing. 

What makes video marketing effective is that it’s entertaining, relatable, and easy to share with others. It’s also naturally engaging to watch videos. It helps users immerse themselves in the world that you want them to see.

Some of the best practices for video marketing include:

• Creating short and engaging videos is the main goal of video marketing. Internet users have very short attention spans so you should be able to deliver your message in the shortest time possible.
• You should produce high-quality videos that are tailored to the platforms that you’re posting them on. Longer videos are perfect for YouTube but you should keep videos short for TikTok. 
• Repurpose your content for different social media platforms. Video is pretty flexible because all social media platforms feature videos so make sure you make the most out of them. 
• Monitor your metrics like engagement, completion rates, views, and others. This will help you refine your video content strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions

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