Digital Marketing has become an essential part of product or brand promotion to have an impact on potential customers. In recent years, businesses are spending more on Digital Marketing to promote themselves and their products. It also opened several opportunities for job seekers to build their career in Digital Marketing. This post provides a list of popular ways to do Digital Marketing.
Notes: It's not an exhaustive list. Please comment us in case we have missed your favorite type of Digital Marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing website traffic by focusing on appropriate keywords and relevant content so that the web page appears on top of the competitive pages when a user searches the specific keywords on a search engine. The ultimate goal of the SEO is to increase the visibility of the web pages of a website to users of a web search engine, resulting in the popularity of the web pages which in turn makes the website popular. The popular websites have a higher probability of making direct online sales, make users aware of a brand, and also generate revenue by displaying ads.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing involves the promotion of websites or applications by means of paid advertising. The paid advertisements appear on search engine results according to the matching keywords and the bid selection criteria. The advertisers bid on the keywords entered by users on the search engines including Google, Bing, etc which gives advertisers the opportunity to show their paid advertisement alongside the regular search results. It ultimately provides an opportunity for the advertisers to advertise their brand and products to potential end-users.
The major difference between SEO and SEM is that SEM is paid marketing whereas businesses do not need to pay for appearing on regular search results by following SEO guidelines with relevant content.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a process of sending commercial emails to a selective group of users to digitally promote products and for brand awareness. The different types of Email Marketing include Product Promotion, Offers & Discounts, Brand Awareness, Abandoned Cart Reminders, Order Receipts, Product Reviews, Sales Follow-Up, etc. Most of the emails consist of the promotional messages which help businesses in boosting sales and to earn the loyalty of potential customers.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is the process of gaining visitors through social media networks. It's widely accepted as one of the most effective digital marketing channel to directly interact with the end-users and potential customers. On top of publishing the content to publishers profile, the social media users can help to spread the content by using the sharing features of the social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, etc. It involves chaining to auto-spread the content to have a broader reach to the appropriate audience and potential customers. Most of the platforms also provide analytics to have insights into content reach.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing emerged as a totally different marketing channel by allowing others to target potential audience in exchange of commission of every sale made by such users. The marketers do not own the business but help existing businesses to boost their sales by having a percentage of the total sale amount in the form of commission.
Over the past few years, several businesses evolved on this model resulting in coupons and discount based websites and applications without owning the actual product. The popular sites include Ebates, Groupon, SlickDeals, CouponDuniya, CouponDip, etc.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) also known as Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is a paid marketing model in which the advertisers pay to the ad-networks or publishers to drive traffic to the advertiser's website. It's called as pay per click since it's a way of buying visits to the website and the advertisers pay the publishers for each click made by the end-user.
PPC is an effective model to drive traffic either to the website or landing pages made for effective conversions.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing involves the creating, publishing, distributing and sharing of valuable, relevant, and consistent content to the targeted audience. The content can be either text, audio, or video. The textual content is generally published on blogs in the form of blog posts having content relevant to the users.
Content Marketing helps businesses to generate leads, increase online sales, and also helps in brand awareness. This type of marketing focuses on providing valuable information to the users for free and helps in converting users to customers.
Radio Advertising
Radio Advertising involves buying the airtime or spots by the advertisers to run radio advertisements. The advertisers will be charged by the radio stations for the total airtime used to run the advertisement.
Television Advertising
Television Advertisement also called Television Commercial is a span ranging a duration of few seconds to few minutes of television program promoting the product or brand for which the advertisers pay based on the total duration of the advertisement. The total duration might be larger based on the commercial
It's also called TV ad in the US and Advert in the UK.
Landing Page Marketing
Landing Page is called as a specific page where the web traffic is directly routed via different means of advertising. The source could be a social media post, paid advertisement, marketing email, marketing message, etc. The main goal of a Landing Page is to either collect data by accepting a form for lead generation or to make sales on the page itself or to direct the visitor to the product page.
The main purpose of a Landing Page is to convert the visitor to lead either by sharing phone number to receive a call or to provide an inquiry form to collect contact details or to make sales in minimum steps by targeting a particular audience.
Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy to promote a product using social media platforms. The product information is being represented in such a way that it insists users to share it as much as possible to spread the information in order to reach a wider audience. The content must generate interest in users to share it with their contacts and groups.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing also called as Influence Marketing is a type of social media marketing where the well-known person, celebrity, or a popular page or group having social influence in their field spread the marketing content or message to their followers resulting in brand awareness and increase in traffic.
Mobile Phone Advertising
Mobile Advertising is a form of advertising where advertisements appear on mobile devices over wireless networks. It's a subset of mobile marketing and the advertising can be done via text SMS or display ads appearing on mobile web pages, mobile applications, and mobile games.
Brand Journalism
Brand Journalism also called as Corporate Journalism is similar to Content Marketing, but differentiate in the actual approach. Brand Journalism is done for brand awareness to acquire target audience. Several marketing agencies also hire journalists to do Brand Journalism or manages their own news sites to promote and market their products through journalism.
Video Marketing
Video Marketing involves publishing engaging videos to the website and social media platforms. These videos consist of content to showcase the product, promote the brand, and to build customers rapport.
Internet is nowadays flooded with such videos including social videos having product promotional messages or to explain the product itself.
Augmented/Virtual Reality Marketing
Virtual Reality Marketing is an emerging marketing type and engages the user to visually showcase product features and functions. It's also used by businesses to demonstrate their process directly to the target audience.