Digital marketing is the heart of so many businesses these days. Most people are spending their time online and marketers are taking advantage of this fact. Online purchases have also increased in the past few years leading to a major revolution in the marketing world. There are several types of digital marketing as you will learn in this article.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, online marketing or internet marketing is promoting product or service awareness by use of digital channel such as emails. Digital marketing is aimed at introducing prospects to your brand with the intention of selling to them.
Importance of Digital Marketing
Without digital marketing, most business would be struggling to beat their competition out there. Here is how a strong online presence can boost your business:
- Helps you create awareness of your products and services even when they are at the first stage of development
- Help you convert your new buyers into repeated buyers
- Increases social shares which in return increases traffic and sales
- Helps reduce your prospect’s journey as you are able to present the right services and products at the desired time
- Enables you to stay connected to your buyers thus improves trust and increases your credibility
What can You Market Online?
Any product or service can be digitally marketed. Here are some examples of what you can sell online:
- Your products such as icons, apps and logos
- Your video content such as product demos and basic tutorials
- Images such as product images and infographics
- Online tools such as marketing tools and keyword research tools
- Product and service reviews
- Written content such as posts, eBooks and product reviews
Types of Digital Marketing
We have discussed some types of digital marketing so as to help you fully understand what is involved in digital marketing:
1. Email Marketing
Email marketing is still the fastest way you can reach your clients. Your customers use emails all the time. However, to be able to keep your readers glued to your emails, you must create trust with them and create content that is useful.
Email marketing helps you nature your customers so that you are able to resell your products and services to them. Learn when you should be sending the emails, have it scheduled regularly to keep on reminding your customers the products and services you are offering.
- Your email subscribers become loyal when you keep them actively involved in your brand’s activities.
2. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay per click is a form of paid advertising; it can also be referred to as sponsored ads when appearing on the search engine. In Pay per click type of digital marketing, the marketer usually pays for every user’s click on a link to a particular website. Besides search engines, most social media platforms are now offering pay per click advertising. The advertiser is responsible for placing the ads on the news feed of your targeted audience.
- PPC is extremely flexible and effective for most businesses as they boost rank, generate leads and increase conversions.
3. Search Engine Marketing
This type of marketing is engineered to improving your business visibility on the search engines. Search engine optimization involves different activities that help improve your business ranking. These activities include; keyword targeting, improving Meta tags and descriptions and other factors that can make your website optimize its performance.
- SEO can also be achieved by placements of ads on the search engine to help your business appear on the organic search.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is simply making use of social media platforms to reach your audience with your products or services. Most businesses are taking advantage of social media to reach their prospects to generate leads and increase their sales. There is no rocket science in this, social media can win you high conversions when used well.
Social media enables you to share information, engage your audience and other market stakeholders. However, not all social media platforms can allow you to have this. Understand that each platform is unique. It is therefore crucial that you understand what type of content you are offering so that you are able to choose the platforms that will best suit your business.
Make use of automation tools such as social pilot to help you share information regularly so that you remain in touch with your audience as much as you can.
5. Content Marketing
Content marketing is creating valuable information about a product or a service to increase your brand awareness. Apart from obviously targeting your audience to buy, content marketing mainly aims at developing and strengthening solid relationships with your prospects.
Having a content strategy is one way to make sure that your content is created for the right audience. After creating valuable content you can share it through social media or send it to your email subscribers.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing that is performance-based. It involves paying someone a commission for making sales. The advertiser only pays affiliates for sales and not generate traffic. This type of marketing is suitable for a business that is already established with high traffic. You are likely to make good sales through affiliate marketing with a larger number of audience.
The affiliate is responsible for promoting the products and services through whatever means they choose. The advertiser pays the affiliate the agreed commission depending on the number of sales the affiliate made at a given period.
How do You Get Started with Digital Marketing?
The digital market is wide, how do you even start? Where do you start? To figure out which route to take, you need to know what your goals are. If your goal is to increase traffic then you will get down to creating a digital marketing plan to help you stay focused.
Create a budget depending on the results you intend to achieve. If you intend to make more sales then you will have to spend more on your marketing.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is going nowhere. Some businesses might be still stuck with the traditional methods of advertising such as television and radio, but the truth is, digital marketing is likely to take over soon if it hasn’t already. Remember that any successful marketing strategy has to combine several digital marketing types to optimize results. That being said, digital marketing will help you meet your business goals sooner than later. Get started!
Swansea Digital Marketing, 306 Llangyfelach Road, Brynhyfryd, Swansea, SA5 9LG. Tel: 07946 212 620
