Different types of Digital Marketing for Businesses

In modern marketing, online and digital marketing are two terms used to define how brands use the internet and other digital mediums to promote themselves, such as email, social media, web-based ads, text messages, and multimedia messages.

Marketers can use electronic devices to communicate their promotional messages and measure their customer journey. Most often, digital marketing refers to advertising campaigns that appear on computers, smartphones, tablets, or other handheld devices. There are online videos, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads, and social media posts, among the numerous forms of paid media. Traditional marketing methods such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail are often compared to digital marketing. Oddly, television is usually included as part of conventional marketing.

Inbound Marketing versus Digital Marketing

There are a lot of misconceptions about inbound and digital marketing. Several tools used in digital marketing are similar to those used in inbound marketing, such as email and online content. Both aim to attract prospects and convert them to customers through the buyer’s journey. Despite this difference, the two approaches think differently about how tools and goals are related.

Each tool in digital marketing has the potential to convert prospects. Depending on the brand’s digital marketing strategy, it may utilise multiple platforms, or one may dominate. To achieve the goal, it evaluates available tools and determines which of them are most likely to reach target customers and at what stage of the sales funnel to do that.

Marketers don’t have to choose between inbound and digital marketing because users can use both together. In fact, they work best together. A metric-based approach to inbound marketing ensures that each digital marketing channel contributes to achieving a specific goal, giving structure and purpose to digital marketing efforts.

Components of a digital marketing plan

1. Advertising

Ad units can be purchased for bids and displayed on blogs, forums, and other relevant websites on third-party sites, such as display ads on blogs, etc. Advertisements include images, text, pop-ups, banners, and videos. Almost every online marketing campaign includes retargeting. A browser cookie will be added to track new visitors to your website using retargeting. Users who visit another site can be served ads for your products and services. Advertising to interested customers will enable you to maximise your advertising budget.

2. Content marketing

Content marketing is a crucial strategy for attracting customers. Establishing thought leadership online can be achieved by regularly publishing high-quality, relevant content. It can be helpful for both educating target customers and boosting SEO rankings. Among the types of content, you can create blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, and other materials that your target audience will appreciate. Organic and paid efforts can then acquire customers through these digital content assets.

3. Email marketing

Marketing by email involves sending promotional messages to a segmented group of prospects or customers. Sending personalised messages that address customers’ needs and interests via email continues to be an effective marketing tool. Keeping top of mind for customers is the most popular use for e-commerce businesses.

4. Mobile marketing

Marketing via mobile devices occurs when products or services are explicitly marketed. For example, text message marketing or application marketing fall under this category. Optimising websites, landing pages, emails, and content for mobile devices is also part of a comprehensive mobile marketing strategy.

5. Paid search

By bidding on specific keywords, corporations can increase their search engine visibility and buy advertising space in the search engine results. Keywords you select will only appear in ads that people actively searching for them will see. Paid search advertising includes PPC and CPM. Pay-per-click advertising only charges you when someone clicks on your advert. Pay-per-impression advertising sets you for how many impressions your advert receives. Google Adwords is the most popular service in paid search advertising, but Bing and other search engines also offer paid options.

6. Programmatic advertising

It is a method of bidding on automated digital ads. As soon as a visitor clicks on an ad on a web page, that impression is auctioned off to competing advertisers. Programmatic advertising gives you full control over which sites your advertisements should appear and which category of people see them, allowing you to enhance your targeted campaigns.

7. Reputation marketing

A reputation marketing strategy aims to promote online positive reviews. Customer reviews can significantly impact their buying decisions and contribute considerably to your overall brand and product reputation. Customer reviews on online review sites are encouraged by digital reputation marketing strategies so that new customers can access them. In addition, companies can place ads on competitor profiles on many of these review sites and native advertising.

8. Search engine optimisation

The primary aim of search engine optimisation is to increase organic traffic to your website. Increasing visibility in search engines and improving rankings are some of the objectives of SEO. Managing digital marketing programs involves optimising various elements, including crosslinks, keywords, backlinks, and original content.

9. Social media marketing

Marketing through social media is a crucial element of digital marketing. Digital marketing managers can reach and interact with potential customers through social media platforms. Organic and paid marketing initiatives are often rolled into digital marketing campaigns on key social media channels to reach a broader audience and increase brand visibility.

10. Video marketing

Businesses can engage customers in a more visual, interactive manner by using video marketing. Besides offering educational content, you can also showcase special events and product launches. Popular video sharing sites include YouTube and Vimeo. In addition to pre-roll ads, digital marketers can use video platforms to reach their audiences.

11. Web analytics

Analytics enable marketing managers to monitor online user activity. Data collection and analysis are vital to digital marketing since they provide insight into the preferences and behaviour of online customers. Google Analytics is the world’s most commonly used tool for analysing website traffic.

12. Webinars

Online webinars allow companies to interact with their existing and potential customers no matter where they are. Presenting pertinent content – like product demonstrations or seminars – via webinars is an effective way to engage a targeted audience in real time. Through such direct engagement with your audience, your company can demonstrate its expertise in the subject matter. In addition, many companies use attendee lists in other marketing programs to generate more leads and enhance existing relationships.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

1. Low cost

Businesses have an enormous financial burden to bear regarding marketing and advertising. Even though big companies can afford to spend millions on marketing and advertising. However, small businesses may find this impossible or an unendurable nightmare. Instead of spending millions, digital marketing can be much more affordable. It creates the same level of impact at much lower costs. For example, it costs little to subscribe to an email marketing provider and send transactional or direct emails to thousands of your customers.

2. Huge return on investment

Return on investment is the essential factor for a business. A small investment in digital marketing can yield impressive results. Comparatively to traditional marketing techniques, email marketing and social media advertising are relatively inexpensive.

3. Easy to measure

Digital campaigns can easily be assessed for their success or failure. Unlike traditional methods, where you must wait weeks or months before evaluating the success of a campaign, with a digital campaign, you can find out almost instantly how an advertisement is performing. The performance of emails can be tracked through email marketing software. Users can find out how many emails were read, delivered, and conversion rates. A website or blog can use Google Analytics to measure specific goals.

4. Easy to adjust

A business can make informed decisions on how to proceed based on the performance of its advertisement. For example, ad campaigns that have performed well can be easily boosted by adding more money by clicking a button. Conversely, the best way to solve a problem with a non-performing advertisement is to adjust it appropriately or stop it entirely. Traditional marketing requires a lot of paperwork to be signed, and most agreements in conventional marketing are long-term or medium-term in nature. In other words, even if a campaign struggles to attract subscribers, they still have to wait until the period has expired.

5. Brand development

Building a brand and reputation for a business can be achieved using digital platforms. How a company can develop its brand include having a well-developed website, publishing quality articles on a blog, and establishing an interactive social media channel.

6. Easy to share

Campaigns and articles can usually be shared with multiple followers via digital marketing channels that offer sharing capabilities. Increasing sales results creates a multiplier effect.

7. Precise targeting

A traditional marketing approach uses the spray-and-pray method, in which an ad is spread across a significant number of platforms, hoping that a few people will reach out in response to what they see, hear, or read. As a result, digital campaigns can be targeted based on customer preferences or initial actions.

Conclusion

It’s not enough to excel at SEO, PPC, or social media because if these solutions aren’t combined into a process that generates, nurtures, and converts leads, results will often be less than ideal. With a proper digital marketing strategy by Expand My Business, your organisation will develop a flywheel approach to sales funnels based on a systematic digital marketing process. The flywheel generates results according to the law of compounding, which means it generates results for itself. Expand My Business with its pool of 500+ verified partner agencies and vendors has the expertise in not just offering digital marketing solutions but also managing and offering free tech consultancy services for your business needs. By choosing our services, you can stay at the top of your competitors and get your digital needs delivered at the best prices and timelines. 

Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.