Any brand that wants to have a market presence needs to have an outreach program. Earlier, these outreach programs were mainly print advertisements, hoardings or TV commercials. However, internet penetration all over the world has gone up drastically in the last decade. In light of this, all brands have had to adopt digital marketing to an extent. With the advent of smartphones, this has become all the more important. Since everyone is connected all the time through their smartphones, digital marketing has become important. People are spending more and more time on their smartphones and thus brands need to be where their customers are. There are many types of digital marketing that brands can leverage to propagate their products or services .
Many people wonder what is digital marketing. All marketing over mobile devices, local SEO Services, websites or the internet comes under the banner of types of digital marketing. This kind of marketing is important as it allows brands to directly reach out to their customers. Brands with digital presence have an edge in the current scenario where there is cut-throat competition. The basic definition of digital marketing is absurdly simple to understand. However, just understanding what digital marketing is not enough to implement it. Proper implementation is needed for digital marketing to be successful. A lot of content is being put out by a lot of portals. This means that there is tons of content being generated and barely a handful of this content will be seen. Thus, digital marketing is the art of creating the right post. This post shows up at the right time and on the right screen.
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What are the types of digital marketing
Digital marketing is a broad theme that entails all marketing done digitally. However, a huge chunk of digital marketing is done through social media sites. This is because most people spend hours on social media every day. This makes it the best place for brands to reach out to prospective customers. It also allows brands to reach out and get more brand exposure. Even if brands are not looking to directly acquire customers through social media sites, they still maintain a presence. Digital marketing is set to be the best approach to marketing as of now since digitization has touched every part of our lives. One of the main advantages of digital marketing is that it allows outreach to people without maintaining a physical presence. Brands can advertise digitally without having to incur the costs of maintaining a physical presence.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is one of the popular types of digital marketing that is imperative in today’s world. It has become quite a buzzword but most people don’t understand the true meaning of this word. SEO ensures that your content or webpages are visible to viewers. Whenever you perform a Google search, you get to see only about 10 articles on the first page. You rarely even bother going to the second page. If you are putting up webpages or articles, you need to make sure your piece comes up after a search. Millions of articles are present at any given time on any topic. You need to ensure that your article comes up as a top search result when relevant keywords are searched for. This is precisely what SEO allows you to do.
SEO ensures that your article shows up on top when someone searches for something relevant to your article. Thus, SEO backlinks service allows you to do organic digital marketing. You don’t pay for views. You set your article the best way possible in terms of keywords and other metrics. After using all SEO techniques, your article is better positioned to come up as a top search result than others. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you over-optimize your article or stuff it with keywords. You need to tactfully place keywords that you think your customers might search for without making it seem unnatural. Then you need to optimize it so that people view your page upon searching for keywords relevant to your article. You can consult local SEO services, who are highly experienced in this field and know about the latest trends and can boost web traffic beyond expectations.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay per click or PPC is a good shortcut method which you can use instead of organic SEO. You need to pay to indulge in this form of advertising. First, you pick certain keywords that are relevant to your business. Then you try to acquire advertising space for those keywords. This is done through a bidding process and hence the bid amount is extremely relevant.
The format of your ad is another aspect that affects the success of your pay per click advertising. The extensions that you add also affect the efficiency of the advertisement. Expected clickthrough rate or CTR is another important factor that affects PPC. Now, all these factors together give your advertisement a rank. This rank is then compared with other competing advertisements. Out of all the advertisements competing for ad space, the one with the best rank gets placed. Customers will only get to see that advertisement and not the others.
Extensions are an important part of Pay Per Click Advertising. Extensions help in ranking your ad higher than the others. Search engines consider ads with extensions as more genuine and better, thus ranking them higher. Extensions also allow you to mobilize the customers who see your ad. You can use the call to action feature to get them in touch with you or direct them to a product or site. Moreover, you can use extensions to get customers on a call with you. This is one of the important types of digital marketing that has been rapidly picking up pace.
Social Media Marketing
People these days spend a lot of time on social media. With the widespread adoption of the use of smartphones, a lot of people are using social media on the go. It is only logical that brands start using social media for their marketing since that is where their customers are. Social Media Marketing is one of the types of digital marketing where brands leverage social media sites. Brands use social media sites like Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to post their ads. Directly posting ads is a good way to use social media since they will be viewed by your prospective customers.
The biggest advantage of Social Media Marketing is that you can single out your target audience. You can choose the age group, gender, region and other metrics while publishing your ad. Only people that fall under the metrics set by you will see the ad. In other forms of marketing, you publish a widespread ad for but you can’t single out your target audience. In such cases, you just throw out your brand and hope that more of your target audience gets to see it. You can even use social media for customer interactions.
Instead of just publishing ads, you can put out content relevant to your customers and interact with them. Simple and relatable posts surrounding the genre of your product will allow you to connect and interact with customers. This also helps in giving your brand a more customer-friendly image. Social media marketing is one of the hottest among the types of digital marketing and is surely here to stay.
Influencer Marketing
With the advent of social media, influencer marketing is one of the new types of digital marketing. Influencer marketing involves enlisting ‘influencers’ to promote your brand. Influencers are people who have a huge following on social media. Brands enlist such influencers to promote their products. Brands can ask influencers to directly post their ads on their social media accounts. More often than not, brands use a much more subtle way of branding. They as influencers to sport their products and talk about them. Some brands even ask influencers to write feedback about their products to get more outreach.
Smaller brands can effectively leverage influencer marketing for getting customers. They don’t need to enlist large influencers who charge a lot of money. Influencers with smaller but more loyal following will be able to help get small brands more customers. Out of all the types of digital marketing, smaller brands can leverage influencer marketing the best. Influencer marketing also allows brands to get constructive feedback from the followers of influencers. This allows them to tailor their product as per the popular demand. Influencer marketing is especially popular on social media apps like Instagram.
Influencer marketing allows you to associate your brand with the personal branding of influencers. Influencer marketing is not as simple as finding an influencer with many followers and paying them to promote your brand. You need to find the right influencer whose followers can become your customers. Hence, you need to take a look at an influencer’s personal branding carefully.
Public Relations
Public Relations is one amongst the important types of digital marketing channels. Brand promotion revolving around public relations is generally viewed as more reliable by people. Advertising is a paid endeavour by a company to reach out to people. Public Relations content is basically content put out by your former customers about your product or services. You can’t directly post on behalf of the public, but you can ask them to and give them incentives for it.
You can ask people who have used your product or services to rate them on online platforms. Customer reviews are the most effective type of content in public relations. You can ask your prospective customers to leave feedback about your product. You can offer them a discount or a usable coupon for leaving the review or feedback. This will give your customers an incentive to leave feedback without manipulating what feedback they leave. You can even get some of your most satisfied customers to write testimonials for you. These testimonials can be projected on your website for increasing the credibility of your brand.
Other prospective customers who read these reviews and feedback left by your existing customers will consider them more reliable. Real people are leaving reviews and hence they are viewed more favourably by the public. This is somewhat of an organic campaign that always benefits in the long run. You may not want public relations to be your primary digital marketing strategy. However, you should keep generating some public relations content over time as a secondary campaign. This will give your brand a much-needed value-addition and reliability which no other digital marketing technique can get. You can even choose some good public relations content from your available pool and then propagate it further.
Email Marketing
Email marketing was one of the first types of digital marketing that came into existence. Before the advent of social media, email had already become prevalent. The first step of getting into e-mail marketing is generating a list of email IDs to send the e-mails to. This list can comprise of your existing customers as well as prospective customers. You can collect the email IDs of existing customers when they purchase your products. For prospective customers, you can give them an incentive in the form of a discount for subscribing. Or you can give people the option to give you their e-mail IDs so that you can provide more information.
Once your mailing list is generated, it is now time to reach out to them. Make sure that your emails are visually attractive and not too frequent. Over email, don’t just talk about your products, frame them in a way that they have a take-away value. You can provide your customers with special discounts. You can send out newsletters. You can talk about general things revolving around the industry that your brand belongs to. You can use email marketing to conduct polls and interact with your customers. Email marketing is the best way to reach out to your existing customers and draw more business from them.
Final Thoughts
Digital marketing is slowly surpassing all conventional forms of marketing that have been dominant till now. Every brand that wishes to sustain in the near future needs to adopt digital marketing in some form. Moreover, the scope for digital marketing is increasing as people spend more and more time on handheld devices.
