Digital marketing, also often called online marketing refers to a set of marketing activities and tools that marketers use in order to communicate a brands message to potential customers. Additionally, it provides businesses with means to closely engage with customers in ways that traditional marketing cannot do. It is especially great at exposing your brand to a larger audience while still being cost effective.
What are the types of digital marketing?
Content Marketing
In the digital age consumers’ attention is the new commodity that businesses compete for. Content marketing is a tool used to grab that attention and in doing so build brand awareness and gain consumer engagement through storytelling. This subsequently drives customers through the buyer journey as they connect with your business’ messaging.
At the forefront of a successful content marketing strategy lies what marketers call inbound marketing, which is a buyer-centric strategy aimed at helping potential customers find and engage with your company. Content marketing is often used in conjunction with social media campaigns to achieve the end goal of inbound marketing.
For more information on content marketing and the different types of content you can use in your strategy visit our blog – What is content marketing: The 4 types of content marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Ever heard the phrase “No one ever looks at the second page on Google”? Well Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims to get your business/website to rank higher on search engines such as Google, that means trying to get your site to show higher on the first page, and in turn have a better chance of getting traffic to your site.
To accomplish this, marketers do activities such as:
- Enabling content indexing – this gives search engines the ability to “read” what the content on your site is about
- Keyword research – is a term used to describe the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people use on search engines when looking for content that serves their search query, therefore doing keyword research can give you valuable insight on queries/search terms your target audience is looking for on Google
- Instilling good link structure on your site (this makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and find your content)
Pay Per Click Advertising (Paid Advertising)
Pay Per Click advertising simply put refers to paid advertising, it’s a means of driving traffic to your website by displaying your adverts online and “paying per click” to the publisher, the most popular form PPC is Google Adwords. Ad campaigns run through Google Adwords are found at the top of the search results page on Google’s search engine. How it works is that you bid on keywords relating to your ad and business in an auction against your competition.
How high your adverts rank on Google depends on multiple factors that Google calculates. These include the amount you bid on keywords, the quality of your ad (including expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), the competitiveness of the auction and the context of the search query.
Social Media Marketing
It is the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter etc. to promote your product or brand, it can be used as a great vehicle for your content marketing strategy. Additionally, Social media marketing allows you to not only engage with a large audience, but to also build trust with customers, share content they can engage with, understand your customers up close and also reach new customers. It gives you a platform to be close to your audience in ways traditional marketing could not.
The other types of digital marketing include:
- Email marketing
- Influencer / Affiliate Marketing
- Viral Marketing
- Mobile Advertising
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
- Your business being exposed to a potentially larger audience than traditional marketing and at a relatively lower cost. This helps build brand awareness
- It’s cost effective, when compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing costs far less and has a potential of producing higher returns depending on the quality of the digital marketing strategy that’s implemented
- Improved conversion rates – if you have a website, then your customers are always one click away from purchasing from your business or enquiring more information, as opposed to other means where customer have to leave their homes to visit your store
- It allows you to be able to swiftly engage with your existing customer as well as potential clients
- Trackable, measurable results. This is done through web analytics and online metric tools, this helps with being able to easily tell how well your active campaigns are performing
As technology continues to progress, more people are opting to interact with business online due to the ease and convenience it offers. As a business, big or small, I’d advice that you look at developing your digital marketing presence and take advantage of all the benefits that come with it
Author: Keneilwe Thipe