If it wasn’t 100-percent true before the pandemic, it certainly is now: Businesses need to be online to survive. An astonishing 81 percent of consumers go online to research products and services before making a purchase, and connecting with consumers during this research stage is critical for converting them into customers. If your business hasn’t invested in digital marketing before, it needs to make a change in 2024.
However, not all business leaders know even the basics of digital marketing. To get you started on your digital marketing journey, here are the different types of digital marketing which you may need to engage with to see online success.
Types of digital marketing
Content Marketing
Content has been king of marketing strategies since long before the advent of the internet, so it should come as little surprise that content remains an incredibly important marketing strategy today. Content marketing involves generating and publishing uniquely valuable content that engages a particular audience. Content can come in all shapes, sizes and colors, from quick blog posts to extensive infographics to lecture series to white papers; the type of content you choose and its tone will depend greatly on your business’s marketing goals.
Perhaps the best aspect of content marketing is that you might be able to manage much of it in house with the expertise and effort of your existing staff — but you might still want to leverage the knowledge and skill of content marketers to ensure your content receives strong engagement from your audience.
Search Engine Optimization
The vast majority of web traffic flows through search engines, so business web pages need to rank highly in search results for businesses to engage and convert web users. When the internet was young, ranking highly was as simple as stuffing search keywords densely on web pages; now, optimizing web pages for search is slightly more complex.
SEO marketing involves improving the speed and accessibility of your website in addition to providing value to web users and building some degree of authority through a network of internal and external links. Widely recognized as the most technical of digital marketing strategies — while also being undeniably essential in the digital age — SEO is best tackled by trained experts.
Search Engine Marketing or Pay-per-click Marketing
At the top of almost every web search results page are a number of “sponsored” results, which are web pages that have paid the search engine for such a prominent position. Typically, search engine marketing follows a pay-per-click (PPC) system, in which businesses pay some predetermined amount for every click that web users make on their sponsored search results. Some industries have much higher PPC costs than others, so you may need to research whether PPC is the right marketing strategy for your business. There are plenty of known benefits to PPC, which you can discover if you make use of an experienced white label PPC team.
Social Media Marketing
Social networks are some of the most popular websites on the internet today, so it makes sense that businesses have gravitated toward social media sites as channels for digital marketing. All of the dominant social networks have tools to help businesses better engage their target audiences, like sponsored posts or demographics tracking as well as on-site stores that allow social media users to make purchases without navigating to another website.
Like content marketing, social media marketing can be achieved on a limited budget, but because the world of social media has become so complex, it is usually best to rely on experienced social media experts whenever possible.
Affiliate Marketing or Influencer Marketing
Building a following on social media is difficult, so instead of doing all that work for themselves, some businesses instead trade on the followings of established social media stars. Influencers are often paid by brands to talk about certain products or services to their fans and followers, who tend to trust their opinions and make purchasing decisions accordingly.
The key to successful affiliate or influencer marketing is partnering with influencers that share a majority of their audience with your business, which can be more difficult than you expect. Still, because the majority of influencers and affiliates will accept surprisingly small payment amounts, this digital marketing strategy is usually low-risk for small businesses.
It is well past time for your business to dip its toes into digital marketing. By starting with the strongest digital marketing strategies first, you are more likely to see a major return on your investment, allowing your business to survive and thrive in the years to come.
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