7 Types of Digital Marketing And How These Can Evolve Your Strategy

Digital marketing can be broadly segmented into 7 main categories these include: Search Engine Optimisation, Pay-per-Click, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing and Affiliate Marketing. In the past decade, digital marketing has become an important component in a company's overall marketing strategy. It allows companies to tailor messages to reach a specific audience, making it possible to market directly to people who are likely to be interested in their product.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. As a form of online marketing, it allows organisations to establish a brand identity and has revolutionised the marketing industry. It requires both foundational marketing knowledge and technical know-how. Digital media has the ability to reach very specific audiences and depending on the target audience, some channels are more effective than others.

Below is a brief overview of the different types of marketing and their importance in the current marketing landscape.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website. To accomplish this, SEO marketers research words and phrases consumers are using to search for information online, and use those terms in their own content. This encompasses many elements, from the words on your web pages to the way other sites link to you on the web to how your website is structured. So, what are some things that can improve a site’s SEO? It’s important to understand that one of the things that makes SEO challenging is that the answer to this question always depends on Google and its most current algorithm. Keeping that in mind, here are a few of the most important things for SEO strategists and marketers in general to understand about how SEO works today. 

Content indexing – It is important to allow search engines to clearly “read” what your site content is, by doing things like adding alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio content.

Good link structure – It is important that search engines can “crawl” your site structure to easily find all the content on your site. There are many things that an SEO specialist can do to properly format links, URLs, and sitemaps to make them most accessible to site crawlers.

Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords – i.e. the search terms you want your site to be found for—in your content and headers is one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO. It is no longer good practice to “stuff” your content with as many keywords and keyword variations as possible. Writing high-quality content that uses keywords in the headers and a few times in the crawl-able page content is now considered better practice, and will make pages rank better in search results.

Pay-per-Click (PPC)

PPC refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online. Another aspect that differentiate pay-per-click from SEO is that you only pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google Ads campaign, you will pay only when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You can spend any amount of money on PPC advertising. Some companies may see results from investing just a few hundred Rand, but many large companies spend tens of thousands a month on PPC.

Social Media Marketing

This includes everything a business does on social media channels. Almost everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must approach social with a strategic approach. Social media marketing goes beyond creating posts for social channels and responding to comments. To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. Consumers will quickly realise if there is no real person behind the posts.

A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Marketers must also be savvy at analysing the performance of their posts and creating strategies based on that data. Moreover marketers need to be consistently measuring and tracking their campaigns because this data allows them to demonstrate a particular campaign's return on investment and whether it provided any value to the company. In other words, social media marketing is a lot more complicated than managing a personal Facebook or Twitter profile. It requires a blend of creative thinking and objective, data-driven strategy.

Content Marketing

Content marketing uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand awareness. Ultimately, the goal is to have the reader take an action towards becoming a customer, such as requesting more information, signing up for an email list, or making a purchase. “Content” can mean blog posts, resources like white papers and e-books, digital video, podcasts, and much more. In general, it should first and foremost provide value to the consumer, not just advertise the brand or try to make a sale. Content marketing is about building a sustainable, trusting relationship with your customers that can potentially lead to sales over time.

Content marketing works in conjunction with other types of digital marketing. It is a way to incorporate SEO search terms into fresh website content, and the content created can be shared as social media posts and in email marketing. Looking at the analytics for your content marketing can tell you a lot about your customers such as; what are they looking for when they land on your site? What kinds of content make them stay on the site longer? What kinds make them lose interest and navigate away? Content marketing is a long-term strategy. Over time, marketers build up a library of content that will continue to bring users to the site via search engines. 

Email Marketing

Even with the emergence of social media, mobile applications and other channels, email is still one of the most effective marketing techniques. It can be part of a content marketing strategy, providing value to consumers and over time convert an audience into customers. Email marketing software can offer many different analytical measures, but two that marketers are always striving to improve are the open rate –the percentage of recipients who opened the email – and the click through rate – the number of recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email. There are many things marketers can do to make their emails more appealing to users and more likely to be opened. These include:

Create a Sense of Urgency – Writing email copy that lets your recipients know that time is running out to get a special deal or there are only a limited number of the product in stock. 

Personalise Your Email – Setting your emails and subject lines up to incorporate the recipient’s name is a proven way to increase open and click through rates. 

Let Recipients Set Their Preferences – Allowing users to specify how often they want to hear from you can help keep some of your email subscribers subscribed to your list and clicking on your emails.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email and mobile applications. Marketers can tailor offers or special content to a geographic location or time, such as when a customer walks into a store or enters an event. Marketers know that you need to take your message to where your customers are, and it is very clear: your potential customers are on their phones.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing utilises the ever-growing popularity of industry experts and social media influencers. In working with these third-party’s, your organisation will collaborate to promote your products or services for compensation. Influencers will engage their audience with posts, blogs, or videos to try create new leads for your business. Within the last few years affiliate, or influencer marketing has grown immensely with new media like TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and blogs being a mainstream form of entertainment and news.

Since digital marketing is a rapidly changing space, it is imperative for companies to stay up to date on new and emerging strategies. At Go Ninja our team of dedicated professionals are constantly staying in the loop and are passionate about incorporating the necessary marketing channels into your strategy.