We walked through the previous blog the essentials you need to know before starting a digital marketing campaign. This time, we are taking it a little bit too far and talking about seven key areas or types of digital marketing that you need to comprehend to make the most out of this medium of marketing.
Social Media Marketing:
The most meaningful and most crucial area of digital marketing is social media marketing. Social media is not just a marketing tool anymore. It is evolving to represent the brand; how it thinks, talks and treats its customers. Your accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networking sites can either make or break your brand’s impression. A well-maintained social media account with content that adds value to its customers is a key to gain and retain them using the virtual medium. Social media advertising adds more to your arsenal. If your social media ad campaign is set to target the right audience with a good message, then it can do wonders.
Search Engine Marketing:
“ATM near me,” “Chinese restaurants in Andheri West,” “Best shoes for running,” “Best smartphone under 30000.”- Millions of searches like this take place on search engines every day. Approximately 92% of such searches take place on Google. Do you know how Google shows you the results when you search? It’s a mix of SEO (search engine optimisation) & SEM (search engine marketing). In layman’s language, SEM is a paid strategy to appear at the higher position in SERP (search engine result page), while SEO is a free and organic strategy. In SEO, you optimise your website with relevant content and strategic use of keywords, get backlinks and do hundreds of different things to rank your page better on Google. However, in SEM, you pay Google to show your ad content when someone searches a particular query. Such ads can be targeted to a specific location, devices, age group, and the list goes on. While SEO is a slow process, it is far more endurable. On the other hand, SEM is a quick process and gives you deep insights into how people react to your ads.
Influencers Marketing
You must have seen Virat Kohli promoting LPU on his social media just a few days ago. You would have noticed big accounts on social media, bloggers, Youtubers talking about specific products or services on their timelines. There is a good chance that such posts are part of the brand’s influencer marketing campaign. How does it work? So, an influencer is a person who is highly popular and credible among his audience. It can be an actor/actress, singer, sportsperson, doctor, businessman, YouTubers or an Instagrammer, or anyone who can influence public opinion. Influencer collaborations can be either paid or unpaid. In unpaid collabs, brands send products to influencers or ask them to experience their services and share them with their audience on the internet. In paid collabs, influencers are paid to talk about brands and their products or services. Influencer marketing helps in reaching a niche audience and instil trust in a brand in people’s minds. At times, influencer marketing might perform better than advertising.
Content Marketing
“Content is the King” is the most widely used phrase in the marketing world, and rightly so. Once you have your target audience and digital marketing goals set, content is the most important focus. The content can be targeted to build brand awareness or to connect better with your existing customers, or to communicate with your customers, stakeholders, and so on. Your content is a blog, a photo, a video, or anything that helps you convey your message effectively, so the receipt gets it as you want. High-quality content not just assists you to build your brand but it increases your chances of appearing more often and in a better position before your target audience.
Email Marketing:
This is probably one of the oldest forms of marketing but is still as effective today as a few years ago. Do you get emails from Amazon, Flipkart about deals or from Swiggy about your past orders and new offer benefits? Or you dropped your email address on some website and now keep getting emails from them. You can stay connected with your customers, readers, stakeholders and provide them with regular updates and deals of your brand. Dropping an email when you’re introducing new products or running limited period offers will result in a greater audience coming to your web store. Since emails are sent to particular people, they’re more likely to click on the message and take some action. However, buying an email database or shooting random or unnecessary emails doesn’t help any brand or harms the brand image.
Affiliate Marketing:
Have you seen short Amazon links in the video description of YouTubers? That’s what affiliate marketing is. You can consider it as a minor technical extension of influencers marketing. The brand generates a unique link or a code. These links are shared by influential creators or social media stars, or bloggers, or YouTubers, and you can track how many people landed on your website using that link. Once they purchase, you share a certain percentage of revenue with the platform or influencers who got you, customers. Your affiliate partner can be anyone who has an audience of your choice. It can be an individual or a website. Affiliate marketing can be understood as a revenue-sharing partnership. Unlike influencers marketing, you don’t pay to post about your brand, but you pay for every revenue you generate using their platforms.
Display Marketing:
This is a growing phenomenon in the digital marketing spectrum. With growing internet penetration and low data cost, people are responding better to display ads than to traditional ads and emails. The ads you see while playing a YouTube video or scrolling through Facebook and Instagram timelines or the ads you see when you visit some websites all are part of display marketing. Display marketing consists of ads, either image or video forms. Some display ads aim to increase the brand’s public outreach, while some are directed to make people buy products. Such ads can target a specific group of people who are more likely to interact with your message and be potential buyers of your brand. The success of display ads can be measured by ad insights such as reach or clicks, or conversions.
These seven most crucial areas or types of digital marketing are dominating the industry right now. As the world is becoming digital and marketing, a brand needs to know the scope and advantages while getting started with their online marketing strategy. We will study each of the digital marketing areas in upcoming blogs, which will provide knowledge and remove any doubts you might be having.
