Before we delve into other aspects of digital marketing, let’s quickly review the top eleven types of digital marketing channels:
- Website
The website is often the home to your digital marketing efforts. Brands and organizations use websites to host content while using other mediums to distribute it. Most of your digital marketing activities will link back to your website, where an action is expected to occur, and the conversions are tracked. For example, the download of a file, booking of a product or a service, and so on.
- Content Marketing
Content creation is the spine of your entire digital marketing strategy. Whether you’ve got a documented content marketing strategy or not, you’re creating content to inform, entertain, inspire, or persuade your buyers through other channels. Some of the most shared content formats include text (blog posts), videos, images, infographics, podcasts, slide decks, and ebooks.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO acts as a jetpack for your content marketing efforts. SEO consists of on-page and off-page activities to boost your website’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) for your preferred keywords. Earlier, SEO was primarily text-based, but in recent years voice search has gained prominence as well, which is why your SEO activities need to have a conversational approach.
- Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is an umbrella term for various online advertising strategies. The typical pricing/bidding strategies for digital advertising are cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-mille (CPM), i.e., per thousand impressions. Standard digital advertising formats are search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising, native advertising, social media advertising, and programmatic advertising.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is the process of maintaining a database of cold and warm contacts and sending them email alerts about your brand, products, and services. It is an effective channel to communicate with your audience on an ongoing basis. Email marketing helps build your subscriber base, onboard new customers, retain existing ones, promote discounts and offers, and distribute content.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing ensures you are present on the platforms your users are spending the most time on. These include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Instagram, where you can distribute content through organic and paid channels. Social media has also played a vital role in propagating video marketing and the ephemeral content wave. It enables two-way communication, and your fans and followers can interact with you on your content through likes, comments, direct messages, or by posting on your official pages.
- Affiliate Marketing
The concept of affiliate marketing is similar to commission-based sales. Organizations provide custom links to their affiliates. Affiliates earn a specific cut/commission every time someone buys through their custom link. Influence marketing could be considered a modern and evolved spin-off of affiliate marketing.
- Mobile Marketing
The number of smartphone users across the world is expected to grow to 3.5 billion in 2020. To bank on this opportunity, brands connect with their users on their smartphones through mobile apps, emails, mobile-friendly websites, and social media. By clicking with users on the go, brands have optimized their marketing strategies and sent timely messages.
- Online PR
Online Public Relations is a type of earned media. This is when a member of the press (journalist or online publication) mentions your brand through their stories, interviews, and so on. Product reviews by customers and bloggers, and Influencers mentioning your brand or products, whether paid or organic, also contribute to your online PR.
- Conversational AI
The rise of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have paved the way for more evolved marketing strategies such as conversational AI. As the adoption of voice search, chatbots, and digital assistants becomes prevalent, conversational AI becomes vital to digital marketing.
- Web Analytics
Web analytics is the practice of collecting, measuring, analyzing, and reporting data. This is commonly tracked through Google Analytics, but websites could also build their analytical tools. The data collected could be quantitative or qualitative. Web analytics helps marketers understand the sources of traffic, what’s working and what’s not, the return on investments (ROI), and how they can enhance their digital marketing efforts.