The idea behind digital marketing is to use an online medium to connect with potential consumers and promote products and services. And to do that effectively, it is important that marketers gain an understanding of the various types of digital marketing techniques that they can incorporate. Let’s have a look at the commonly applied digital marketing methods that businesses can adopt to reach out to the audiences –
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Email marketing
One of the oldest tools for digital marketing, email marketing, as the name suggest, is to communicate with the target audience through emails. Email marketing is also one of the most effective types of digital marketing because it is a personalized and focused approach to marketing communication. The audiences willing to receive emails are interested already interested in the brand. They are either existing customers returning to the brand or potential customers with high chances of conversions. Email marketing is fairly cost-effective, a campaign’s performance is easily trackable, and most importantly, a digital marketing strategy that works for all businesses, big or small.
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Social media marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) refers to the marketing efforts businesses put to promote various social media platforms. SMM can be used for a number of different reasons – brand building, sales conversions, audience interactions, knowledge sharing and so on. Every platform has a set of fun tools that businesses can use to their advantage. Depending on their objectives for SMM, businesses have the option to experiment with various content formats too. But it is important that they understand the preference of their target audience and develop their SMM strategy accordingly. For this purpose, analytics provided by social media platforms come in handy, and it is important that businesses study the performance of their posts and campaigns and adapt their strategies to the needs and demands of the audiences.
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Affiliate marketing
A paid form advertising, affiliate marketing is a strategy where businesses collaborate with a third party to advertise their brand’s products or services. In the digital marketing space, affiliate marketing ranges from expert reviews to influencer partnerships. In an affiliate marketing program, the collaborator showcases the brand as the best fit for the audiences and encourages them to choose a brand over another. Affiliate marketing tactics are based on three frameworks – cost per click, pay per sale and cost per action, each of which is performance-based compensation models. While the primary purpose of affiliate marketing is to drive sales and generate online revenue, businesses can use this method of digital marketing to enhance visibility, grab audiences attention and improve brand awareness.
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Content marketing
Content marketing is a widely applied type of digital marketing used to appeal to and engage the audience. By sharing relevant, informative and consistent content with the audiences on online platforms, businesses intend to establish themselves as market experts and gain a leading edge in the field. However, the point to note is that content marketing doesn’t just mean utilizing the might of words but also creating attractive visuals to support them. So, everything from social media copies to search engine optimization (SEO) blogs to editorials fall under the spectrum of content marketing. To get this digital marketing strategy right, businesses need to identify their audiences, choose the right content format, and select the right platforms.
In order to operate and sustain in the internet-driven times, going digital with a marketing strategy is the call of the hour for businesses. While the concept of online marketing can further be divided into many subcategories, all of them function under the four types of digital marketing that we have mentioned above. Nonetheless, businesses should take an integrated approach to digital marketing and develop a combination that is customized to their marketing objectives.
