Digital marketing can be broadly broken into 8 main categories including: Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-Click, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Marketing Analytics and Affiliate Marketing . In the past decade, digital marketing has become a vital component in an organization’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. Two academic team members from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) spoke about how digital marketing aligns with traditional tactics and shared information on some of the types of digital marketing in practice now.
What is Digital Marketing?
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Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. As a form of online marketing, it allows organizations to establish a brand identity and has revolutionized the marketing industry. A senior associate dean of business programs, Dr. Mark Hobson, said although digital marketing seems like a new world, in fact, it is based on many of the principles familiar to traditional marketers.
And requires both foundational marketing knowledge and technical know-how. Dr. Jessica Rogers, senior associate dean of business at SNHU, said the two disciplines serve to connect with distinct groups of consumers. “… Traditional media is a great way to reach a broad consumer base, whereas digital media has the ability to reach very specific audiences,” she said “A key point is that depending on the target audience, some channels are more effective than others.”
Types of Digital Marketing
Rogers talked about some of the most popular types of digital marketing, providing a brief overview of each:
Search Engine Optimization (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. According to leading SEO software company MO’s “Beginners Guide to SEO,” SEO 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. An SEO specialist can make around $70,999, according to Salary.com.
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 search engines and their 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, from Moz’s “Beginners Guide to SEO”:
- 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)
Pay-per-click 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. Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a page of search results, the ads you see while browsing the web, ads before YouTube videos and in ads in mobile apps.
One of the other things that differentiate pay-per-click from SEO is that you only pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google AdWords campaign, you will pay only when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You can spend just about any amount of money on pay-per-click advertising. Some companies may see results from investing just a few hundred dollars, but plenty of large companies spend tens of thousands a month on pay-per-click.
Search Results
How much it costs to run an ad or promote your search results will depend primarily on how much competition there is for your keywords. High competition keywords (i.e. keywords that many people are searching for and that many sites are trying to be found for) will be more expensive and lower competition terms will likely cost less.
When you set up a pay-per-click campaign, you will also be able to choose whether you want your ad or promoted results to be shown to users all over the world, or only within a specific geographic area. If you are marketing a brick-and-mortar business, this ability to tailor by location helps you not waste ad dollars serving ads to users who don’t live anywhere near your business, according to Google.
Social Media Marketing
This includes everything a business does via social media channels. Just about everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must approach social with an integrated and strategic approach. Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments.
To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.
Marketing Team
Social media marketers should not be in a silo separate from other marketing functions. Social marketers need to work with the company’s wider marketing team to coordinate their message across all platforms, online and off, so that every part of the brand is telling the same story.
A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Social media marketers must also be savvy at analyzing the performance of their posts and creating strategies based on that data. It’s important to measure how well your current social media posts are performing well before continuing to implement your new strategy.
Industry Professionals
Statista reports, 88% of industry professionals stated that an increase in exposure to their company was the leading benefit of social media marketing in 2021. Behind that 79% of companies claimed an increase in traffic to their website was the largest advantage. There are also several free options to spread your message that go beyond Instagram and Twitter. Some other options include Google My Business, eBay and Facebook Messenger and Marketplace.
In other words, social media marketing is a lot more complicated than managing your personal Facebook or Twitter profile. It requires a blend of creative thinking and objective, data-driven strategy, and maybe a great fit for professionals who enjoy blending these two disciplines. A social media analyst with a bachelor’s degree can earn about, according to Salary.com.
