6 Types of Digital Marketing and how to use them in your day-to-day Strategy

Every individual at some point in their life has an urge to start their own business, resulting in the emergence of a ‘Start-Up’ culture in India.  Due to this, both modern-day and traditional businesses are looking at digital marketing as an alternative marketing tool, which has increased the demand for skilled digital marketers in the market. But have you ever thought, what makes some businesses reach the masses, and become big and successful, while others remain a ‘Good Idea’ and fail to kick off? It’s types of Digital Marketing that makes or breaks the businesses.

We all know that marketing is a process to create awareness about a product or service. But in today’s scenario, simply creating awareness via traditional marketing practices will not work out. At present, it is important that businesses should engage its customers to become successful and this is only possible via. We would focus on two things in this blog. First, we will try to understand the meaning of Digital Marketing, by addressing questions like ‘What is Digital Marketing?’. Then we would understand the different types of digital marketing strategies one can use to improve the website performance. So, let’s start.

First thing first, what is Digital Marketing?

Many people think that digital marketing is new and very complex. They think that to learn and master digital marketing, they must know computer coding. This is a misconception. Let me first clarify that to be a digital marketer, coding language is not mandatory. All you need is basic marketing sense, which I think is a common trait.

Digital marketing has many definitions, but the one which best defines it is by “Hubspot” on its blog—

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and their websites to connect with current and prospective customers.’

In simple terms, Digital Marketing is ‘Data-Driven Marketing’, as this is the only platform which helps marketers to monitor their marketing strategies and continuously measure their marketing efforts. In traditional marketing, we can reach a mass audience but can’t monitor or measure the effectiveness of the advertisement. For example, if I put a newspaper ad, my ad can be seen by all those people who read that newspaper (mass reach), but I cannot monitor or measure how many of those readers purchased my product or services after seeing the advertisement.

But on the other hand, if I run the same advertisement on that newspaper’s website via display ads, a type of digital marketing campaign, not only can I monitor my advertisement’s performance with the help of factual data points, but also control my audience reach through various targeting methods. Like I can check how many people saw my ad (Impression), how many clicked on it (Clicks), and how many purchased my products or services (Conversion), via that ad which can help me analyze the effectiveness of my Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign and that’s why digital marketing is gaining acceptability in the industry.

Now the question that comes to our mind is how to do digital marketing for any business, brand or individual personalities? We need to first understand the different types of digital marketing strategies that exist before we initiate ours.

There are mainly two types of digital marketing strategies that exist:

1. Bring Traffic to the website/App/Social Profiles, or
2. Monetize the traffic and increase business revenue.

The entire digital marketing revolves around these two objectives. This is where you should start your digital marketing campaign from. First, identify your main goal or objective with the help of digital marketing. Then plan accordingly.

Once you have identified the overall objective—let’s assume that it is increasing the website traffic—then you need to understand the different types of digital marketing channels that can help to increase website traffic. Broadly there are two ways – either you bring traffic via organic methods, or via paid methods. Organic traffic is when a user is searching with a query on the search engine or social media platforms and your website results show up naturally, depicting the search.

Paid traffic refers to bringing website traffic by running ads on a search engine and social media platform. Paid traffic has two types of digital marketing strategies, namely, Pull Strategy and Push Strategy. In Pull Strategy, we show our website ads when the user is looking for information, example, showing search ads when the user is searching with a query or a keyword. Whereas in the Push Strategy, we show our website’s ad to inform the user about our products/services, for instance, the social media ads or display ads.

Now let’s understand the different types of digital marketing campaign one can use to increase the website traffic:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is the most powerful and sustainable way to have a website. Why do you think is this so? The answer is because it is Organic Traffic. SEO is an art of optimizing your website content for a certain set of keywords. SEO can also help in optimizing the content for Voice Search, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and Backlinks. For example, I searched on Google, ‘digital marketing training’ and EduPristine’s digital marketing page shows up naturally on Google’s first page. Across the globe, 80% of the website traffic clicks on the organic results compare to the paid results and that is why SEO plays an important role in increasing the website traffic. There are mainly two types of digital marketing activities that need to be taken care of in the SEO’s ‘On Page’ and ‘Off Page’ factors. The former refers to all the measures we take within the website or web pages, whereas the latter refers to building links and external signals for the website or webpage. Both play an equally important role in optimizing the website content, and the SEO normally takes 90–180 days to show the desired results.

• Google Ads (PPC): Apart from bringing traffic via organic means, we can also drive website traffic via paid ads, and the best way to do this is via Google Ads—commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC). Bringing traffic via paid ads is easy but is not free. It is a costly affair and requires proper planning and budgeting. One can show his/her website ad on multiple places, like on search engine results page, on others’ website (commonly known as ), or on the Mobile APP or on the YouTube channel also. Let’s look at an example to understand better. When I searched for ‘digital marketing training’ I not only saw the EduPristine’s organic result, but I also saw the search ad on the same page.

• Social Media Marketing: As we all know that social media platforms are used by masses, irrespective of the demographic, it has become the marketer’s favourite avenue to build awareness about their product/services and bring traffic to their web properties. And that’s why, apart from using SEO and Google Ads to increase website traffic, social media also plays an important role in building awareness for your website. Social media helps in brand awareness and in engaging with your customer. Social media platform is the only platform that allows our prospective customers to react to our content, ads, or post in the form of ‘Like, Comment, or Share’, which helps you as a marketer to understand what type of digital marketing campaign you should focus on and what you should not.

There are mainly two types of digital marketing strategies being used while executing a social media plan. First is the Organic approach, like Creating business pages, regular posting, sharing regular updates, etc.

Then, you should consider paid campaigns as well reach the larger audience. Some of the popular social media paid campaigns include ads on Facebook, Quora, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Therefore, it is important that one should include both Organic and Paid campaign in their social media plan, instead of focusing only on ‘Organic Only’ and ‘Paid only’.

• Email and Mobile Marketing: This is also a type of digital marketing channel used to market product and services and bring quality website traffic. Email marketing is commonly used for lead generation and sending personalized, and as promotional messages to our target audience. We can use various email marketing tools (both paid and free) to send such communication. This tool comes very handy in the creation of landing pages or leads capturing forms, thus making our communication very effective and measurable. But when we are focused on reaching our audience on mobile devices, we must rely on Mobile Marketing and Optimization. Under mobile marketing, we can design multiple types of digital marketing activities, ranging from SMS campaign, push notification, and In-App Ads to running paid ad campaigns to urge target users to download your mobile app. It is a mandatory requisite in our marketing mix in today’s mobile-dominated world.

• Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing has become one of the main sources of driving revenue for all the bloggers. The main concept of affiliate marketing is that you sell other’s products on your website and help them increase the sales. In return, you are entitled to a commission amount. All big and small e-commerce companies allow the enrolment to their affiliate marketing program on their websites. For bloggers and YouTubers, this is one main form of monetization technique as setting up an e-commerce company is not feasible for everyone; but becoming an Affiliate marketer is the best way to fulfil your dream of selling online.

• Content Marketing: Now that we know digital marketing helps businesses in reaching out to the new customers and generate revenue growth, therefore it is important that we build a practice of not promoting our products or services directly to our customer. We should work on providing truly relevant and valuable content to our prospects and customers to help them move down the marketing funnel and convert visitors into customers.

As I told you guys that the major role of any digital marketer is to bring quality traffic to their website and help businesses in generating revenue. And the blog above mentions different types of digital marketing campaigns to help achieve the objective. It is very important that we use all the types of digital marketing channels to bring traffic, like SEO, PPC, Social Media, Email Marketing, and Mobile marketing; instead of focusing on any one of these. I have seen many clients who focus only on PPC Ads or Social media, but not on optimizing the website content for a search engine. This is not a good digital marketing strategy. Once your website starts receiving the good traffic, you should start using the advanced digital marketing concepts like Marketing Automation, Funnel Marketing, Content Marketing, and CRO to fine tune the different types of digital marketing campaigns and process for better results.

Conclusion:

Remember one thing, content that answers users’ query is the content that ranks high on search engines. But a lot of people ask me what do we mean by content. My answer to them is very simple, Content can be classified into three categories—Content can be a ‘text’, ‘image’, or ‘video’. It can also be a mix of these three elements. So, one should focus on generating good quality content, which your user would find useful. This would help you to build trust and gain a dominant position.