A Guide to Digital Marketing – Types, Benefits, Best Practices and Opportunities

Digital marketing is in trend and rightly so. If you want to generate more profits for your business there is no better way than promoting it online, and it can only happen through digital marketing. Gone are the days when offline business was enough to make your business earn value and ROI. Today, if you are not online, you are probably missing out on a lot of potential customers.

In this article we will give a comprehensive knowledge on what digital marketing is, its different types, benefits, the best practices to ensure you get the desired output, opportunities to grow your business and a lot more.

Here we will also list down some of the evergreen digital marketing success stories to inspire you.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing or online marketing is a renowned marketing approach that uses the internet to reach out to a larger audience through different popular digital platforms.

Online marketing has allowed brands to stay relevant by promoting their services and offerings through different channels and touchpoints. The traditional marketing channels like television, hoardings, billboards, and newspapers are expensive. On the contrary, the digital marketing channels can guide prospects through their buying journey and stay connected with the existing customers.

Did you know? According to Pew Research Centre, 3 quarters of Americans go online daily. Not just that, 43% go on more than once a day and 26% are online almost constantly. As a digital marketer, it is important to take advantage of the digital world with an online advertising presence, by building a brand, and providing a great customer experience with a digital strategy.

Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today—it has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.’” – Sanjay Dholakia, Former Chief Marketing Officer, Marketo

Digital marketing is a most cost-effective solution and offers you unique opportunities to ensure you’re getting the most of your investment.

Different Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing comprises of many services that can help brands build a stronger online presence. Here are the major types of digital marketing services. Take a look.

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – One of the most important types of digital marketing, SEO consists of both on—page and off-page activities. It is a marketing process to help a website or a content piece rank higher on Google and other search engines. The main difference between paid marketing and SEO is that SEO is organic, which means you don’t have to pay money to get rank. The results are slow, but rankings achieved through SEO are permanent, if you continue to deliver according to search engine algorithm. Fresh flow of quality content is primary requirement for better ranking and quality traffic.On-page SEO is about creating content to improve your website ranking. This involves including keywords into your pages and content, writing high-quality and information-rich content regularly, ensure your meta content is keyword-rich and well-written, among everything else. Remember, ‘Content is King.’

    Off-page SEO includes earning relevant backlinks. This involves building relationships and creating content people want to share. Yes, it is a time-consuming task, but this is integral to SEO success.

  • Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Social media marketing is more than just having social media accounts of your company. It is far beyond simply creating posts for social platforms and replying to comments. Brands must have a comprehensive social media strategy that’s compelling and interesting.Social media marketing means driving traffic, increasing brand awareness, and generating quality leads by engaging people in relevant online discussions. Did you know? 81% of people use Instagram to research products and services.

    The most popular social media channels which brands use for marketing their products and services are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, LinkedIn and YouTube.A successful social media marketing strategy means you should map all your content with specific goals to kick off your social media campaigns. As a brand you should:

  • Create diverse content.
  • Stay consistent.
  • Participate and engage with your audience.
  • Use content creation tools to make your posts attractive and consistent.
  • Repurpose, repost, and recycle your content.
  • Curate your own feed.
  • Measure success with analytics.
  • Harness the power of social media ads.
  • Content Marketing  Content marketing is all about storytelling. Audience’s attention will always go to those who tell great stories. So, as a brand you should master this art to attract customers by creating high-quality content that is relevant to them on a consistent basis.In simple terms, content marketing is a process of attracting, engaging with, and delighting your target markets. By creating an effective content marketing strategy, you can increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, establish yourself as an industry leader, and more.There are various types of content marketing that brands can incorporate in their strategy:
  • Social media content marketing
  • Podcast content marketing
  • Blog content marketing
  • Paid ad content marketing
  • Video content marketing
  • Infographic content marketing
  • Paid Advertising – One of the quickest ways to help prospective customers find and engage with your brand and offerings. In this form of digital marketing, you buy advertising that allows you to specifically target audiences, instead of waiting for them to find you organically.When creating paid marketing ads, you should choose a channel – Google Ads of Facebook, define the target audience depending on criteria ranging from location, search terms, interests, demographics, past purchases, and other parameters.There are different types of paid advertising that you use for lead generation or brand awareness. Here are a few of them:

 

  • Search Engine Advertising (or SEM) – this includes PPC ads, organic search results.
  • Social Media Advertising – This includes running ads of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, even Twitter.
  • Display Ads – often referred as banner ads, these ads are displayed to your target audience when they are surfing the internet. Displays ads are generally pay-per-click.
  • Retargeting and remarketing – This can be done via Google, Instagram, Facebook, and other third-party ad platforms.
  • Native Advertising – It is a type of ad that means the ad design and experience of interacting with it compliments the platform it is placed upon.
  • Video Ads and OTT ads – With more audience preferring OTT, YouTube and other streaming platforms over TV shows, big brands no longer need to put a huge amount on TV commercials. This is economical and scalable.
  • Podcast Advertising – In this type of ads the targeting is very specific; the scope is huge and growing by the second. Just like OTT, you can approach third-party providers who will distribute your ads to a network of podcasts based on their target group and listenership parameters.  This is new and most exciting type of ad, where it provides topic and audience-based targeting opportunities.

 

  • Affiliate Marketing – It is a performance-based advertising model. In this type of advertising, you promote other people’s product or service in exchange of a small commission for each sale.

There are different marketing avenues that affiliates may leverage like:

  • Influencers
  • Email lists
  • Large media websites
  • Bloggers
  • Paid search focused microsites

 

  • Email Marketing – Despite the rise of social media, mobile apps and other modern marketing channels, email is still one of the most effective digital marketing techniques. According to Sendinblue, 62% of consumers ranked email in their top preferred communication channels with small businesses.The email can be promotional, informational or serve a specific purpose in the buyer journey. It is a great way to keep your existing and prospective customers updated about your products and services, exciting offers, upcoming events, important announcements, promote content, etc.

A well-thought email marketing strategy can help brands achieve three key objectives of any business:

  • Brand awareness
  • Conversions
  • Customer Loyalty
  • Conversational AI – The emergence and popularity of technologies like AI and ML have carved way for more evolved marketing strategies like Conversational AI. Brands are adopting voice search, chatbots and digital assistants to interact with customers in a more engaging way.Conversational AI-powered chatbots can help companies answer customer queries instantly, automate customer outreach, and deliver personalized content.

Businesses are using conversational AI for:

  • Lead generation
  • Customer engagement
  • Social media outreach
  • Customer data analysis
  • Sending personalized emails

 

  • Online PR – Through this marketing model brands can get paid online coverage with blogs, content-based websites, and digital publications. Of course, it is like traditional PR but in an online space. Brands can maximize their returns on online PR through:
  • Reporter outreach via social media.
  • Replying to online reviews of your company.
  • Responding to comments on your website or blog.Not just through PR agencies or news articles, product or service review by customers, brand mentions by influencers and bloggers etc. are also categorized into online PR.

 

  • Mobile Marketing – Mobile marketing is a multi-channel digital marketing strategy to reach the target audience on their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices via email, SMS, social media, and apps.This type of marketing aims to reach the audience of mobile users via push notifications, mobile-optimized ads, and mobile apps. There are various types of mobile marketing that brands can leverage to promote their offerings:
  • App-based marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • SMS
  • Mobile search ads
  • Location-based marketing

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has changed the face of marketing. While traditional marketing channels and techniques allowed brands to reach masses, there were no ways to track visibility, traffic, impressions, user sentiments, ROI, and a lot more.

Data is very important in marketing to decide your present as well future course of action for better results. Traditional marketing lacks this.

Below are some of the advantages of digital marketing that your brand can get if you partner with the right digital marketing company.

  • Cost-effective – Traditional marketing techniques were expensive. Earlier it required huge budget to promote your business via TV commercials. But through online mediums the same budget can be allocated to multiple avenues to get even better results.
  • Data-driven – Today due to data, companies can know whether their strategies are working, and when is the right time to modify their plan to cater to the continuously changing needs and demands of the target audience. This saves both time and money.
  • Precision targeting – Digital marketing is customized; its not one-size-fits-all. The strategies are created based on the specific needs and requirements of the target audience.
  • Wider reach – Digital marketing allows people sitting in one corner to reach people sitting in another corner of the world easily in comparatively less investment.
  • Multiple targeting – With the increased usage of smartphones and internet-savvy customers, marketers can classify buyers into different segments based on their journey in purchasing a product or service. It allows customers to target different buyer personas and engage them uniquely. For instance, customers in the awareness stage could be targeted through blogs posts or YouTube videos and those in consideration stage can be targeted through email marketing.
  • Direct engagement and interaction with the target audience – Marketers can engage directly with their customers through social media pages and address their queries and concerns avoid confusion and misunderstandings. This helps brand give their communication a human touch and create a positive online image of themselves.
  • Device-specific targeting – Marketers can divide the target group depending on the device they use to access the internet. Diverse targeting makes engagement specific and improves conversion.

Best Practices of Digital Marketing

We are listing down the top four digital marketing best practices to help you win in 2022.

  1. Leverage AI (conversational AI like digital assistants and chatbots) in digital marketing because it helps brands to reach out to their target customers with precision and humanize the conversations/interactions.
  2. Email marketing is essential because it is relatively inexpensive, effective, and result oriented.
  3.  Focus on video marketing more because they make it easy to comprehend complex information and increases engagement when presented in a storytelling form.
  4. Creating content in multiple formats to cater to the diverse customer’s taste. Explore text, podcasts, infographics, videos, gated content, power point presentations and much more to support your goals and achieve it successfully.

Opportunities

By applying digital marketing strategies companies can attract several opportunities to grow their business and earn ROI.

By adopting online marketing, brands can:

  • Minimize their marketing costs
  • Get real-time results
  • Help you give better exposure of your brand to new customers
  • Get higher engagement

Digital Marketing Success Stories

Some brands have made it big using various digital marketing avenues. Listed below are the six evergreen digital marketing success stories. Do search and read about them on the internet.

  1. Grammarly Email Marketing
  2. Dominos Creative Digital Marketing Campaigns
  3. Wendy’s Social Media Marketing
  4. Dollar Shave Club Viral Video Marketing
  5. Traveller Collective Social Media Marketing
  6. Gary Vaynerchuk Video Marketing