Last Updated: February 16, 2021
Online marketing, otherwise known as digital marketing, is a way to describe marketing that is done online. Since the rise of the internet it has become a central and standard way for businesses to promote their products and services due to the large audiences they are able to reach. Generally speaking, digital marketing is separated into two categories, paid and organic. Paid digital advertising is when a company pays to promote themselves online. Organic digital advertising is when a business promotes themselves online without paying for it.
Here are four of the most common types of digital marketing that businesses can consider when wanting to promote their products or services:
SEO marketing is one of the most important types of online marketing and is a strategy that every business should know of when they consider how to promote their products or services. This type of marketing falls into the category of organic marketing because it doesn’t cost money to utilize this. When a company uses search engine optimization they are simply trying to get their page or website to come up in search engines before other people’s when users search for keywords that match their business. Search engines often prioritize websites that have a combination of different factors, some of which being good titles, optimal loading speed, correct spelling, grammar, punctuation throughout the whole website, and new content. If a business optimizes their page to have all of these factors and has enough relevant data surrounding their business, they will likely start to come up more when people search things online. Any business can and should use search engine marketing tactics regardless of any other marketing strategies that they implement.
Search engine marketing is similar to search engine optimization, but it is essentially the paid version. Search engine marketing is the process of gaining visibility or traffic online through paid methods. This method is most commonly known through Google but is also used through other search engines such as Bing, YouTube, and other online platforms. Instead of optimizing your website and content to organically appear when people search for keywords related to your business, a business can pay a search engine to do this for them. When using search engine marketing a business would need to use a service in which they bid on specific keywords so that they will appear before other URLs that are related to them. Businesses should be aware of this useful method when they consider where to place money toward digital advertising.
Influencer marketing is a great way for businesses to promote their products or services and has increasingly gained popularity in recent years. Influencer marketing is the method of gaining traffic through the use of influential people promoting a given product or service. By definition, an influencer is someone who has a large online following. An example of an influencer could be a celebrity who has millions of people connected to their social media platforms to someone who has 50,000 to 100,000 followers on Instagram in a specific niche. The popularity of the influencer should be in line with the price range of what the business is prepared to spend for an advertisement. The idea is that a business can find an influencer who has a large following in a demographic and psychographic that fits the business target audience who they can promote the given products and services to. This can be a generally low cost way of reaching an audience who is likely to have a high rate of engagement with the digital advertisement.
Email marketing is a very popular type of digital marketing that businesses can use to build their relationships to their existing customers and to promote their products and services. A strategy that is helpful for any business is to create an email list of their new and existing customers to send emails to. There are ways to automatically schedule emails so that this process doesn’t have to be manual. Email marketing is also a good way to send out discounts, sales strategies, and overall brand messaging to potential customers.
These four strategies are the building blocks of online digital marketing. All businesses both small and large should understand these marketing strategies and implement them in ways that work for them. Each of these digital marketing tactics work, but the best results come to businesses that use all of them together.
