You know you have a fantastic product that your customers love, a killer website to attract and convert your target audience, and a collection of thumb-stopping social media posts. But why aren’t sales — or even inquiries— coming in?

A common misconception among many entrepreneurs, especially those new to digital marketing, is that having a website and social media pages automatically results in sales. While these things are essential to establishing your online presence, there’s more to digital marketing than simply setting up your website and social media pages.

How can you make your pages stand out when there are millions of websites and social media pages accessible to your target market with just a few taps and clicks? How can you turn online visitors into sales? Most importantly, how can you keep your customers loyal to your brand?

These are just some of our clients’ questions about starting and having a successful digital marketing strategy.

Today, you’ll learn everything you need to know about it, including the types of digital marketing you could do for your business.

What is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a general term for all marketing efforts done online to promote a brand, product, or service. It includes creating marketing collaterals such as online advertisements, digital brochures, web pages, videos, photos, and social media posts. It also encompasses all marketing channels like your website, email, community forums and groups, social media pages, and search engines.

The key to an effective digital marketing strategy is knowing the channels where most of your customers are and how they consume digital content. With this knowledge, you’d be able to offer content that is eye-catching and relevant to your target audience.

Another aspect of digital marketing is planning how your target audience would interact with your content. How would your content offer value to your customers? It’s also essential to determine how your content would look on various devices, such as computers, smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets.

Why? Most often than not, your target customer’s first online interaction with your brand would be from your online marketing collaterals. You’d want them to have a fantastic first impression of you so you could move them along their buyer’s journey — or the stages a person goes through from being a prospect to becoming a customer.

Now that you have an overview of online marketing, it’s time to find out the different types of digital marketing and how they support your overall marketing goals.

Types of Digital Marketing

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
   Search Engine Marketing is the umbrella term that refers to efforts relating to getting traffic and leads from search engines, both organically and through paid advertising.
   • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is a type of online marketing where you set up your website in such a way that it would rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) by incorporating relevant keywords. Keywords are terms and phrases that are commonly used by your target audience when looking for products and services that you offer. The goal is to rank as high as possible on SERPs to attract high-quality leads.
   • Pay-per-click (PPC) ads – PPC is a type of search advertising where you pay a fee every time someone clicks your ad. With PPC, your brand could appear at the top of SERPs and other prominent sections of a webpage. Google ads are a popular example of PPC ads. Depending on your business needs, you could choose to create local service ads, responsive ads, or text ads.
2. Content Marketing
   This type of online marketing is where you create and promote various digital assets to increase brand awareness, engage with prospects and customers, drive traffic, and generate sales. Depending on the types of digital marketing you plan to have, you may include the following in your content mix:
   • Blogs
   • Case studies
   • Ebooks
   • Whitepapers
   • Infographics
   • Podcasts
   • Videos and images
3. Email Marketing
   One of the most popular types of online marketing, email marketing is often used to direct prospects and customers to your website. It is also used to promote discounts or events and keep your audience in the loop of any updates about your company.
4. Social Media Marketing
   This type of online marketing leverages the popularity of various social media platforms to increase your audience reach, brand awareness, and customer engagement. In recent years, social media has also become a shopping platform where businesses can link their product catalogs so users can conveniently shop and checkout.
5. Affiliate Marketing
   With this type of digital marketing, websites or content creators receive a commission from your business whenever you make a sale as a result of their promotions. You could track sales by giving them unique affiliate links that they could promote to their online network or websites.
6. Online Public Relations
   Similar to traditional PR, online public relations help boost brand awareness and trust through online press releases by trusted media outlets, product/service reviews, and community engagement through forums and comments on blogs or social media posts.
7. Sponsored Content
   This is a type of online marketing where you pay a content creator or company to create content around your product and services and mention you within the post. Examples of sponsored content are feature articles on online magazines and blogs.
8. Influencer Marketing
   Like sponsored content, influencer marketing makes the most of social media users’ reach, popularity, and “influence” of social media users. These users create posts, images, reels, stories, and other types of content on social media to promote your brand.
9. Native Advertising
   Most ads that you see on social media are typically native ads. In this kind of advertising, ads appear together with non-paid content.
10. Instant Messaging Advertising
    This is a relatively new approach to online advertising. Instant messaging ads encourage your target customer to start a conversation with you. Because the ads are served within a messaging platform, your prospects could conveniently reach out to you with just a few taps or clicks.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

Did you know that as of April 2022, there are approximately 5 billion internet users worldwide, with 4.65 billion of them also active on various social media platforms? That’s about 63% of the entire global population.

Imagine all the opportunities you’re missing if your brand isn’t leveraging on digital marketing to grow your business.

With the various types of digital marketing, you could:

• Increase brand awareness – The internet and social media have made the world smaller. You could easily expand your reach and introduce your brand to more people.
• Level the playing field in your industry – It doesn’t matter whether you’re competing with a big brand. What matters is how well you know your target audience and execute your online marketing strategy.
• Create highly targeted campaigns – Unlike in traditional marketing where you have no control over who engages with your marketing collaterals, digital marketing lets you focus your efforts on market segments that could give you better results.
• Engage with prospects at all stages of the buyer’s journey – Digital marketing has revolutionized the way businesses and consumers interact with each other. Traditionally, brands could engage with their prospects in-store or through their hotline. You now have more communication channels and could even engage prospects 24/7 through automated messaging and AI bots.
• Measure the success of your campaign beyond sales – Digital marketing analytics offer more insights into your campaign than just letting you know how many deals you got from your efforts. More metrics also mean you can get a full picture of your ideal customer — allowing you to tweak your strategies for better results.

Whether you’re a small business or a global brand, you can easily integrate digital marketing into your business strategies as it offers various ways and techniques that could help you reach your goals. Additionally, digital marketing allows you to be as creative as you want and maximize your budget while getting high ROI.

Digital Marketing Stats 2022

Still not convinced that digital marketing could be the missing piece to your business strategy? Here are the latest statistics worth looking into.

Online Advertising

• In video advertising, 94% of internet users prefer to watch explainer videos, and 84% of them were convinced to make a purchase.
• According to viewers, they’re more likely to purchase a product when they see it on YouTube and prefer the video-sharing website for researching product/service information.
• Photo and images could get the highest audience engagement

Lead Generation

• 53% of marketers say webinars offer the highest quality leads
• For early-stage lead generation, 53% of marketers prefer email marketing
• 80% of companies that use marketing automation saw an uptick in their lead generation

Email Marketing

• Research shows that email marketing is the second most effective strategy for improving brand awareness.
• Email marketing is the most effective type of digital marketing for small businesses that offers the highest ROI.
• The average email click-through rate across all industries is 2.69%

Social Media Marketing

• The most popular social media platforms across the globe are Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsapp.
• 83% of Instagram users use the platform to decide whether to purchase a product/service or not.
• 97% of Gen Z use social media for their purchase decisions.

Content Marketing

• 53% of marketers think blogging is an effective digital marketing strategy, while 10% say it generates the highest ROI.
• For 40% of marketers, content marketing is essential to their marketing plan.
• 87% of marketers using video marketing says it has increased traffic to their websites.

How to Know If You Should Invest in Digital Marketing?

When creating an online marketing plan for your target audience, it’s essential to know the nuances in their purchasing and decision-making behavior. This will allow you to choose the right types of digital marketing strategy that would effectively convert your prospects to customers.

B2B versus B2C customers

• Decision-makers – B2C customers often decide quickly and on their own. B2B clients, on the other hand, may take time before making a purchase decision as they may need to consult other stakeholders in their company.
• Emotion-based purchases – B2B clients are less likely to make emotion-based purchases, unlike B2C customers. Most often base their decisions on their company’s needs, the benefits a product/service could offer them, and ROI.
• Sales funnel – Time-sensitive or short-term offers are often more appropriate for B2C customers. Because B2B clients tend to take longer to make purchase decisions, their sales funnels are longer, too, and focus on relationship building.

Ready to invest in digital marketing? Here’s how you could get started with your strategy, depending on the type of digital marketing plan you choose to have.

B2B Digital Marketing

Online lead generation is often the focus of B2B digital marketing with the goal of having your prospects speak to a sales or company representative. To do this, set up your website and other supporting channels in a way that would attract and convince your target audience to respond to your calls-to-action.

Your sales funnel may prioritize the benefits of your product/services, real-life application, client success stories, and media features or press releases. All these could create curiosity and convince your prospect that you are the right brand for them.

Apart from your website, other online venues where you can find and attract B2B clients are LinkedIn, online community pages for professionals or entrepreneurs, and other business-focused platforms.

B2C Digital Marketing

For B2C companies, the goal is straightforward — turn your prospects into customers without needing to talk to a sales representative. You’d want them to respond to your calls-to-action as quickly as possible. This means making it easy for them to check out their shopping carts through your website, subscribe to your service, or set an appointment.

If you’re a retailer, it would also be a great idea to leverage social commerce. Make your Facebook page, Instagram, Youtube channel, and even Pinterest page shoppable.

Ready to incorporate digital marketing in your business strategy? Before diving in, you must first take stock of your current resources, including your tools, skills, knowledge, and staff.

Do you have the necessary resources to create and implement an online marketing campaign?

Should I Outsource Digital Marketing Services?

Starting a digital marketing campaign could be a huge undertaking, especially if you don’t have the right resources, knowledge, and skills. With that said, the decision to outsource digital marketing, would often depend on your goals, timeline, and resources.

Here are some benefits of outsourcing digital marketing services:

• You gain access to experts with proven history of developing successful online marketing campaigns for businesses like yours.
• You gain access to the latest tools and technologies that may otherwise be out of reach or out of your budget.
• In the long run, you would be able to reduce risks and save money on your online marketing campaigns.
• Get fresh perspectives on your brand and products/services so you can identify areas of improvement or income-generating opportunities.
• With tools and experts on your side, you won’t have to waste time and resources figuring out how to get started with different types of digital marketing strategies.

How can FortifySEO help?

Founded by marketing experts, FortifySEO aims to help companies like yours adapt to the ever-changing world of digital marketing. With expert planning and implementation of various types of digital marketing campaigns, you can reach a wider audience, improve your online presence, stand out from the competition, and convert high-quality leads.

FortifySEO can help your business general high-quality traffic and leads through the following digital marketing techniques:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Google Ads
• Social Media Ads