Posted by Paolo Tanjuatco on March 6, 2023
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.
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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most ads that you see on social media are typically native ads. In this kind of advertising, ads appear together with non-paid content.
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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.
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:
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.
Still not convinced that digital marketing could be the missing piece to your business strategy? Here are the latest statistics worth looking into.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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:
Take the first steps to starting a digital marketing campaign for your business with experts you can trust. Contact us to learn more about the different types of digital marketing you could do for your business.