12 types of digital marketing channels for online marketing, each used for a different purpose and can be combined to achieve strategic business growth with a digital marketing campaign. The 12 digital marketing channels include Search Engine Optimization, Local SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Advertising, Digital Marketing Analytics, Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, and E-commerce/Drop-shipping.
The key types of digital marketing channels target potential customers at one stage or more of the customer journey through awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Digital marketing is the marketing of products and services mainly on the internet, mobile, or other digital channels. Because the medium is primarily the internet it is also called internet marketing or online marketing. The offline digital marketing channels mostly associated with traditional marketing are radio, television, and phone marketing.
Mobile marketing is gaining prominence because of the ease with which it can be used to target potential customers via marketing messages, mobile apps, mobile devices scanning QR codes, and email on the go.
The 2 approaches to digital marketing are inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing channels attract potential customers most especially through internet marketing. Outbound marketing channels use online channels like email marketing or offline channels like mobile marketing.
Types of Digital Marketing Channels
The different types of digital marketing channels are used to reach out to customers for brand awareness, product consideration, sales, and building relationships with customers. A business will need to combine some of these digital marketing strategies to achieve its digital marketing strategy goal. The different channels target consumers at awareness, consideration or conversion stage of the customer journey.
The awareness/consideration channels include display advertising, social media marketing, video marketing and content marketing. The conversion channels include SEO marketing, PPC marketing and email marketing. A good digital marketing strategy must combine channels for the awareness/consideration and conversion stages of the customer journey. The mix of digital marketing channels is to achieve strategic marketing goals.
The following are digital marketing overview of 12 key types of digital marketing channels that can be combined in a digital marketing strategy to drive business growth.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is the free easy way to convert website visitors. Search engine optimization is the art of optimizing your online presence to rank high in Search Engines Results Pages – SERPs organic search to gain leads or make sales. The results of SERPs are ranked based on their relevance to the searcher’s intent or context of the query. The results can run into millions of results, hence search engine optimization is critical in website marketing and used to gain an advantage over your competitors.
There are 4 key areas in Organic SEO services. The 4 areas are content optimization, off-site optimization, technical optimization, and local optimization.
Relevant optimized high-quality content and better user experience are some key factors impacting SERP ranking. There are millions of websites, without a good SEO content strategy many websites will not have visitors. SEO content strategy is designed to meet the needs of customers at different stages of the customer journey of brand awareness, consideration, and conversions.
Besides great content, the 2nd SEO technique that helps websites to rank in search engines is off-site optimization. The best off-site optimization technique is white hat SEO link building. This can usually be acquired through a combination of email outreach, digital public relations and influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a reach out to authorities in your niche for the purpose of promoting your website.
The 3rd aspect of SEO focus on website and page technical audit to find and resolve issues that can impact user experience and search engine crawling.
Local SEO
Local SEO is focused on the optimization of a business online presence for local search as against global search. Enlisting a business in an online marketing listing directory is a good way to optimize a business for local search. Local SEO is citations of the name, address, and phone number of a business in a local business directory like Google My Business, Bright Local, etc.
Some businesses are more suited for local SEO. It focuses on businesses close to the searcher and leads to greater conversions. The business enlisted in a local business must have a physical address to offer its services like a restaurant. In some cases, the business should be able to offer a home service within a geographic location like a plumber business.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing – Pay-Pay-Click PPC Marketing is the paid search online marketing and digital advertising campaign. Search engine marketing is the paid search strategy for your business to appear above the organic search when people search for specific keywords.
The bidding process is based on Real Time Bidding of the advertisement inventory. If your advert wins it appears with the top-ranked websites in organic search results. The highest bidder does not necessarily win, ranking is based on a combination of ads quality score and bid amount. By maximizing Google Ads Rank you get PPC marketing’s best return on investment.
You pay-per-click each time your advert appears and someone clicks on it. Notable examples of PPC advertising are Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. PPC management services brings prospective customers to a business for nurturing to sales, without which some online businesses will go unnoticed.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is paid advertising on any of the social media platforms. It can be a display ad on Facebook Ads, promoted tweet/account on Twitter, or sponsored post on Instagram. People join social media for social interactions, but many are taking advantage of that to market their products and services online.
Social media advertising depends a lot on user interactions in the social media. A social media platform will show adverts relevant to a user’s interaction and interest. This increases the likelihood of a user clicking on the advert and becoming aware of a product or service.
Social media advertising provides an avenue for small businesses to advertise their products. It can be most crucial in circumstances where keyword search has a very low volume. Thus, social media advertising complements pay-per-click advertising.
Digital Marketing Analytics
Digital marketing analytics is a technique to collect, measure, analyze and report on web data. The purpose of digital marketing analytics is to analyze performance and optimize web pages. Analytics is used to track key metrics like visitor activity, and traffic flow, collect data, and generate reports.
There are several analytics tools. Google Analytics is a popular free tool that offers reports from audience analysis, acquisition analysis, behavior analysis, and conversion analysis. Marketing analytics is used to measure digital marketing efforts through set goals and optimization of digital marketing campaigns.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is a digital marketing strategy to stimulate a prospect’s interest in a product or service for nurture to conversion. It is a strategy that increases brand awareness, builds relationships, and ultimately leads to sales. The strategies include content marketing, blogging, website marketing, SEO, social media, pay-per-click advertising, and email marketing.
Through the various lead generation strategies businesses collect contact information to nurture prospects to customers. Lead generation digital strategy is useful for small business marketing, medium business marketing, large business marketing, B2B marketing, and B2C marketing content.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the creation of valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined target audience to purchase. The strategies for content marketing include articles, case studies, emails, podcasts, videos, webinars, blog posts, e-books, etc.
The use of video marketing is increasing. This is because users love it, especially mobile users, it builds trust, explains the message, engages, boosts conversion, and high-volume social shares. The strong interest in sharing digital media through video content makes it a good tool for viral marketing.
Content marketing strategy is used to define the topics that will satisfy user intent and bring traffic. SEO optimized content will boost search engine optimization efforts, create brand awareness, increases social shares, builds inbound links, and generates quality leads. Good content marketing must include a clear call-to-action message that persuades people to act.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is the use of social media to connect with existing customers and reach out to new prospects. The aim of social media marketer is to promote a business brand.
Social media is used by both consumers and businesses. Businesses use it to create awareness for their brand through engaging content. Content sharing and peer-to-peer influence are significant in social media marketing.
Customers engage with social media content to learn more about a product and provide feedback to the business. The feedback helps in product improvement. Customers share the content of products they like indicating social approval. This increases sales as people are more likely to value recommendations from their peers.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the sending of email messages on a brand’s products and services to nurture the recipient to conversion. Engaging email campaigns must be trusted, relevant, friendly, and strategic. This is because today’s buyers have great access to information across different marketing channels. They are likely to tune off any spam messages to take control of their buying process.
Email marketing strategy is used to nurture prospects into leads and eventually sales. Email marketing is crucial because many may not visit a website, blog or even their social media. They would like to check if they have any email messages. The increasing use of Smartphones has made it possible to check emails on the go.
Blogging
Blogging is a content marketing strategy of writing of articles to share one’s passion and inform readers in a program called a blog or weblog. It is a log or record of events or information with an associated date. The blog post is a major technique to draw traffic to a website, this increases brand awareness and drives sales
People interested in starting a blog and blog writers research what information people are searching in the internet. The research can be done through applications like Answer the Public, Google People Also Search For and Google Searches Related To. Bloggers write on such high volume traffic topics of interest to attract traffic to their blogs.
Blogging is indispensable in content marketing for businesses. It is usually difficult to rank a topic based on a single page. An effective keyword research for content marketing is used to build topics related to the business. The topics are developed as blog posts to build topical authority that will help rankings in search engine results pages.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a means of promoting a product or service by use of affiliate links. An affiliate marketer will apply for an affiliate program to promote a product in his blog or page via an affiliate link. The marketer will insert an affiliate link in an article related to the products or services. If a visitor clicks on the affiliate link to make a purchase, the author will be entitled to an affiliate commission.
The affiliate marketer provides a medium to make a product or service visible to the their audience. As a mark of gratitude and encouragement, the product owner pays the affiliate a fee. You may have seen a common message on the web “You will earn a commission if you purchase through this link”. Such messages are meant to persuade visitors with purchase intent to buy through the affiliate link.
E-commerce/Drop-shipping
E-commerce is a method of buying and selling goods using online methods. It is characterized by a cart and checkout. Shoppers enter the products they wish to buy in the cart. The prices are added up; upon checkout, the user is directed to a payment gateway for credit card processing.
Drop-shipping is a variation of e-commerce; the seller does not own any physical shop or warehouse. The goods bought from the seller are usually supplied by third-party partner shops or businesses. The third-party supplier takes care of inventory, warehousing, and supplies.
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