The Internet provides businesses of all sizes with a plethora of tools and resources that can be used to market products, convey a message, find new customers, or even open previously unimaginable lines of business.
However, before companies can tap into these resources, they must first understand what they are.
This list of the top ten forms of digital marketing available to businesses of all sizes presents a diverse range of opportunities that, for the most part, can be implemented with little to no capital outlay.
In other words, some of these are extremely cost-effective both initially and in the long run. Here are the top ten types of digital marketing that any business can begin using today:
SEO
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization, and it refers to the process of designing your website, its structure, language, and content around keywords and phrases relevant to your industry’s niche and consumer base. It encompasses many other aspects of digital marketing and is, in many ways, fundamental to how we currently understand it to work. SEO is about aligning your company’s outreach with what works in the open marketplace known as the Internet, whether it’s tagging keywords and phrases to content on a website or using relevant hashtags on social media.
Blogging
Blogging provides your company with the opportunity to develop vast reserves of expertise and insight, as well as a massive cache of easily accessible SEO-optimized content. This will bring visitors back to your site time and time again for years to come, with little need for maintenance and updating to older posts if done correctly the first time. All of this can be thrown into disarray by an ongoing strategy that generates new content that is reused and recycled across marketing channels to amplify your company’s message, such as transforming a blog post into a podcast, video, social media snippets, or other avenues.
Social Media
Social media, the current darling of digital marketing, is a broad and fast-moving category that combines blogging’s content marketing with SEO-optimized strategies that govern a company’s entire web presence. Social media, particularly in consumer-facing industries, aids in breaking down geographic, national, and even linguistic barriers to new markets.
Related: How to Begin a Career in Social Media Marketing.
Email Marketing
Whether you collect subscribers via your company website or a social media campaign, email marketing allows you to communicate directly with businesses or consumers who are actively looking for what your company has to offer.
Paid Advertising
Though it does incur some expense, it is practically insignificant when compared to the traditional methods of yesteryear. The ability to scale campaigns from extremely targeted, niche efforts to massive outreach is perhaps the greatest strength of paid advertising on digital channels.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when your company collaborates with a relevant player in your field who provides ancillary services related to your products in exchange for a percentage of the sale proceeds. A simple example would be a beauty blog receiving a percentage of total sales from a product promoted through its various channels, or a vendor receiving a percentage of sales of new pieces of equipment, and so on.
Cobranding Opportunities
Cobranding opportunities, similar to affiliate marketing but typically more involved, allow companies to join forces to market relevant products to their respective audiences and even engage in cross-promotional opportunities. This usually entails leveraging each party’s brand cachet in order to find an appropriate market synergy. Several products that feature influencer branding are popular examples of this.
Influencer Marketing
Finding relevant social media stars to promote your product or service to their audience in exchange for a percentage of sales or a flat fee is what influencer marketing entails. This can be especially beneficial for niche businesses such as publishers, small fashion labels, and other lifestyle businesses.
Digital Media Marketing
Digital media marketing entails creating audio and video content for distribution via podcasting channels or websites such as YouTube.
ePublishing
Convert your company’s expertise into digital books that you can use to market products and services implicitly. Offering free digital books for download or regular media using ePublishing methods is an excellent way to capture email and personal information, and it can help your company leverage new channels for marketing and customer outreach.
Learn more from Marketing.
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