Are you looking for the best way to drive more traffic to your business and make more sales? Digital marketing is the way to go.
More businesses are getting into digital marketing today than ever before. Reports show that total online ad spending will increase by 4.7% during 2019.
But with all the tools available online, it’s hard to know where to start your digital marketing plan. This post will fill you in on what you need to know. Below are ten types of online marketing that you need to know about.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Not everyone has a large budget to pay for advertising. If this is you, search engine optimization is one of the best things you can invest in.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to rank in search engines. You can do this in two ways: on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO is the process of optimizing your website pages to rank for specific keywords in search engines. You can optimize your website by testing page headlines, descriptions, content structure, and internal links.
Off-Site SEO
If you want to optimize your off-site SEO, you’re going to need links. Search engines consider links like a vote for your site. If you can get links from popular websites, you can gain authority for your site.
As you get more of these links, search engines will start to trust your website more. This trust will get you higher rankings.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing sounds like it would go hand-in-hand with search engine optimization, but there are some key differences between these two forms of marketing.
The focus with SEO is on free traffic from the search engines. You work to get your website ranked high so you can take advantage of search traffic.
Search engine marketing makes use of paid advertising to make your site visible to customers online. It uses platforms like Google Adwords and Bing Ads to take the top spots of the search engine. If you bid high enough, you’ll be at the top no matter how bad your SEO is.
To take advantage of paid ads, you’ll need to come up with compelling headlines and descriptions for your landing pages. Over time, you’ll test your advertisements and find the people who respond to your products. Once you start to see a return on your investment, you can increase your budget and scale your sales as much as you like.
3. Content Marketing
Ask yourself this: why should anyone trust you as an authority in anything? There are a lot of businesses out there that have credibility. What makes you better than them?
Content marketing is one of the ways you can show your credibility in an industry. Creating blog content allows you to provide value to your readers by giving your insight on topics that are important to your customers.
Content marketing also works with other forms of marketing. One of the big ones is SEO.
You can use keyword research to learn what people are searching for in your industry. Once you have this information, create content based on the keywords you find. As you do SEO for your website, your content will start ranking and will bring more traffic to your site.
You need a good strategy if you want to create great content. Get in touch with an agency like SEOexplode if you need help getting started.
4. Social Media Marketing
Have you noticed that almost everyone has a social media account today? It seems like people spend most of their free time scrolling through their social media feeds, looking for the latest happenings in the world.
Believe it or not, the average social media user spends 136 minutes every day on these sites. What if you could get your product or website in front of these people?
Social media marketing will help you do this. If you want to get started on social platforms, you need to get your business profile set up. You’ll use this page to create content for your fans.
If you do it right, you can use these platforms to connect directly to your customers. These interactions will help you create a loyal following that will always be willing to buy from your business.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Do you not have much of a budget to advertise but have a loyal following? Why not reward people for sending your business customers?
Referrals are one of the best ways to promote your company. There’s nothing better than a success story to promote your product or services. After all, it’s easy for somebody to exaggerate how good their business is.
When you create an affiliate program, you’re signing up salespeople to work on commission. Every time they make a sale, you’ll give them a portion of the revenue.
This commission gives a big incentive for your affiliates to make as many sales as possible. The more business they send you, the more money they’ll make.
6. Email Marketing
Email is almost as old as the internet. Despite this, it’s still one of the most commonly used methods of communication today. This makes it a great way to market your products.
To make the best use of email marketing, you don’t want to only send promotions to your email list. Doing this can cause you to lose subscribers left and right.
Instead, try to provide value to your list. Use your emails to provide valuable content to your subscribers. Doing this will help you build trust and allow you to create meaningful connections.
Your promotions will be much more effective when you have the trust of your email list.
7. Influencer Marketing
Have you been on Instagram lately? It seems like everyone is trying to be an influencer these days. That isn’t surprising considering how much cash the more popular social media figures are making.
Influencer marketing is one of the newer forms of marketing. It wasn’t until the past few years that companies began to use individuals with followings to promote their products.
It isn’t hard to do either. All you need to do is find someone on social media with a lot of followers that has some connection to your industry. You pay the influencer what they ask, and they’ll promote your product on their page.
People love popular influencers. Using them can be one of the best ways to reach potential customers.
8. Smartphone Marketing
When’s the last time you went somewhere without your phone? The chances are that it’s been a long time. You aren’t alone, either.
Almost everyone has their smartphone on hand at all times. This makes the smartphone a great way to reach your customers.
You can do this in a couple of ways.
The first is through SMS marketing. Your customers will sign up with their phone number like they would for an email list. Once you build your list, you can start sending promotional messages with texts.
The other is through push notifications. Web browsers today can send notifications straight to devices.
When a visitor lands on your website, you have the chance to request push notifications on their device. If they accept, you can send notifications whenever you have a message for your visitors.
9. Video Marketing
Video has taken over the internet. Youtube alone has 300 hours of video uploaded every minute.
Visitors can ignore text advertisements, but it’s a lot harder to ignore a video. Your video also has the chance to target people who are already in the frame of mind to pay attention to your product.
Not only that, but you also have a better chance to get your message across. Your video ads can be anywhere between a few seconds to a few minutes. Take the time you need to explain why people need your product.
Of course, you can use video marketing without buying ads. You can create a video channel for your business as well. You can use this space to create video content for potential customers to find.
10. Viral Marketing
It’s hard to get in front of a lot of people at once. There is a lot of content out there on the web. You need to have something that stands out to promote the sharing of your content.
Viral marketing is the practice of making that happen. To create a successful viral campaign, you need to create content that is funny, trendy, or informative.
Your goal is to get as many shares on social sites as you can in a short amount of time. If you’re successful at getting your content to go viral, you’ll be rewarded with a huge amount of traffic to your website.
Types of Online Marketing: Final Thoughts
There is a lot to learn when getting into digital marketing. There are many types of online marketing out there, so pick a one or two to start with. When you take your time and do it right, your business will benefit for a long time.
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