Digital marketing consists of various digital channels such as SEO, content marketing, mobile marketing, and social media marketing and so on. All of these channels help in creating strategies that can help in reaching and connecting with customers and prospects. Digital marketing helps brands to stay relevant as they can make themselves visible to audiences through various channels.
Apart from traditional channels, marketers also utilise digital channels to guide prospects through their purchase and journey and to ensure your brand keeps in touch with existing customers too. However, there is always an option to consult agencies and seek help from them. One such agency is Blurn Digital Agency. With the help of digital marketing experts; Blurn can create a positive impact on your business by formulating a unique digital marketing strategy to make your brand an authority in its niche market.
Types of Digital Marketing Channels
Website: A website can be home to your digital marketing efforts. Almost all brands and businesses make use of websites to host content and distribute it. Most of your digital marketing activities can be linked back to your website, where action would be expected to take place and the conversions get tracked.
Content Marketing: Content creation can be described as the backbone of your entire digital marketing strategy. Whether you have a content marketing strategy or not, content needs to be created to entertain, inform, inspire and persuade buyers from various channels. Most common formats of content include images, videos, infographics, text, podcasts, e-books and slide decks.
Search Engine Optimisation: It acts as a jetpack for your entire content marketing efforts. There are on-page and off-page SEO activities that help in boosting a website’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) for the preferred keywords. Initially SEO was primarily text based, but in recent years, voice search has gained a lot of popularity. For this reason, SEO too needs to have a conversational approach.
Digital Advertising: It is a general or umbrella term for various online advertising strategies. The pricing or bidding strategies for digital advertising is known as cost-per-click (CPC). Common formats of digital advertising include search engine marketing, display advertising, social media advertising, native advertising and programmatic advertising.
Email Marketing: This is the process of keeping a database of contacts and sending them email alerts based on a brand, services and products. This can be an effective channel to help brands keep in touch with their audiences on an ongoing basis. Email marketing can be used to build a strong subscriber base, retain existing customers, bring in new customers, distribute content and to promote discounts and offers.
Social Media Marketing: Ensures that your brand is present on the platform where users tend to spend most of their time. This includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and so on, where you can distribute content via both paid and organic channels. Social media plays an important role in boosting video marketing. It enables a two-way communication where the fans and followers you have can directly reach out and interact constantly through comments, likes, and direct messages or by simply posting something on your official pages.
Affiliate Marketing: This concept is similar to commission-based sales. Organisations provide custom links to their affiliates. The affiliates then earn a specific commission every time someone uses the custom link. Influence marketing can be considered as a modern spin-off of affiliate marketing.
Mobile Marketing: As mobile phone users keep growing rapidly, brands utilise this opportunity and connect with users on their smartphones with the help of mobile apps, mobile-friendly websites, emails and social media. As brands connect with users on the go, optimising marketing strategies and sending timely messages is important.
Online Public Relations: This is a form of earned media. In this case, a member of the press mentions your brand with the help of interviews, stories etc. Product reviews by bloggers, customers and influencers mentioning your brand using paid or organic methods can also contribute to online public relations.
Conversational AI: Rise of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have led the way for more evolving marketing strategies like conversational AI. Conversational AI turns out to be inevitable to digital marketing as the popularity of chat bots and digital assistants becomes prevalent.
Web Analytics: It is a practice of collecting, analysing, measuring and reporting data. However, websites can also build analytical tools. The data collected using web analytics could be both qualitative and quantitative. Web analytics helps marketers to have a thorough understanding regarding the sources of traffic, the return of investments (ROI), what may or may not work and how digital marketing efforts can be enhanced.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for Businesses
Measurability: When a traditional marketing campaign is launched, it is not possible to find out its impact unless there is some sort of coupon code that would reflect in the sales figures. On the other hand, in digital marketing, there is sophisticated analytical ability. The impact can be measured using traffic, clicks and sales. Based on the attribution model that is implemented, it can be easy to identify the contribution of each touch point to the sales. This measurability feature allows marketers to understand what works and what does not and to fix the issue.
Sophisticated Targeting: The modern method of marketing allows you to tweak messages based on the audience persona. Digital marketing channels allow you to target buyers precisely. There is also always an option to keep it diverse and target a longer group based on your brand’s goals.
Refine On-the-go: There is no way for making any corrections in traditional marketing. Once an ad gets printed, it is out! However, with digital marketing, minor changes can be made ‘on-the-go’. If a particular ad doesn’t seem to bring the expected revenue and response, there is always an option to tweak or re-allocate the budget.
Though all of the above may seem a bit overwhelming for those who are not too aware of how to go about digital marketing – there’s always the option of hiring a reputed digital agency like Blurn to help you make the most of the digital marketing channels to propel your business forward!