1. Search Engine Marketing, SEM
Search Engine marketing, SEM helps marketers to drive their website traffic through major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. SEM is a marketing strategy popular among digital marketers because they find it handy to target potential customers who are already searching online for a product/service like the ones they are promoting. Anytime an internet user searches for a topic through a search engine, two sets of results usually come up. First set are the organic search results while the second set are results from paid ads because both sets of results come from the use of specific keywords which search engines use to locate them. SEM also includes such activities as Display Advertising, Search Retargeting, Site Remarketing, Mobile Marketing and Paid Social Advertising.
2. Google My Business, GMB
Google now provides a free tool to business owners called Google My Business. Ambitious digital marketers use this tool to improve their online search presence. Once marketers create a GMB listing, it generates a Google Maps location that synchronizes with Google Search to enhance location-based searchability. What marketers simply do on opening GMB listing is to add important business information such as their location, contact information, photos/graphics, and the products/services they are promoting. GMB listing allows customers to leave reviews and even their own photos. Marketers must therefore provide as much information as possible to help their rankings on Google for relevant search queries. The more info available to Google, the easier it is for Google to show it to the right people. A well-completed business profile with the right info helps with SEO for the business. You get better results if you compliment that with paid Google ads on the account.
3. Business Website
To market successfully online, a business website is a necessary requirement. A business website serves as online business window and the centerpiece of the digital marketing strategy for the business. It is from the site marketers can deploy all the digital marketing tools and techniques to promote their businesses. Marketers in all their marketer efforts aim at driving traffic to their websites where they usually convert prospects and leads into customers. For this reason, a business website must be attractive, eye-catching and memorable. It must be fast loading, easy to use, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly enough to attract traffic.
4. Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Search Engine Optimization, SEO is essentially a technical way of tweaking a website with keywords to make it easier for it to come up naturally or organically in search results of major search engines. SEO helps the higher listing in their SERPs. SEO does this for your business free by optimizing content on your website, including blog articles, videos, photos and infographics. What SEO simply requires is an investment of time and effort (if you have the knowhow) as against direct advertising spend.
5. Social Media Marketing, SMM
The primary goal of SMM is to widely increase brand awareness and establish trust with the target audience using the huge popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and the likes. Most social media platforms allow marketers to run ads on their sites to build the much-needed awareness even when such marketers only have a small audience and reach of their own. The platforms help marketers to direct traffic to their business websites and generate customer leads and sales.
6. Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating and promoting any marketing content online. It aims primarily to generate brand awareness, increase social media following, increase website traffic, and ultimately generate customer leads and sales for the business. For any content to meet this great expectation, it must be informative, engaging, educational and even entertaining. That is what the content needs to capture the attention of the target audience. Content is often published on a business website, but for good results, it can also be shared through social media, email marketing, SEO, and paid ads. The type of content ambitious marketers like to use include eBooks, case studies, how-to guides, glossaries, industry news, videos, images and banners, podcasts, webinars, blogs, online courses, and infographics.
7. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is now catching on among digital marketers because of the sole aim of saving time and money while still maintaining efficiency. Marketers depend on online software to get going most of the time. You can have access to marketing automation software in websites such as HubSpot. Such software allows marketers to streamline their processes by helping them to connect social media channels in one place to schedule and automate content across platforms. These software platforms also automate your basic marketing operations and repetitive tasks such as Email newsletters, CRM, Social media post scheduling and campaign tracking and reporting. However, because each social media network has a unique community and has preferences for content types, adequate care must be taken to create only content that works best across multi-platforms.
8. Marketing and Sales Funnels
For many digital marketers, marketing and sales funnels have become a very vital tool for their digital marketing strategies. Marketers now use lead capture pages to build and grow their email lists. They use token gifts like eBooks and Discount Coupons to get prospects to sign up to get value that the eBooks and Discount Coupons represent. Once users sign up to get these values, marketers capture their email addresses into their email lists. That is part of the not-too-obvious bargain for them to get the eBooks and or Coupons. As the email list grows, your audience, leads and sales grow along by way of a marketing or sales funnel pattern.
9. Online PR
Digital marketers use online Public Relations, PR to secure earned coverage for their brands. It works much like traditional PR even though it poses much more challenges to measure the success of online PR than other online marketing methods. However, marketers need not underestimate the lack of analytics for measuring a positive news article’s impact. That it gets traffic, and it sure does, is all that really matters on the long run. Some common examples of online PR activities include, press releases on your website or social media, sharing content about causes that connect people, engaging with comments on social media content or your blog, emailing outreach to reporters and media organizations with pitches for news content/articles. This is in addition to such other activities that help establish your online reputation and attract traffic to your website.
10. Pay-Per-Click, PPC
PPC is the ads system used in search engine marketing such as on Google. What it does is to charge a marketer for every click on a paid ad run on the search engine. It usually gets direct prequalified traffic and thus a very effective marketing arrangement. The reason it is, generally referred to as pay-per-click, PPC advertising. Because the right keywords in search queries trigger ads on search engines, marketing advertisers usually bid on such key search terms used by customers to get good traffic sent to them from search engines. This is why PPC ads tend to get very good results most of the time.
11. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one good way marketers earn commissions for helping to promote and market products/services for merchants online. This relationship comes about by way of affiliate marketers helping to post affiliate links on their social media accounts or blog articles on their business websites. Affiliate marketers earn commissions when internet users act on their marketing efforts through clicks or sales from the affiliate links they posted. Big e-commerce businesses like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba do act as affiliate marketing networks to manage this delicate relationship between merchants and affiliates and it becomes a win-win situation for all parties.
12. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy of using emails to promote content, events, and direct traffic to business websites. When marketers use content marketing and sales funnels to generate leads, they rely on emails to nurture these leads to customers and make sales. Business emails are especially helpful when used as follow-up emails to potential purchasers and new customers, newsletters to inform subscribers of newly posted blogs or social media content, welcome emails to new subscribers, insider info, special promos, limited time offers, special coupons and or new discounts.
