Marketing is about getting your brand and product to the right people. The people that will buy it. The good news is that when it comes to digital marketing there are plenty of options. Indeed, online businesses often use a combination of the different types of digital marketing you will find below to ensure they hit their sales targets. Read on to find out what they are, and the value they could add to your online business.
Reader's Roadmap
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is about leveraging your presence on social media platforms to connect with both current and potential customers. It’s less about direct selling and more about building your brand, humanizing your business, and creating genuine connections between you and your customers. Of course, this is vital as it helps to bring in potential customers and move them further down the funnel to make a purchase.
The best strategies to use on social media include posting content that is not all sales-related, and then interacting with the comments it gets. Also for good social media marketing, you must post content regularly and make sure it’s varied. Many people choose to plan and schedule their content well ahead of time to ensure it meets these criteria.
SEO
SEO or search engine optimization as it is also known is all about getting your business to the first page of Google. A first-page placement is important because this is where the majority of the click-through traffic comes from. That means if your business ranks at less than position 10 in the SERPs you will get significantly lower traffic, which will in turn give you significantly fewer visitors to turn into sales.
It’s also worth noting that there is a massive difference in the traffic you can expect from a first-place position to a tenth-place position in the search results;ts. Indeed, the expected traffic drops massively the further down in rank you go.
What this all means is that it’s well worth putting in some effort to get your business to rank on that first page. Happily, there are a range of things you can do to achieve this, all of which fall under the banner of SEO, and can be split into two main categories on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is anything you can do on your site to improve your search engine rankings. It includes things like fixing technical issues, using pillar and cluster content, and optimizing every page.
Off-page SEO is anything you do off of your website that helps raise its position in the SERPs. This type of SEO mainly relies on getting backlinks from high domain authority sites which act as a type of positive reference to Google, over time pushing you up the results page.
PPC marketing
Another hugely effective form of marketing that online businesses can use is PPC marketing. PPC stands for pay-per-click, and it’s a type of paid advertising that can be incredibly effective.
The entire premise of PPC marketing is that it center around making sure your business has the top spot on the first search engine results page. We already know that the further up the page you are the more attention you will get, and a PPC slot will push you even above the organic results ensuring that your business is seen first.
However, to get the most from a PPC campaign, you’ll need to make sure you carefully evaluate the trigger words and phrases that you use. Otherwise, each click can cost you money, while not generating any income. That is why many businesses choose to work with a professional PPC agency to devise their campaign and manage their ads. Then they can be sure that they are partnering with experts that will get them the best result and ROI possible.
Affiliate marketing
Lastly, another valuable form of digital marketing for your online business is affiliate marketing. If someone is an affiliate, it means they are connected to you and will promote your products for you. The benefit of this for them is that they get a small percentage of the sale amount for every sale they make.
Often affiliates will publish detailed content reviewing many products including yours. They will then add links back to your site, or to the platform on which you are selling like Amazon, so customers will follow these when they make a purchase.
When working with affiliates it’s important to keep things above board and make sure that they display that they are an affiliate of your business on their website. This will help people make a more informed decision when they make a purchase.