Digital Marketing Strategies

The list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the strategies most businesses are using:

How Do I Get Started?

The good news is, getting started with digital marketing is fairly easy. Most online advertising platforms make it easy to sign up and create your first campaign (it is how they make money, after all). Here are a few links to beginner guides for several different digital marketing strategies:

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising” (which we’ll go over in a second). Facebook ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising” (again, we’ll get into that shortly).

Paid Search Advertising Google, Bing and Yahoo all allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Paid Search Advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) If you don’t want to pay to show up in the SERPs, you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank pages or blog posts on you site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but getting a page to rank usually takes quite a bit of time and effort (for a more in-depth comparison of paid search and SEO, Check out this article.)

Paid Social Media Advertising Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat will allow you to run ads on their site. Paid Social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences that your business, product or service exists.

 

Social Media Marketing Like SEO , social media marketing is the free, organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business. And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.

 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.

Native Advertising

Ever get to the bottom of an article and see a list of suggested articles? That’s native advertising. Most native advertising falls under content marketing because it uses content to attract clicks (“you’ll never believe what happens next!”). Often, native advertising can be a bit hard to spot, since it is usually mixed in with non-paid content recommendations… but that’s kind of the point.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the oldest form of online marketing and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing_) or promote an event.

 

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.

As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of different ways to market your business online, which is why many businesses either hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team and marketing automation software to cover their marketing needs (for an in-depth comparison of these options, check out this article).

Does Digital Marketing Work?

Digital marketing is a great option for any business. At disruptive, we’ve used digital marketing to help all kinds of businesses grow—from mom-and-pop shops to internationally recognized universities and beyond. That’s the beauty of advertising online. If you know who you want to target, you can use digital marketing to target anyone, anywhere.

 However, the being said, certain types of businesses will benefit more from certain types of digital advertising. As a quick overview, let’s take a look at which strategies tend to work best for businesses like

• Ø B2C COMPANIES
• Ø B2B COMPANIES

Of course, the right blend of digital marketing tactics will vary from industry-to-industry and business-to-business, but simply comparing B2C to B2B should help give you a sense for how different strategies can be better for certain businesses. Not every strategy is right for every business, but with a little trial and error, you should be able to identify the most profitable approach for your company or site.

·        Paid Search Advertising

·        Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

·        Paid Social Media Advertising

·        Social Media Marketing

·        Conversion Rate Optimization

·        Content Marketing