•  What Are the 8 Types of Digital Marketing?

 In February 2021, conducted a survey in which 46% of the respondents claimed they spend between five to six hours a day on their phones for personal use. In addition, 22% stated they spend 3 to 4 hours a day on their phone, according to Statista, and from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, mobile users in the U.S. around 40 minutes a day on social media apps, with Facebook and Instagram holding the largest audience.

What Are the 8 Types of Digital Marketing?

E-commerce has grown immensely in the last few years, becoming an important part of the global retail world. In 2022, retail e-commerce sales were estimated to surpass $5.7 trillion worldwide, Statista reported.

Marketers know that you need to take your message to where your customers are, and it is very clear: Your potential customers are on their phones.

6. Pay-per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online.

Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a search results page, browsing the web, watching YouTube videos, and using mobile apps.

One of the other things that differentiates pay-per-click from SEO is that you only pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google Adwords campaign, you will pay only when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You can spend just about any amount of money on pay-per-click advertising. Some companies may see results from investing just a few hundred dollars, but plenty of large companies spend tens of thousands a month on pay-per-click.

How much it costs to run an ad or promote your search results will depend primarily on how much competition there is for your keywords. High-competition keywords (i.e. keywords that many people are searching for and that many sites are trying to find for) will be more expensive and lower-competition terms will likely cost less.

When you set up a pay-per-click campaign, you will also be able to choose whether you want your ad or promoted results to be shown to users all over the world or only within a specific geographic area. If you are marketing a brick-and-mortar business, this ability helps you not waste ad dollars serving ads to users who don’t live anywhere near your business, according to Google Ads.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.

To accomplish this, SEO marketers research words and phrases consumers are using to search for information online and use those terms in their own content. According to leading SEO software company Moz, 's "Beginners Guide to SEO," SEO encompasses many elements, from the words on your web pages to the way other sites link to you on the web to how your website is structured.

So, what are some things that can improve a site’s SEO? It’s important to understand that one of the things that makes SEO challenging is that the answer to this question always depends on search engines and their most current algorithm.

Keeping that in mind, here are a few of the most important things for SEO strategists and marketers, in general, to understand about how SEO works today, according to Moz:

• Content indexing – It is important to allow search engines to clearly “read” what your site content is, by doing things like adding alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio content.
  
  
• Good link structure – It is important that search engines can “crawl” your site structure to easily find all the content on your site. There are many things that an SEO specialist can do to properly format links, URLs, and sitemaps to make them most accessible to site crawlers.
  
  
• Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords (i.e. the search terms you want your site to be found for) in your content and headers is one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO. It is no longer good practice to “stuff” your content with as many keywords and keyword variations as possible. Writing high-quality content that uses keywords in the headers and a few times in the crawlable page content is now considered a better practice and will make pages rank better in search results.

8. Social Media Marketing

This includes everything a business does via social media channels. Just about everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must approach social with an integrated and strategic approach. Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments.

To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.

Social media marketers should not be in a silo separate from other marketing functions. Social marketers need to work with the company’s wider marketing team to coordinate their message across all platforms, online and off, so that every part of the brand is telling the same story.

A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Social media marketers must also be savvy at analyzing the performance of their posts and creating strategies based on that data. It’s important to measure how well your current social media posts are performing before continuing to implement your new strategy.

Statista reports that 86% of industry professionals stated that an increase in exposure to their company was the leading benefit of social media marketing in 2023. Behind that, 76% of companies claimed an increase in traffic to their website was the largest advantage, according to Statista.

There are also to spread your message that go beyond Instagram and Twitter. Some other options include Google My Business, eBay Facebook Messenger, and Marketplace.

In other words, social media marketing is a lot more complicated than managing your personal Facebook or Twitter profile. It requires a blend of creative thinking and objective, data-driven strategy and may be a great fit for professionals who enjoy blending these two disciplines.

A Need for Marketing Skills

Digital marketers support the wider marketing team and the strategic goals of the whole company by rolling out marketing strategies in the online environment, Rogers said.

Digital marketers strive to be a voice for the customer and how they want to interact with a brand digitally.

“(Marketers) strategically approach the brand’s channels to maximize investments, drive traffic and conversions, as well as manage integrated digital content,” said Rogers.

The need to be where the customers are at all times means that digital marketers have a significant responsibility to be attuned to changes in technology, social media, and software.

Technology changes quickly; the hot social media app of today may be all but abandoned by next year, but many of the foundational principles of marketing remain the same.

Today, many employers require experience in Google Analytics, Google and Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and Hootsuite, according to Rogers. You'll learn the foundations of tools such as these, exploring and applying them through coursework.

They are also looking for candidates who are proficient in Adobe Creative Suites and have a working knowledge of SEO and keyword research.

However, some important pieces of the marketing puzzle have not changed since the days when companies primarily advertised in print, radio, and TV. All marketers need strong communication skills and a strong basis in marketing principles.

Employers include these Soft Skills with the technology-related proficiencies in job posting requirements, according to Rogers.