Marketing has been around as long as human beings have been trying to sell something. But, of course, the first person to ever try and trade their crops for something else had to convince their buyers their crops were worth whatever they wanted to exchange for. But, of course, we’ve come a long way since the days of bartering corn for a cow (though if that’s your business model, good on you for making it work in the digital age). 

In this post, we go over some of the more common forms of digital marketing. While you’re probably familiar with physical marketing (think billboards, newsletters, leaflets, and physical mail), this post focuses on digital marketing and how it can benefit your business. 

While we cover a lot of ground in this post, remember that only some types of marketing work well for some businesses. Let’s look at the different digital marketing strategies and their purpose.

Digital Marketing Strategies at a Glance

• Email Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Media
• Blog Writing
• Advertising
• Experiential and Interactive Marketing
• Public Relations Marketing
• Cause Marketing
• Stealth Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing

Email Marketing

Let’s begin with a straightforward form of marketing: email marketing. Email marketing can take a wide range of shapes, but the base concept is similar to letter marketing. Email marketing can come in promotional emails, customer surveys, direct newsletters, and a range of other email services that can direct customers to an abandoned cart or prompt them for reviews.

Email marketing can work for most online businesses if you tailor your emails to your products. For example, while an e-commerce site may benefit from emails about its latest products, if your company offers a service, you may be better served to bundle your email notifications with your blog posts to build brand authority.

Remember that email marketing has to follow CAN-SPAM and GDPR and should be an opt-in system. Your purpose with email marketing is to increase brand awareness, communicate deals and offers to your customers, and build brand authority through regular informational emails. 

Influencer Marketing

If you’ve spent time on social media, you’ve probably run into influencer marketing. The concept behind influencer marketing is to market your product to a larger audience using the built-in reputation of an influencer. 

You offer your products to an influencer and pay them to mention and test your product, and in return, they advertise that product to their followers. Not only can this form of marketing bring potential clients to your business, but it can also increase brand awareness and build your business’s trustworthiness with future clients. 

However, you should approach influencer marketing with caution. Handing out your products to every influencer you see can bring mixed results. Be sure to target your specific niche carefully and vet influencers for quality content and product reviews before hiring them. 

Affiliate Marketing

Most people associate affiliate marketing with Amazon or other large companies, but the concept is the same regardless of the size of your company. With affiliate marketing, a company has another individual or business advertise its product on its site. In return, the affiliate company gets a small percentage of the sales of each product sold through their link. 

Affiliate marketing works well if you are an established company with a successful online storefront. Still, it can also work if you’re looking to attract customers to your company. By funneling potential customers directly to your site, you gain potential future customers and build your brand awareness. 

Conversely, if you’re looking to leverage your platform, you can find products that work with your offerings but do not compete with you and market those on your website. Not only can this increase traffic to your business, but you will also earn some revenue from commissions, making it a win-win as far as marketing is concerned. 

Remember that adding affiliate links to your page only works if you draw in visitors; this advertising method may not work well for freshly started businesses. 

Social Media

Unlike other marketing options on this list, social media is an indirect form of marketing. Most people do not check their social media accounts to purchase something or see direct advertisements. Instead, social media marketing balances your information and entertainment posts with product deals and promotions. Brand awareness and reputation should be your first concern when building a social media account, with marketing falling much further down the priority list.

Social media marketing works well for most business models so long as you customize your pages to reach your target audience. Keep in mind what niche you want to attract to your social media account, and plan accordingly. Remember to post regularly and on a schedule, and coordinate your marketing strategies across all social media accounts to keep things balanced. 

Blog Writing

Blog writing falls under “content marketing,” where you create content about a specific topic to bring customers to your brand. Blog writing is mainly about increasing your brand authority and awareness while providing educational information for your customers. While blogs can market specific products, these blogs should be focused on solving a need or answering a question rather than simply listing off products with no connection. 

Blog writing can tie in with other forms of marketing, like email marketing or social media marketing, to help raise your customer’s awareness of your products and boost your brand’s authority across several platforms. 

Advertising

While technically, all marketing is about advertising your product to your customers, here we mean paid advertising campaigns. Paid advertising works to expose potential customers to your brand across several platforms. While advertising can be costly, it is a worthwhile investment as it not only increases brand awareness but can also increase brand authority and attract potential clients to your site. 

Paid advertising is best paired with other forms of marketing to better build your brand’s reputation. Like any marketing campaign, you want a unified marketing strategy before paying for advertising willy-nilly. Once you know your niche, you can better craft your advertisements to target potential clients and bring them to your site. 

Experiential and Interactive Marketing

Experiential and interactive marketing strives to create an in-person or virtual experience tied to your product or brand. An excellent example of experiential and interactive marketing is Disney World. Disney World sells itself on the concept of a theme park, but Disney as a company is so enmeshed with the entire amusement park that it correlates the joy of the theme park with the company itself. 

Of course, you don’t have to go as far as Disney World regarding experiential marketing. Online conferences, in-person meet-ups, or live streams fall into experiential marketing. They can help increase trust in your brand while also assisting customers in seeing your company as an authority on a topic. You can also offer live product testing events or giveaways as interactive marketing to help customers associate the event’s excitement with your brand.

Public Relations Marketing

This form of marketing uses news buzz to push new customers toward your business. Public relations (PR) marketing usually puts the launch of a new product or a new head of the company at center stage, using newsworthy events to bring about brand awareness and brand authority. 

This form of marketing does require a partnership with a news source of some kind, but there are aspects of PR marketing that you can bring into your marketing strategy. For example, making announcements across your social media pages can act like a news headline, bringing interest to your business and services. 

Remember that PR marketing is essential in a buyer-to-buyer (B2B) company, as many people use news outlets to judge where your company stands in the corporate field. 

Cause Marketing

This form of marketing has the added effect of making the world a better place. Cause marketing involves tying your business to a cause, as the name would imply. An example is giving 2% of your proceeds to end world hunger or donating to save an endangered species. 

You should pick a cause that resonates with your business and your personal goal or a goal that reflects well on your business model. For example, if you create wooden products, donating to end deforestation is a charitable goal that reflects well on your business model and will increase your brand trustworthiness. 

Stealth Marketing

Stealth marketing is by far the coolest-sounding item on this list, though the term’s actual meaning is a little less “spy” than it would imply. Stealth marketing is all about product placement without direct advertisement. An example is every time you see a soda product in a movie. 

If done well, your potential customers are slightly more aware of your brand without even noticing it. But, of course, this kind of marketing should come with a good marketing plan and an informed eye on where your products are placed. 

For example, advertising a soda in a zombie movie may seem benign enough, but the awkward product placement in World War Z lived to bite Pepsi in its reputation. However, with a little forethought and some key product placements, stealth marketing can subtly advertise to your potential customers without them noticing it happening.

Search Engine Marketing

While search engine marketing (SEM) is at the bottom of our list, it is an essential form of marketing in the digital era. SEM uses search engine optimization (SEO) to place your business on the first page of a search platform like Google. As a result, you attract customers to your website and increase brand awareness by putting your business front and center. 

SEM is a multi-pronged marketing process that involves building your website to be an authority on a topic or niche. By merging blog marketing, social media marketing, and overall website design into one, you can target search engine results and drive more business toward your company. 

While there are a lot of marketing strategies out there, you don’t have to try and find the right one for your business on your own. Creating a marketing strategy to build your business should be a team effort, and working with a professional marketing team can take some weight off your shoulders. Here at Planted Marketing, we offer our expert marketing knowledge to small and mid-sized businesses to help them get their business recognized. Contact us today if you’re interested in crafting the right marketing strategy for your company. 

Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and organic solutions for woman-owned brands. Our wide variety of services allows for customized plans that work best for your brand and each stage of growth. Want to learn more? Send us a message at info@planedmarketing.com. Talk soon!