The Social Ms has a strong focus on social media marketing. So that is where we are going to start our list of types of digital marketing. Social Media certainly has a rightfully earned place in this list.

Social Media Marketing is „the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service.“ Source Wikipedia

That means all sharing of information and engagement with followers, fans, partners or competitors on social media platforms with the goal of promoting your products is part of digital marketing. In essence, social media marketing is the targeted use of social media conversations to increase the awareness for a brand or product.

Content marketing is the art of using storytelling and valuable information to increase brand awareness with the goal of getting your target audience to take a profitable action. Content marketing aims at building relationships with potential customers and becoming a partner rather than an advertiser.

Image Source: Content Marketing Institute

Since Content Marketing strongly relies on content distribution, content marketing can rarely be seen totally separated from other types of digital marketing that can fill the content distribution part.

SEO is the process of optimizing content or websites so that they show up in search results in search engines like Google. Search engines decide which websites to show for a search term based on keywords mentioned on the website and links that refer to this website. That means SEO has a lot to do with using the right keywords or keyphrases in the copy of a website or within the content you want to show in search and getting links to this website or content.

There are multiple strategies for optimizing your website(s) for search engines – some of them are accepted by google and others are regarded rather shady and may result in Google penalizing your website.

There is a strong connection between content, social media marketing and SEO. The most obvious is that social media and SEO are perfect distribution channels for content.

While SEO describes the process of getting unpaid traffic from search engines – SEM refers to the paid traffic from search engines. The most common form of search engine marketing is probably Google Adwords for the simple reason that Google is by far the most used search engine.

Image Source: Search Engine Land

In SEM the marketer usually pays the search engine a predefined amount of money for showing a marketing message at various places within the search results for specified keywords or phrases.

SEM is a form of Pay-Per-Click advertising.

Similar to SEM other forms of PPC advertising also describe marketing methods where the marketer pays for each click on a link to a website. Apart from search engines, almost all social networks offer the opportunity for Pay Per Click advertising. These ads then appear in the feed of the targeted social media users.

Note that many of these activities cannot be clearly separated. The lines between the various types of digital (online) marketing are often blurred.

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based type of digital marketing. In contrast to PPC advertising with affiliate marketing, the advertiser does not pay for traffic but rather for conversions. The rates are usually higher but the risk on the side of the advertiser are limited since he only pays for conversions.

Affiliate marketing is popular with bloggers and high-traffic website owners who make money from selling other people’s products to their audience.

Email marketing is one of the best converting marketing channels. By sending regular updates to your email subscribers you can build and nurture a relationship. By providing value with your email updates you can build trust – eventually, you will be able to turn a percentage of your audience into customers.

Note that email marketing is far more than buying an email list and bombarding them with promotional messages or a one-time advertising spot in someone else’s email newsletter.

The best results from email marketing will always be achieved with a list of subscribers you personally earned and nurtured. Then your email list can easily turn into your best digital marketing asset.

Many articles on digital marketing stop with the above 7 types of Online digital marketing. But then we could simply name it online marketing.

For your digital marketing strategy you should also know about the most important offline digital marketing types:

You know what I am referring to, don’t you? Those breaks in your favorite music program where someone tells you what car to buy or what cleaner to use. Some of these spots can be rather annoying, a select few manage to be entertaining – at least when you hear them the first time.

There is still more to radio advertising: For instance, you can sponsor a program and

It is not dead yet: The spot that breaks up your favorite television program. While we are more and more getting used to finding ways to omit having to actually watch TV commercials there is still some marketing success in TV advertising.

In fact, some spots like the ones created for Super Bowl make it to some notable marketing fame. Some of the best Super Bowl spots even make it to social media fame and get a ton of shares that the advertisers do not have to pay for – or rather which is probably calculated into the price of advertising space for Super Bowl anyway.

What you need to keep in mind is that advertising via TV offers very limited targeting options.

Of course, many of the above types pf digital marketing can take place on your mobile phone. You are probably using Facebook, Instagram, and Google on your mobile phone after all. But there are some other types of marketing on your mobile phone that so far would not fit into any of the mentioned categories.

SMS advertising has been around for some time now. And with technology like Bluetooth still on the rise, the marketing and advertising options for mobile especially in local marketing have by far not yet been fully leveraged.

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