6 FORMS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Posted by Andrew Langer on November 14th, 2019

Digital marketing has been around for quite some time now but remains grossly misunderstood by the netizens. It is a lot more than just marketing on digital and online channels. It is an extensive discipline replete with many roles, careers, and industries. Digital marketing has become the need of the hour for nearly all businesses as more business owners find themselves paying for digital marketing services than they have ever done so in the past. There are many other tricks, tools, and techniques in digital marketing that continue to evolve every passing day. More important than the tools and techniques are the forms of digital marketing that many people are still unaware of and hence, this piece has been put together to enlist 6 forms of digital marketing.

 1. CONTENT MARKETING: Unless you have been oblivious of the developments in digital marketing for the past decade or so, you must have come across the saying 'Content is King'. The same saying holds in this day and age with more relevance than ever before. We live in times of information overload where over 4 million blogs are published every day and thus, for your blog to get more visibility than the others, it should be info-rich, unique and of a very high-quality. Under this digital marketing service content is created to inform, educate, remaining highly engaging. The content crafted is aimed to solve the problems of the readers and giving them something of value. Creating content is one part of the puzzle, the other part is marketing it, and that part entails making sure that the content gets enough eye-balls which is necessary for the furtherance of an organization's digital marketing goals. Content marketing is taken very seriously by digital marketing services company and their clients as Google has a reputation of rewarding quality-content and coming down rather harshly on poor and plagiarised content. 

2. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION(SEO): SEO lies at the core of digital marketing. It is all about optimizing the website and its content to increase its ability to secure high ranks on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The website can be optimized by the in-house SEO team of any company or the same can be outsourced to SEO agencies that provide digital marketing services. SEO is aimed at improving the ranks of a website to either the first page or ideally the top three. 

 3.  SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM): SMM is all about marketing on different social media websites and generating traffic from them. SMM is the need of the hour because most people use the internet for social networking than anything else and some of the most popular social media websites of our times have memberships in hundreds of millions (Twitter) and even billions (Facebook). Since you can only attract people from where they are already present, it is imperative upon all businesses and the digital marketing experts working for them, to give SMM the importance that it deserves or outsource it to experts providing digital marketing services.

 4. SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) : This form of digital marketing works with the help of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, where the website owners have to pay for every time their link has been clicked from the 'sponsored results' that appear on either the top or right side of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is a time-tested technique that has worked for many IT consulting companies that have successfully managed to get a lot of traffic by paying for the listings of their products and services on the top or side of SERPs, where they would be more prominent than other results on the page. This form of digital marketing is worth every penny because the higher the visibility, the more the chances of the said website getting traffic and the same extends to conversions. 

 5. INFLUENCER MARKETING- It is among the newest and the most trending forms of digital marketing and any digital marketing company worth its salt without agreeing on the same. Influencer marketing is all about hiring individuals who have substantial online reach on different social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Such individuals are paid to promote the brand as they are seen as experts by the said organizations' target audience. This form of digital marketing has been trending for quite some time now and is expected to go from strength to strength, but one needs to tread cautiously and only hire influencers with valid credentials. 

 6. EMAIL MARKETING: This form of digital marketing is used to update email subscribers regularly about the events happening in the company, along with the highlights and the upcoming products and services. Email marketing can prove to be very effective if is executed shrewdly by your in-house time or by experts providing digital marketing services to you. The emails drafted and eventually sent to the subscribers should provide them some value and enough reasons to remain 'subscribed'. This works well with organic subscribers and the not ones that can be paid for. People who remain subscribed to your emails have higher chances of converting and becoming buyers in the future. 

  Final Words

 All the aforementioned forms of digital marketing are very effective in getting a website more exposure and increasing its brand awareness. Digital marketing has significantly leveled the playing field of all organizations of all sizes, giving the smaller and medium based companies something to fight against the Internet giants and their multi-million dollar advertorial budgets. There are a lot of companies providing digital marketing services in every price range and in every geographical location of the world, and there is every chance that you will find the right partners for the furtherance of your business goals.