Boosting traffic, growing your brand awareness, engaging your customers — it’s already a widely known fact that digital marketing covers all of them. But how different is digital marketing in Australia? 

Digital marketing is constantly changing. It takes on many forms like search engine marketing, display ads, videos, social media posts. According to Qualtrics, “More than 75% of consumers took a new interest in online activities in 2020. Of those, 21% purchased a product online for the first time.”

So as a digital marketing agency, how adept are you at the different types of digital marketing? It’s important to capitalise in this vast digital world. To help you out, we created this guide of 14 effective types of digital marketing. When it comes to decision making, the common questions apply: (1) WHY are you using digital marketing for your business? and (2) WHO are you making these marketing efforts?

Types of Digital Marketing

As there are plenty of avenues to interact using digital media, there are also different types of specialisations in digital marketing, such as:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Native Advertising
• Marketing Automation
• Email Marketing
• Online PR
• Inbound Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Audio Marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Influencer Marketing

Here’s a run-through of some of the most frequently used digital marketing tactics and each type of channel involved in it:  

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is defined by The Balance as “the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.”

A study made by Search Engine Journal states that “91% of the web traffic is shared by sites listed on Google’s first page.”

The science part requires researching and weighing different factors contributing to achieving the highest ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), which accordingly increases your website’s organic (or free) traffic. 

Organic traffic can be increased by producing high-quality content that search engines like Google or Bing will crawl. That’s how channels like business websites, blogs and infographics benefit from SEO.

There are different ways of approaching SEO that generates qualified organic website traffic, such as:

• On-page SEO: This type is focused on the content existing “on the page” when you look at the website. By using keywords with a high search volume or based on the intent of your content, you answer queries of your readers, thus, ranking you higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Examples are:

1. Headings
2. Meta titles and descriptions
3. Image alt text
4. Page content (keywords used, readability, length, etc.)
5. URL structure

• Off-page SEO: This is more focused on all optimisation taking place “off the page”. These activities come in the form of inbound links, or what’s also called backlinks. Having a network with different publishers, guest posting on their websites (and linking back to your website), and getting external attention earns backlinks that moves your website’s ranking up on the SERPs.
• Technical SEO: Another type of SEO that focuses on your website’s backend and how your pages are coded. All forms like structured data, CSS file optimisation, and image compression are technical SEO that increases the loading speed of your website –  another significant ranking factor to search engines like Google. 

Apart from that, optimising web pages nowadays must consider the following elements in order to rank as highly as possible on search engines:

• Content quality 
• User engagement level
• Mobile-friendliness
• Number and quality of backlinks

SEO strategists and digital marketers must keep in mind how SEO works nowadays by looking after the following tactics:

• Indexing: Significantly, you let search engines clearly “index” or, in basic terms, “read” your site content by adding alt text to your images and text transcripts for videos and audios.
• Link structure: Another important thing is making your site structure “crawlable” so search engines can easily find your content. SEO specialists can format links and add sitemaps in order to make a website accessible for site crawlers.
• Keywords and targeting: One of SEO’s primary building blocks is embedding keywords – search terms you want to be found in – to your content. “Stuffing” as many keywords to your content is no longer considered a good practice. Today, what’s regarded as a better practice is producing high-quality content that only uses relevant keywords in headers and a few good times in the page content.

Strategically using these factors makes up the science side of SEO, but the unpredictable results involved is what makes it a piece of art. 

The thing with SEO is there’s no such thing as a consistent rule or a quantifiable rubric to make you rank higher on SERPs. Google has been known for the constant changes in its algorithm, making it impossible to produce exact predictions. The next best course of action is to monitor your website’s performance and adapt to any changes by making adjustments accordingly.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of content — blog posts, pictures, multimedia, social media posts, and more — in order to build rapport and move your prospects down the sales funnel. Content strengthens your connection with customers and helps your brand stand out from the competition.

It also synergises with other forms of digital marketing. Be it search engine optimisation (SEO), email, social media, or other channels, it always involves and uses content. 

These content marketing statistics will prove how important and valuable it is in digital marketing:

• According to the Content Marketing Institute, “92% of marketers reported that their company views content as a business asset.”
• The Manifest expressed that “62% of companies that have 5,000 employees or more produce daily content.”
• Based on a study done by Social Media Week, “91% of consumers are prepared to reward brands for their authenticity.”

The same with any kind of marketing strategy, content marketing’s goal is to attract leads that will then convert into paying customers. However, it’s much different from what traditional advertising ever was. It’s offering value through written material instead of only extending an advertising message of a product or service.

Consumers are always craving information that can solve their problems. If you provide them with high-quality and valuable content, you’ll be able to gain their confidence. This is where these channels can play a huge part in your content marketing strategy:

• Blog posts: Creating and putting up articles on company blogs help in demonstrating industry expertise and improve organic search traffic. This eventually gives your brand leverage to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team to nurture.
• Ebooks and whitepapers: Long-form content like ebooks and whitepapers help in educating your website visitors. This is also a way of getting their contact information in exchange for valuable content, consequently generating leads and moving these people through the buyer’s journey. 
• Infographics: Now and then, website visitors want you to show, not tell. This is where infographics come in handy. It’s a visual type of content that helps readers visualise concepts you want to help them understand. 

Marketing teams form content assets to provide answers to questions or provide context to consumers throughout the three stages of the buyer’s journey:

• 1st Stage — Awareness: Buyers realising their needs.
• 2nd Stage — Consideration:  Buyers make a determined course of action to meet their needs.
• 3rd Stage — Decision: Buyers decide on a product/service to purchase to fulfil their needs.

An example is a consumer needing a new pair of shoes to wear to the gym. Consequently, the marketing team of a particular activewear company produces a piece of content about the best features to look for in a pair of gym shoes. Looking at this content, they can then determine what shoes to choose based on the criteria provided. Another contributing factor can be the popularity and price of the shoes. After gathering enough information, they can then proceed to make a decision. 

This is how important it is to guide a consumer throughout the buyer’s journey. Not only is content marketing less expensive compared to other types of digital marketing, but it also produces 3 times more leads.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing, or SMM, is another type of digital marketing where businesses make use of different kinds of social media platforms to promote their brand and content, increase brand awareness and drive traffic to the business. Marketers today are using the most common social media channels, like:

• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• LinkedIn.
• Instagram.
• Pinterest.
• Snapchat.

With how consumers have become more active and reliant on social media platforms, the more reason why brands should be more proactive. Take a look at these stats:

• A user is said to have about 8 social media accounts.
• On average, a user spends 142 minutes on social media in a day.
• There are 3.26 billion people with access to social media out of 5.11 billion people with mobile phones. 
• A user is said to spend about 1/7th of their waking time on social media.   

Standing at the top with a 96 percent effectiveness, social media is the most popular medium for B2C marketers to engage in. It’s also becoming more prevalent in the B2B sphere.

On the other hand, marketing teams have multiple ways to use social media platforms to reach out to their prospects. They can make use of these channels to distribute paid ad campaigns and sponsored content, segment the users so your ads will only appear on the feed or timeline of your targeted audience. 

It’s also a great channel to promote your products and services organically and engage with potential consumers. Interacting or answering questions is an excellent way of ensuring continuous engagement between consumers and your brand, which cultivates a positive experience and strengthens customer loyalty.

However, the goal for SMM does not necessarily have to be a sales-driven approach. Many brands opt to utilise social media marketing as leverage to start conversations with their audience and improve brand awareness. 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing

Pay-Per-Click Marketing, or also called PPC, is a short-term type of digital marketing that refers to posting paid advertisements on a platform. This means, once you’re no longer paying for the ad, it will cease to exist. What makes it different from SEO is you pay for the results generated. 

The most common type of PPC is Google Ads, a form where you pay for Google’s SERPs top slots. These paid ads appear before organic results and always come with an “Ad” favicon.

The when and how users see your ad is more complex to understand. When spots are available on the SERP, the search engine fills these spots through an instant auction. Algorithms prioritise each available ad according to various contributing factors, like:

• Ad quality
• Keyword relevance
• Landing page quality
• Bid amount

Building and managing a PPC campaign starts in the same manner as an SEO campaign. First off, you have to know what keywords the audience is using. After you identify your target keywords, you can proceed with setting up your ad account. 

A Google Ads account uses the following framework:

• Ad Campaigns: The highest grouping with each campaign having an objective, bid strategy, budget, and targeting settings.  
• Ad groups: These exist within an ad campaign and can be organised into different subject matters. An example is creating different ad groups for each type of product or service you offer. 
• Ads: Ad groups have their own set of ads displayed for consumers to see.
• Keywords: Each ad group has its own set of keywords used for targeting your desired audience or market.

Once you’re done setting up and your campaigns running, you track their performance directly in your Google Ads account.  

Other channels you can use PPC marketing are as follows:

• Facebook Ads: Customise videos, image posts, or slideshows, which Facebook will then publish and display to users’ newsfeeds that match your target audience.
• Twitter Ads: Pay to place tweets or profile badges to a specific audience’s newsfeed, with the particular goal of either increasing your website’s traffic, garnering tweet engagement, or having more Twitter followers.
• LinkedIn Sponsored Messages: Pay to send sponsored messages to LinkedIn users that match the industry and background you’re targeting.

PPC campaigns have one or more target actions users have to complete after they click the ad. These are called conversions and can either be transactional or non-transactional. A user making a purchase is already considered a conversion, but so is downloading an app or newsletter signup.

Whatever you decide your target conversions would be, you can monitor them with your chosen platform to track their performance.

Display Advertising

Display advertising, or more recognised as banners, is relatively similar to traditional print ads. The difference is that they are done online and can catch your audience’s attention by targeting specific publications or websites they visit. 

It’s become more sophisticated with what we call programmatic advertising (ads being booked, analysed and optimised automatically with the use of algorithms) and retargeting (like looking at a bag from your favourite store website and then the same bag follows you to each website you visit for months ceaselessly. 

Affiliate Marketing

What better way of marketing your business is there than having other people doing it for you. And that’s how affiliate marketing works! 

Affiliate marketing is a result-oriented type of marketing where a third party receives a commission in exchange for any sales revenue after promoting another person’s business. You could either be of the two: 

• A promoter. 
• The company working with a promoter. 

Whether you want to be one or the other, the very first step is making a connection with the other party. A commission can either be a fixed amount or a percentage of the order value. The size varies depending on the program and the type of product or service sold.

Other examples of affiliate marketing channels are:

• Hosting video ads via YouTube Partner Program.
• Running social media campaigns.

Note: An affiliate program usually has a cookie duration. It means the amount of time a visitor must complete a purchase after clicking the link for the affiliate to receive a commission.

Let’s say you’ve collaborated with a content producer as part of your brand’s affiliate program. You offer them a cookie duration of 30 days — if a customer buys from the link 25 days after clicking it, the promoter would be rewarded the sale. However, if the customer completes the purchase 32 days after clicking the link, the promoter will not receive a commission.

Native Advertising

Native Advertising is just marketing if you strip its guise. The objective is to blend in with the surrounding content to make the obvious blatant advertising less glaring. This form of marketing is a retaliation to the cynicism of customers nowadays towards ads. Many customers will immediately conclude an ad is biased and retorts to completely ignoring it.

However, a native ad can get around this cynicism by offering them entertainment or information before getting promotional. Safe to say, you’re downplaying the aspect of “advertisement”. Some good examples are BuzzFeed’s sponsored posts. 

Native ads are intended to be less noticeable, but also they aren’t meant to be deceptive. The more consumers know what they’ll get, the more they feel better and trust your brand.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is making use of softwares that automates basic marketing operations. It helps improve the efficiency and relevance of your digital marketing campaigns. A study by Forrester and Oracle shows that “93% of local Australian marketers are using marketing automation platforms, compared to 22% globally.”

The following statistics from Spiralytics demonstrates how marketing automation provides significant benefits for marketers:

• There’s a 14.5% increase in sales productivity with a 12.2% decrease in marketing overheads.
• A business implementing marketing automation experiences an average of a 451% increase in having qualified leads.
• 15-20% of potential buyers were converted to sales with lead nurturing via marketing automation.
• According to Marketo, 76% of companies implementing marketing automation generate a return on their investment within the first year. 

Marketing teams can automate tedious tasks that would have been taken a lot of time when done manually, such as:

• Email Newsletters: The use of email automation isn’t just about sending emails to your subscribers automatically. It also greatly helps in shrinking and expanding your mailing list as needed, so your email newsletters will only be sent to the people who want them in their inboxes.
• Social media post scheduling: One way of growing your brand’s presence on social media is by posting as frequently as possible. This makes manual posting a bit disorderly. That’s how social media scheduling software can put out your content to your channels for you, giving you more time to focus on creating an effective content strategy. 
• Lead-nurturing workflows: The process of generating qualified leads and converting them into paying customers can be daunting. By automating that process, you only send your emails and content to specific leads who fit a certain criteria, like when someone downloads and uses your app.
• Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns involve a lot of factors: people, phone calls, content, webpages, emails, and more. With the help of marketing automation, it’ll help get everything sorted out. You can easily do performance tracking according to the progress all of these channels made over time.

Consequently, marketing automation allows brands to keep up with personalisation, thus:

• Allows the collection and analysis of customer information.
• Design targeted marketing campaigns.
• Send and post-marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences.

With prospect engagement, marketing automation tools let you know which prospects interacted with your message, making it easier to assess when and how to reach out to them next. This kind of real-time personalisation means you can efficiently create individualised marketing strategies for customers without having to deal with any additional time.

Email Marketing

One of the oldest kinds of digital marketing is, you guessed it — Email Marketing. It’s a proven, effective marketing technique even with the emergence of social media and other channels. 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters. 

The concept is simple — you email promotional messages to your prospects and hope they click on them. Sounds simple, right? The actual execution is much more complicated than that. First off, you’ve got to ensure the emails you’re sending out are wanted. Hence, you must have an opt-in email list that:

• Personalise your content in your subject line and body.
• Expresses the kind of email your subscribers will get.
• Has a clear unsubscribe option.
• Incorporates your transactional and promotional emails. 

Emails are used to promote brand content, a discount or event, and even redirect people towards your website. There are different types of emails to send in your email marketing campaigns, just as:

• Customer welcome emails for first-time website visitors.
• Blog subscription newsletters for your subscribers.
• Follow up emails to visitors who got something from your brand.
• Holiday promotions to loyalty members.
• Tips or educational series emails to nurture customers.
• Abandoned cart emails to visitors who left your site without completing the purchase.
• Win back emails for visitors who purchased in the past but haven’t returned for some time.
• Remarketing emails for visitors who viewed the products on your website.

It’s a practical approach that moves prospects down the sales funnel as you send out relevant content to each stage of their buying journey.

Another advantage to using email marketing is you have 100% control over your mailing list. On that matter, there are many things you can do to make your emails appealing to the eyes of users, and therefore, increase the click-through rate. These include:

• Creating a sense of urgency: Let your recipients know the time to get a special deal is running out, or there’s only a limited number left before the offer runs out, which increases the possibility of people clicking through towards your business website.
• Personalising your email: Set your body and subject line up that integrates the recipient’s name. This way, it spurs the recipient to open your email. According to Backlinko, “The words “free”, “help”, “percent off”, and “reminder” in a subject line have been found to negatively impact open rates .”
• Letting your recipients set their preferences: Allow users to determine the number of times they want to receive emails from you. It helps keep them clicking on your emails and keep their subscription to your list.

Businesses make use of email marketing as a form of communication with their audience. Especially e-commerce and retail sites, they see a lot of success in using email marketing.

Online PR

Digital Public Relations, also called Online PR, is securing online coverage with online publications, blogs, and other content-based sites. 

It leans towards traditional PR; the only difference is it’s done in a digital space. You can maximise your PR efforts using the following channels, such as:

• Connecting with the press via social media: For example, talking to a journalist on Twitter is an excellent way of developing your relationship with the press that gives media opportunities for your business.
• Engaging online reviews of your company: Whether it’s a good or a bad review when someone gives a review of your company online, your first instinct might be to steer clear of it. Contrary to popular demand, engaging with your online reviews helps in humanising your brand and delivers a powerful message about your company.
• Responding to comments on your website or blog: Akin to responding to online reviews of your company, answering to people reading the content you’ve put up is one of the best ways of generating healthy discourse around your industry and deepening your connection with them.

Online PR, if done and implemented properly, enhances the accessibility and visibility of your brand. You can gain a positive impact from establishing relationships with respected content authors and journalists in the industry. 

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing pertains to the marketing methodology of attracting, engaging, and delighting your customers through strategic content creation and personalised experiences tailored to their needs and stage at the buyer’s journey.

By focusing on creating high-quality content, you pull people ‘in’ to your business. People are constantly seeking answers, researching to know about your industry, checking out other competitors, and deciding whether they need what you’re offering. The objective now is to produce content that fits all these scenarios to capture interested prospects.

Marketing teams utilise every digital marketing technique (even those listed above) in an inbound marketing strategy. The objective is to create a customer experience that works with customers, not against them.  

Some classic examples of inbound marketing strategies are:

• Whitepapers
• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Video
• Ebooks
• E-Newsletters
• SEO
• Social media

Aligning the content to your customers’ interests will naturally draw inbound traffic that can be converted, closed, and followed up over time.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is another form of digital marketing that uses videos in promoting your brand to your audience. Videos are exceedingly entertaining and engaging. It’s a great way of marketing your products and services. Take a look at these statistics:

• Think With Google expressed that 2 billion people are looking for something on YouTube in a month. 
• 80% use search engines and videos alternately to learn about products and see how other people are using them, while 55% of consumers do so before making a purchase.

Videos increase brand engagement, educate consumers, and be used for advertising. Some examples of videos your brand can make are:

• Video ads: A quick and short video that showcases your products or services and can be distributed to different channels like YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.
• Educational and how-to videos: These are videos that provide valuable and relevant knowledge on a subject your audience finds helpful. You can display them on your website or a platform like YouTube.
• Demo and tutorial videos: Videos that explain how to use certain products or how a service works. You can also do explainer videos or a step-by-step guide about a particular topic.
• Webinars: Webinars are good lead magnets and can be offered to your visitors in return for their subscription.

Audio Marketing

Although radio has been replaced with television, people still tune in to radio stations every week, especially with the rise of “internet radio” nowadays. It’s also much broader if we include smart home assistants like Google Home or Amazon Alexa.

Even without having the same dynamic as videos, channels like podcasts are being consumed increasingly. Take a look at these statistics from DotnDot:

• “Consumers listen to almost 1 to 5 hours of podcasts or music per week, and the majority is moving on mobile devices.”
• “By considering the report, 50% of users listen to digital audio while cleaning, cooking, and other activities at home.”
• “54% of podcast users make buying decisions after listening to product advertisements.”
• “More than 61% of podcast listeners are buying the products or services through podcast ad campaigns.”

Mobile Marketing

If you want to reach your customers in today’s world, mobile marketing is the best answer, as most of today’s digital traffic comes from mobile devices. This form of digital marketing is focused on reaching your target audience through their smartphones. 

The importance of mobile marketing will only continue to rise, as it’s expected that the number of mobile shoppers will continue to increase to approximately 187.5 million users by 2024. 

It’s no longer just a trend. Businesses have adapted this practice and have prioritised mobile users and can reach them via a text message, websites, on social media, and even on mobile applications. 

Mobile marketing varies on how businesses use it. Some ways of implementing mobile marketing include:

• Location-based marketing: Showing mobile ads to your audience within a specific geographic location through a local ad extension in Google Ads.
• SMS marketing: This form works in a similar fashion as email marketing, where someone gets subscribed to your marketing list by providing their phone number. If they’re already on your list, you can send them all sorts of promotional messages.
• In-game and In-app advertisements: You can collaborate with game creators or app developers in promoting your products in their applications. Your ads can be seen as full-screen images, banners, pop-ups, or embedded to the content itself.

Influencer Marketing

Influence marketing is a type of digital marketing where businesses partner with influencers—authority figures, experts, celebrities— who already have a stable audience to promote their brand through endorsements and recommendations. 

According to one survey, “38% of shoppers rely on influencer reviews when online shopping while 30% said they’re open to hearing from influencers several times per day.”

Although, an influencer doesn’t necessarily have to be a celebrity. It could simply be someone with authority in a particular niche or has the power to influence other people’s decisions. People look up to influencers and are quick to purchase the items recommended by the person they admire.

Most influencers promote products to the audience on popular platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or Snapchat, where loyal followers jump on the cart and buy from you.  

How Digital Marketing Creates Growth

If your brand’s already doing digital marketing, it’s more likely that you’re already reaching your audiences online. From paid ads to social media posts, there are a lot of ways to use digital marketing to grow your brand. There has never been an easier and consistent way of staying connected with your customers. There’s nothing else that offers this kind of level of personalisation. It provides incredibly flexible opportunities, and each form plays a special part in your marketing activities. The more you embrace the possibilities digital marketing offers, the more you realise your company’s growth potential.

Business Key is a marketing specialist in Australia offering effective digital marketing solutions. We support small and large businesses, especially in Western Australia, and do long-term and strategic marketing activities focused on growing companies. Find out more!