Any marketing strategy that uses electronic devices can be used by marketers to deliver promotional messages and measure their impact on the customer journey. In practice, digital marketing generally refers to marketing campaigns delivered on computers, phones, tablets, or other devices. It can take many forms, including online video, graphic ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads, and social media posts.
Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing,” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is often lumped in with traditional marketing. So, without further ado, let’s dive into this blog and learn some of the things you need to know about marketing.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing allows one person to earn money while promoting another person’s business. You could be the promoter or the company working with the promoter, but the process is the same in both cases. It uses a revenue-sharing model. If you are the affiliate, you receive a commission every time someone buys the item you promote. If you are the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.
Some affiliate sellers choose to showcase a single company’s products, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants. Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to establish a connection with the other party. You can either use a platform designed to connect affiliates to vendors or start or join a unique sales program.
If you are a retailer and choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program attractive to potential promoters. You will need to provide these affiliates with the tools they need to be successful. This includes incentives for great results, as well as marketing support and predefined materials.
2. Native Advertising
Native advertising is marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with the surrounding content so that it is less blatant than advertising. Native advertising was created as a reaction to the cynicism of today’s consumers toward advertising. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays for its delivery, many customers conclude that the ad is biased and, as a result, choose to ignore it.
Native advertising gets around this bias by offering information or entertainment before it becomes promotional, thus going beyond the “advertising” aspect.
It’s important to always clearly label your native ads. Use words like “promoted” or “sponsored”. If these indicators are hidden, readers could end up spending a considerable amount of time engaging with the content before they realize it’s an advertisement. When your consumers know exactly what to expect, they feel better about your content and brand. Native ads are meant to be less intrusive than traditional ads, but they weren’t designed to be deceptive.
3. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the effectiveness and relevance of advertising. According to statistics:
- 90% of consumers in the United States find personalized content “very” or “somewhat” engaging
- 81% of consumers would like the brands they buy to understand them better
- 77% of businesses believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60% struggle with this technique
Marketing automation enables companies to comply with personalization expectations. It allows brands to:
- Collect and analyze consumer information
- Design targeted marketing campaigns
- Send and publish marketing messages to the right audiences at the right time
Many marketing automation tools use prospects’ engagement (or lack thereof) with a specific message to determine when and how to reach them next. This level of real-time personalization means you can effectively create a customized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.
4. Email marketing
The concept of email marketing is simple: you send a promotional message in the hope that your prospect will click on it. However, in practice, it is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. So you need to have an opt-in list that does the following:
- Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
- Clearly indicates the type of emails the subscriber will receive
- Provides a clear unsubscribe option
- Integrates both transactional and promotional emails
You want your prospects to perceive your campaign as a valued service, not just a promotional tool. Email marketing itself is a proven and effective technique: 89% of the professionals surveyed named it as their most effective lead generator. It can be even more valuable if you integrate other techniques, such as marketing automation, which allows you to segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer’s needs more effectively.
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