Digital Marketing – 6 Tactics To Help Your Business Grow
Written by Luke Glassford
The importance of digital marketing for businesses and other organisations continues to grow, with digital marketing spending increasing by 9.6% between 2020 and 2021 in the UK.
In addition to this, 72% of the total marketing spending in the UK was funneled into digital marketing in 2020. (Source: Digital marketing in the United Kingdom (UK) - statistics & facts)
If you are new to digital marketing, then the amount of different tactics, strategies and terminologies can be overwhelming at first. In this guide we will cover the six main types of digital marketing to help you understand which may suit your business best.
If you have any more questions or would like to know more about how Gambit Partners can help your business grow, get in touch now:
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing – or online marketing – is a catch-all term to describe any online strategy used to reach and engage with potential customers on the internet.
There are many different types of digital marketing, many of which are more accessible and affordable than ‘traditional’ forms of marketing such as TV advertising.
We have listed the main six types of digital marketing below - Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Affiliate Marketing and Email Marketing.
Types of digital marketing strategies
Social Media Marketing refers to any form of promotional activity that utilises social media platforms to connect with an audience. This could be directly selling a product or service via promotional posts and adverts on social media, or encouraging organic engagement and brand awareness through sharing interesting content and interacting directly with consumers.
On average, people spend over 2 hours on social media everyday – which is why many consider social media to be an important marketing channel.
As the social media landscape develops, more platforms emerge that provide fresh opportunities for businesses. For example, Pinterest can be a great way to promote products through sharing engaging images, while TikTok is becoming a powerful platform for brands to attract a younger audience.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is another form of online marketing that can have a huge impact. This approach is focused on regularly sharing useful, informative, or entertaining content.
This can include content hosted on your own website, or videos, images and infographics posted across social media or on other websites.
When done well, content marketing can promote brand awareness and encourage potential customers to engage with your brand online.
Bill Gates famously proclaimed that “content is king” back in 1996, and that statement is more relevant than ever today.
Content can do many things. It can help improve a brand’s reputation or build a company’s authority within its niche. Also, high-quality content is seen by Google’s algorithm as one of the most important considerations when ranking a website, which brings us on to our next online marketing technique…
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of improving a website’s ranking positions in search engines.
The reason SEO is so popular is that the traffic it can generate to your website is highly ‘targeted’. If someone searches for a service or product that you offer and is then directed to your website, they are much more likely to become a customer than if they just see an advert for your company, for instance.
SEO can therefore provide a very high ROI (return-on-investment), but you also need to consider that achieving high ranking positions for popular search terms can be a long process that requires a lot of investment (of time as well as budget) and patience.
The upside is that, unlike paid adverts, the results of SEO can continue long after your initial investment, with good ranking positions continuing to provide targeted traffic to your website.
If you are interested in learning more about how your business can get started with SEO, take a look at our SEO Foundations Package for Small Businesses.
4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
A common alternative to SEO is PPC – or ‘Pay-Per-Click’ – advertising. Although many different ad platforms use a pay-per-click model, Google Ads are perhaps the most popular.
These ads appear at the top of Google’s search results after you carry out a search, and you pay Google a certain amount of money each time your ad is clicked – hence the name ‘Pay-Per-Click’.
The amount you pay depends on what keywords you want to trigger an ad, with some competitive search terms costing upwards of £70-£80 per click!
If you want targeted search traffic without waiting for SEO to start showing results, then Google Ads can be a great way to get instant traffic to your website – as long as you have the budget to spend.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where a business pays an affiliate for a sale brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
This can offer a win-win scenario for both affiliate and business. The affiliate gets a percentage of the sale, while the business only pays for the traffic that converted into a sale.
If you sell products or services, you could partner with ‘affiliates’ such as website owners, blog owners and social media influencers in your market and pay them a commission for any sales they make for you. This is usually done by a third-party affiliate network, which will take care of all of the tracking and reporting for you.
Affiliate marketing can therefore be a useful way to attract more sales by reaching a wider audience while getting others to do your marketing for you, which can work out to be very cost-effective depending on how much commission you choose to pay to affiliates.
6. Email Marketing
Email marketing has been around a lot longer than some of the other techniques on the list, and may not be as ‘exciting’, but there is a reason it has been used for so long to attract new customers and engage with existing ones.
Studies have shown that 99% of email users check their inbox on a daily basis, making it a great platform to help promote your business – as long as you are providing value to your audience and not clogging up their inbox with irrelevant emails.
Email marketing can be a cost-effective way for businesses and organisations to communicate to customers and prospective customers, helping to drive sales, engagement and customer retention.
To learn more about how Gambit Partners can help your business establish effective sales, marketing and growth strategies, get in touch below.
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Written by
Luke Glassford
Marketing Director at Gambit Partners
1. Social Media Marketing