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All marketing has three core elements.
Content: This is the medium your message takes. Examples are print ads TV commercials, digital ads, blog posts, videos, flyers, social media posts, speeches etc.
Distribution channels: This is the platform where you share your message. Examples are magazines TV channels, web pages, search engines, social networks.
A marketing strategy: The strategy includes of what you want to say, why you want to say it how you want to say it, to whom, when on what what marketing channels and with what types of content.
There are so many types of marketing born from all the above three basic components. Here we are going to pick 7 of them.
Advertising
Advertising is what most people think about when they think about marketing. A TV commercial, a YouTube ad, a print ad in a magazine, banners ads online. Ads are following you around and actively try to get you to notice them. That’s why advertising is often called interruption marketing. To avoid such disturbs, you might find yourself taking evasie measures – like muting the TV, changing channels during the commercial break, skip ads, using an ad blocker.
But why to advertise?
Because it can be great for brand awareness and it can be useful to target an audience that has already shown interest in your brand (that’s why, you might see banner ads for discount boots on websites after you shopping for them). The downside of advertising is that you are sure to be paying money every time you get your content in front of your audience. However, it is less cost-effective.
Content Marketing
The purpose of content marketing is to create content that is valuable to your target audience and would like to see and share. A high-quality content include blog posts, podcasts, how-to-videos, researches, eBooks, free online tools.
SEO is where it comes to place SEO makes the content more irrecoverable on search engines. It improves the odds that your target audience will discover your webpages when they search for questions and information that your brand has answered through digital content.
Both, SEO and content marketing fall under the umbrella of digital marketing which is why you may hear them referred to as online marketing/internet marketing.
The core benefit of content marketing is that it gets people on your website, where you can engage them, by encouraging them to sing up for an email address.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the paid version of content marketing. It mostly consists of pay-per-click advertising using Google Ads. The basic idea is that businesses pay Google a certain dollar amount each time someone clicks on a paid search result. Those paid search results are clearly labeled as ads, which means they tend to be clicked on less than organic results.
SEM is just one type of digital advertising. Other ways to advertise on the web include social media ads, ad distribution networks that post a banner on relevant sites.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is exactly what it sounds like, the use of social media platforms to distribute unpaid or paid content.
The benefits of using social media channels are many because there are billions of people use social media and you can promote your brand and its content for free on social media. In addition you can turn satisfied customers into brand advocates on social media with user-generated content campaigns. However, there are many social media channels and you only need to focus your attentions more on the ones that matter the most to your target market.
Call To Action
A call to action is a prompt to get anyone reading your content. These CTAs can be found on your homepage, on any of your blog posts, end of an email, included in social media, landing pages, etc.
The most common CTA buttons are like:
- Find Out How
- Get Your Free Quote
- Discover More
- Sign Up
- Subscribe
- Download the eBook
Direct Marketing
It is often called one-on-one marketing, is a direct proposal. It can be a proposal for a trial or a conversation. Examples are mails such as “you are pre-approved”, credit card offers and cold calling a list of leads.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is basically the practice of automating certain marketing tasks. An example is the automated email we send out to users who sign up for our newsletter. Marketing automation improves segmentation lists by developing certain messages to send out to certain leads at a very particular time and day.
The idea of marketing automation is to send customized emails, offers for certain users based on their consumption habits.
At the begging it may be useless to you, but if you are going to launch an email marketing campaign and you would like to improve your leads as you go deeper into the sales funnel, then you will need marketing automation resources.
